Operationalising Labour’s mission-oriented education policy

The Challenge

The school system faces three slow-moving and interrelated crises. Attendance, teacher retention and student mental health levels have plummeted, and show no sign of returning to normal levels soon. Lying behind these crises are an unprecedented breakdown in trust between parents and schools, as well as worsening school behaviour issues, contributing to higher teacher workload and more teachers leaving the profession. It’s difficult to understate the challenges facing a potential incoming Labour government.

These are new and complex problems, which don’t have simple solutions. Even if throwing money at these problems were an option they would still be difficult to solve. For example, even with more money it will still be difficult to hire teachers when increasingly people don’t want to do the job. To add another layer the the challenge, the DfE are reporting a significant amount of staff churn and low morale after 14 years of Conservative government.

It is clear, therefore, that a potential incoming Labour government would need bold new ideas to turn around the school and wider education system. As well as new ideas, they may also need a bold new approach to education policy. 

The Labour Party has already committed to utilise ‘missions’ (including the mission to Break Down the Barriers to Opportunity). The concept of missions is based on Mariana Mazzucato’s books The Entrepreneurial State and Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide, as well as a department at UCL’s IIPP. These books and reports help to outline how government departments can structure themselves to set visions, experiment, use short feedback cycles during implementation and foster capacity-building within government. This is a new framework for thinking about the how of government, but there are already examples (such as the Future Farming Programme) where these approaches are being used by the Civil Service. 

The cornerstone example Mazzucato uses to explain mission-driven government initiatives is the Apollo mission, which demonstrates 1) A vision, 2) Risk taking and innovation 3) Organisational Dynamism 4) Cross-Sectoral Collaboration 5) Outcomes-based measurement 6) Public-Private partnerships. 

So, building on these principles, what might a more mission-oriented Labour Education Department look like?

Experimentation

Innovative organisations, such as the ones Mazzucato details, tend to experiment and iterate. Experimentation reduces the risk of long-term failure and therefore can make policy cheaper over the long run, which is arguably why startups need to experiment relentlessly, or fail. As outlined above, the current chronic attendance problem is complex, and there is a great deal of uncertainty about how to solve it. Therefore some experimentation may be needed. 

Iteration

Innovative and mission-led organisations also iterate quickly. Critical to iterating quickly is having timely data to understand whether solutions are working. One of the reasons education policy is a good candidate for a more agile, iterative approach to government is because of the emerging real-time data infrastructure. The DfE has already developed a sophisticated data warehousing infrastructure to provide schools (via dashboards) and central ministers with real-time attendance analytics. This data is fed by Management Information Systems, such as the one I work for (Arbor Education). Indeed, we worked directly with the Greater London Authority to monitor the roll out of the Mayor’s Universal Free School Meal programme. This enabled the team at city hall to understand the uptake of FSM day-by-day from students of particular demographics, dietary requirements and in specific locations among other characteristics. Labour have also announced a ‘Children’s Number’ to help join up services’ data which would strengthen this infrastructure for iterative and data-informed policy making. 

User-Centred

The data needed to iterate can, of course, be qualitative. Innovative organisations tend to be deeply focused on understanding the people affected by the problem at hand since more concentration on the details of the problem spurs innovation. To be truly ‘citizen-obsessed’ might involve not only speaking to teachers/ parents/ students consistently but visiting schools to deeply observe the experience of how policy is experienced by teachers. This methodology might be extended and adapted to include more deliberative democratic methods, such as mini-Publics. Indeed, more engagement with teachers might, in itself, help with retention. The third most important reason for leaving education cited in the 2024 working lives of teachers survey was ‘Teachers’ views not being valued by policymakers like the government’. There are already examples of the government taking a more deliberately responsive approach to policy, for example the Future Farmer’s programme, with apparent success.

The Mission Oriented policy movement is in its infancy. Therefore, it would be wise for Labour to take on general principles and ideas for new ways of working from the mission oriented policy framework, as well as other innovative governments and organisations. For example, they need to strike the right balance between building capacity within the DfE to solve tricky problems but also setting a vision and bringing in MATs, LAs, other education organisations and the general public to rally around the key missions they prioritise. As laid out by Mazzucato, another way of empowering and unblocking civil servants may be to allow for more cross departmental working, for example to help join up the solutions to the interrelated problems of student mental health, attendance and student behaviour. 

Ultimately, as with any organisation, a new Labour education department would have to form it’s own ways of working. Simply following a formula or protocol would be unlikely to address this unique moment for the education system. Indeed, an organisation which rigidly takes on a methodology without adapting or changing over time wouldn’t be very flexible or agile. Of course, governments shouldn’t try to be startups or solely ‘entrepreneurial’. As Rainer Kattel of the IIPP argues in a recent book How to Make an Entrepreneurial State governments should provide ‘agile stability’. 

In a country where 58% of people believe ‘Nothing in Britain works anymore’ solving some of the education system’s now entrenched problems outlined above can help rebuild trust and demonstrate that more effective government does make a difference. While specific protocols may not be a silver bullet, a new set of operating principles for the how of education policy may be critical to successfully navigating this complex set of education challenges.

This is written based on my experience of teaching from 2015-2020 and then working for two startups.