The week in public services: 17th March 2020

This week: budget fallout; the impact of coronavirus on the health and social care system; and slackers vs sloggers

The most important story is (importantly and obviously) coronavirus. Stay safe. Follow the NHS guidance. But if you’re finding yourself with spare time on your hands now would, of course, be a good time to catch up on the latest research in public services. On which note…

Budget summary

Let’s get to it…there has been endless discussion of the budget — but the only things you really need to read are: our Institute for Government analysis of how the budget compared to the six test we set out before, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis of what the budget means. For all else, the usual suspects on twitter (Chris Giles, Torsten Bell, Giles Wilkes) have you got covered.

Also — *self-promotion alert* — we wrote, what I think is the simplest and best (obviously) guide to local government funding in England last week. For all the claims and spin that go back and forth about local government funding, we hope this will help bring some clarity to the debate. Check it out!

Health and Social Care

Strong head-bashing-desk meme vibe from this latest Health Service Journal story (£), which reports that eleven NHS Trusts are contesting a high court ruling which ruled that they could not ask local authorities for £1.5bn backdated business rates. I get that both NHS Trusts and local authorities are under pressure to balance their books, but in what universe will this help them build better relationships?

Meanwhile, the Nuffield Trust have provided a helpful run-through of the latest NHS data. NHS 111 calls have been much higher in weekdays this February — which is presumably due to a rise in concern about coronavirus (likewise, the percentage of NHS 111 calls answered within 60 seconds is plummeting).

Billy Palmer has done some great analysis on the extent of progression among new nurses. Of nurses that stayed for at least nine years (so, nurses who joined in 2009) one-third remain on their entry grade. That strikes me as not a lot of progression — would be interested to know how this compares to other public sector professions such as teachers or police officers.

Elsewhere at the Nuffield Trust, Rachel Hutchings has written about how the NHS can “define success” when thinking about how to spread innovations. Is it about getting all parts of the NHS to adopt them? Or getting a few areas to use them in depth? Good questions, worth asking

In social care, Labour MP Liz Kendall has written an op-ed for the FT, arguing that any reform to social care funding needs to address: the balance of contributions from the individual and the state; sharing the costs of funding “across the generations”; and “removing inequities between the NHS and social care to provide a single joined-up service”. An ambitious to-do list — but one Matt Hancock should be paying attention to if he is serious about building cross-party consensus…

And I’ve been trying to hold back from any coronavirus articles, given my lack of ability to sort through what’s worth reading and what’s not — but a lot of the Health Service Journal coverage is sensible, thoughtful, and non-hysterical. It’s also free. A good move — props. Particularly recommend this (£) piece from Rob Findlay about how coronavirus could affect elective waiting times. A three-month shutdown of capacity might add, on average, an extra week to elective waiting times, but people already waiting for up to one year (primarily waiting for routine neurosurgery, plastic surgery, orthopaedics and urology) could be waiting even longer…

Children and Young People

Good article from John Jerrim on the distribution of teacher working hours. Interestingly, England is one of the few countries where teachers, on average, work long hours, AND these hours are roughly equally distributed. Most countries where average teacher working hours are long have very unequal distributions i.e. a few teachers work a tonne of hours. So, just to confirm then, we can’t reduce average working hours by trying to ‘redistribute’ those hours between slackers (those who work few hours) and sloggers (those who work lots of hours)…because most teachers already lean towards being sloggers. As ever, there’s no easy answers. Suuuuuuuuper.

The Education Policy Institute have published a briefing on school funding. Although school funding is increasing, it might not make much of a difference in disadvantaged schools — i.e. schools where a large proportion of pupils are eligible for free school meals — because:

• These schools will see smaller increases to their budgets than schools serving more affluent communities
• These schools also tend to employ more early-career teachers. As the government is planning to increase teacher starting salaries to £30k by 2023, the cost of employing these teachers will rise faster than employing more experienced teachers

Valuable reminders.

Meanwhile, the UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities have been comparing the characteristics of parents whose children attend private schools versus parents whose children don’t, making clever use of the millennium cohort study. They found that, even controlling for family income, a couple of factors mattered:

• Parental “traditional values” i.e. agreeing with statements such as ‘couples who have children should not separate’ and disagreeing with statements such as ‘it is alright for people to have children without being married’
• Proximity to either a grammar school or a state school rated ‘Outstanding’

Full paper here, and a good summary blog here.

At the Howard League, Claire Sands has blogged about her growing concerns about private provision and the market in children’s residential care. Good read — though I’d have liked to see a clearer explanation of how these companies’ profit motives have created space “to exploit and abuse children in residential care”. I don’t understand the causation here — so I look forward to reading their more in-depth briefing.

Good National Audit Office (NAO) report on free early education and childcare. Nearly all families are receiving some kind of benefit from the scheme, but take-up, and quality, of care is still lower in deprived areas. The NAO recommend that the Department for Education (DfE) use existing Ofsted and take-up data to better analyse geographic variations in entitlements and quality of provision and strengthen its’ evidence about cost pressures. Both of which suggestions DfE could helpfully think about for children’s social care too, I think.

Reforms to Key Stage 2 and GCSE exams led to higher attainment for pupils for whom English is an additional language. Possibly due to changes in the way schools examine these subjects. Or new content. Or something else entirely. Fascinating stuff from Dave Thomson.

Law and order

Very interesting attempt from the Office for National Statistics to create a ‘crime severity score’. How?

A wonk’s dream, sure, but also a fascinating piece of work. I’d love to see this applied over multiple years to see how big the increase in police-recorded crime since 2014/15 looks when weighted for severity. Paging the ONS stattos…

Worryingly, the Guardian have obtained an internal review from the Crown Prosecution Service which examined 200 unprosecuted rape cases. The review found that case prosecutors made “disproportionate” and “unnecessary” requests for more information in over half of cases, and “police failed to complete all actions asked for by prosecutors in more than three-quarters of cases”.