Policy & Management British Civil Servic by Geoffrey K. Fry

Author:Geoffrey K. Fry [Fry, Geoffrey K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Process, General
ISBN: 9781317903888
Google: omegBAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 28028662
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1995-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

IV RECRUITMENT, TRAINING AND THE CAREER CIVIL SERVICE

The belief that ‘as between two able men, the specialist is less likely to become a successful administrator in the modern State than, say, one who has been trained in the Honours school of Literae Humaniores at Oxford’ might be said to have been the Civil Service’s traditional attitude towards the direct entry recruitment of adminstrators ever since Macaulay pronounced on the matter in the 1850s. Macaulay certainly implied that ‘at its best, a humanistic training produces greater flexibility and greater open-mindedness than is the case with a specialist training.’ Macaulay, though, was not the author of those words. Nor were those sentiments penned by a First Civil Service Commissioner in a mood of what, in another context, Stanley Baldwin once called ‘appalling frankness’. The words were those of Harold Laski (1938, p. 323). They did not stop him from writing later that the Civil Service was ‘much too convinced that a man who could get a First in Greats at Oxford could see all the problems of his time with an insight and imagination less likely to be available to other men’ (Laski, 1951, p. 162). Laski was the populariser, if not always the originator, of many of the familiar criticisms of direct entry recruitment to what used to be called the Administrative Class, and of much else about the Civil Service, not least ‘the narrow social class from which the highest civil servants are drawn’ (Laski, 1938, p. 324), an observation better directed at the Diplomatic Service than the Home Civil Service. Laski proposed opening up the Civil Service to late-entry recruitment, not least from other areas of the public service, and, as part of a substantial extension of post-entry training provision, he advocated the establishment of ‘a Staff College for the Administrative Class, and for promising recruits from the lower grades’ (Laski, 1942, pp. 10–11). Laski’s fellow authority in the academic study of public administration, W.A. Robson, kept what became the Fabian reforming agenda up to date in the 1950s, most obviously in the form of admiration for the training and professionalism of the French Higher Civil Service (Robson, 1956, p. 58), and the Fulton Committee took up this agenda in the 1960s, as did the English Committee in the 1970s and the Treasury and Civil Service Committee later. When John Garrett of that last-named Committee was told in 1993 by the First Civil Service Commissioner that in the recruitment of fast-stream administrators ‘we dot not actually keep [details of] school background any more’ (HC 390-II, 1992–3, evidence, q. 746), Garrett did not resist observing ‘how convenient!’ (ibid., q. 747).

‘It would be fanciful to suggest that perhaps some of the world-wide reputation which British civil servants had acquired for integrity might not unfairly be credited to the body which selected them’, wrote the official historian of the Civil Service Commission about its centenary (Reader, 1981, p. 49). In translation, this meant that the Commission did deserve some of the credit, and few would deny this.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.