I was a little late last night and nearly missed the Nesta event in London to launch the report they wrote with Osca. But I’m very glad I went, because I believe this one of those reports we will look back on as important.
It is called Good and Bad Help: How purpose and confidence transform lives.
This is the kind of territory that I’ve been working in for a couple of decades, about why public services succeed and why they fail. In fact, in 1990, I linked up with two friends to launch a ginger group called the Self-Esteem Network, dedicated to making self-esteem a political issue. Not a million miles from Good Help.
I can’t pretend it was exactly a success. I met some fascinating people and enjoyed singing some of the songs from the California state primary schools (“I’ve got self-esteem/Do you know what I mean?”) But I don’t think we cracked the two fundamental questions – what policies will effectively drive up self-esteem when it is lacking, and how do you know they are working?
The term is now dead. John Vasconcellos, the California assembly member behind the California task Force for Self-Esteem, has been discredited – quite unfairly. But the basic issue remains and the new report sets it out well.
It is this. If public services fail to treat those they are helping as people who might, with some help, drag their own lives back together, then their workload will get heavier and heavier.
What is inspired about the report is that its title sets this dilemma out clearly. Good help works, bad help doesn’t work – and we know a great deal about the difference. But most public services are not set up to provide good help.
The apotheosis of inflexible service delivery was reached, it seems to me, under Blair and Brown. I was disappointed that the coalition failed to grasp this nettle, though actually they failed to see it at all. So we now still live in the world of impersonal, digital-by-default, PBR services, delivered by impersonal, lobotomised – and possibly also bankrupt – outsourcing giants. Neither show much signs of being able to provide the Good Help we know works.
It is the same unfortunately the world over – increasingly expensive services that don’t work – and one of the reasons voters are so cross. I proposed a way of injecting flexibility into existing services in my independent review on barriers to choice in 2013, and something along those lines is going to be needed if we are to ever to forge an effective public sector again. And we have to if we are going to provide people with the Good Help they need. We know what to do – we’re just a bit hazy still about how to shift the existing system.
It is called Good and Bad Help: How purpose and confidence transform lives.
This is the kind of territory that I’ve been working in for a couple of decades, about why public services succeed and why they fail. In fact, in 1990, I linked up with two friends to launch a ginger group called the Self-Esteem Network, dedicated to making self-esteem a political issue. Not a million miles from Good Help.
I can’t pretend it was exactly a success. I met some fascinating people and enjoyed singing some of the songs from the California state primary schools (“I’ve got self-esteem/Do you know what I mean?”) But I don’t think we cracked the two fundamental questions – what policies will effectively drive up self-esteem when it is lacking, and how do you know they are working?
The term is now dead. John Vasconcellos, the California assembly member behind the California task Force for Self-Esteem, has been discredited – quite unfairly. But the basic issue remains and the new report sets it out well.
It is this. If public services fail to treat those they are helping as people who might, with some help, drag their own lives back together, then their workload will get heavier and heavier.
What is inspired about the report is that its title sets this dilemma out clearly. Good help works, bad help doesn’t work – and we know a great deal about the difference. But most public services are not set up to provide good help.
The apotheosis of inflexible service delivery was reached, it seems to me, under Blair and Brown. I was disappointed that the coalition failed to grasp this nettle, though actually they failed to see it at all. So we now still live in the world of impersonal, digital-by-default, PBR services, delivered by impersonal, lobotomised – and possibly also bankrupt – outsourcing giants. Neither show much signs of being able to provide the Good Help we know works.
It is the same unfortunately the world over – increasingly expensive services that don’t work – and one of the reasons voters are so cross. I proposed a way of injecting flexibility into existing services in my independent review on barriers to choice in 2013, and something along those lines is going to be needed if we are to ever to forge an effective public sector again. And we have to if we are going to provide people with the Good Help they need. We know what to do – we’re just a bit hazy still about how to shift the existing system.
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