Public: Welfare to work | Public

Gender gap: BBC programme to look at pay inequality between men and women

Mon, 18 May 2009 13:17:47 GMT

Forty years after the Equal Pay Act, it is estimated that a man will earn £369,000 more than a woman across their careers. Last week 'institutional sexism' was highlighted in the justice system

Last week, the Fawcett Society highlighted "institutional sexism" in the criminal justice system, pointing out that most senior management positions in organisations such as police forces, the prison service and the judiciary are still held by men.

The gender gap is still very real: a new BBC two-part television series starts tonight. Exploring attitudes to working women 40 years after the Equal Pay Act, it points out that on average a man will earn £369,000 more than a woman across their careers.

Skills for Justice, the sector skills council for the UK justice system, is working to redress this imbalance through a new initiative aimed at helping women in a variety of jobs in the justice system, to improve their career prospects and earning potential through the development of new skills.

The Women & Work: Sector Pathways Initiative project is a response to recommendations by the 2006 Women & Work Commission's report, Shaping a Fairer Future. The project's aim is to raise the skills and unlock the potential of women who want to move into supervisory, management and senior management positions - areas where women are under-represented, particularly in the justice system.

Funding of £0.5m is being made available for training in team leading, coaching and mentoring, which will be available to about 600 women. For women already in senior management roles, the project offers support on how to effect a change in HR systems and structures through an executive coaching programme.

Alan Woods, the chief executive of Skills for Justice, says that although women make up approximately 44% of the entire justice sector workforce, they make up a significantly smaller percentage at management and senior management level and the new project will provide a great opportunity for women to learn skills that can help them to move ahead in their careers.

"The project also includes help for organisations to explore the role of company culture and structure on women's progression, supporting organisations to consider how their company policies could be a barrier to women's success," he says. "The aim is to help organisations remove the glass ceiling that can prevent women from getting to the top."

Speaking at the Skills for Justice skills summit conference last month, Annette Shepherd, an area manager with security firm G4S, told delegates that a change in management culture and implementation of HR policies in G4S has led to an increase in the number of women at all levels, including middle and senior management.

The two-part BBC series will be shown on 18 and 19 May and will explore men and women's attitudes to working women, asking why men still dominate the top jobs. It will feature interviews with a range of women, including an armed female officer at the Metropolitan Police's firing range.

Felicity Winter is director of policy & communications at Skills for Justice

O'Donnell's pride in public officials

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:58:00 GMT

The recession may put huge pressures on public finances, but it is also a great opportunity for the civil service. That may sound like a bad case of the Pollyannas, but it is cabinet secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell's heartfelt conviction.

O'Donnell spelled out his vision of these opportunities (and challenges) in a lecture to Lancaster university students at the Royal Society of the Arts last month. He acknowledged that the pace of change presented problems, but was adamant the civil service was well-equipped to deal with them.

Jobcentre Plus is coping admirably with the extra demands on its services, O'Donnell said. "What other organisation, public or private, could cope so well with so substantial an increase in its workload over a period of just a few months?" he said, pointing out the service was conducting around 400,000 new jobseeker interviews a month.

The cabinet secretary also dismissed fears the recession would erode the commitment to reduce emissions. "We must also make sure that decisions we take now do not damage our long-term objectives in areas like climate change."

But the competing and increasing demands of the public, at a time of fewer resources, means the civil service will have to be ever nimbler.

Building trust remains an issue, too. "Whilst public trust in civil servants has increased over the years - almost doubling since 1983 - we will struggle to improve this further if we are stuck with Sir Humphrey stereotypes," he admitted. All civil servants must behave with honesty, objectivity, integrity and impartiality, and not tolerate any violations of these values.

O'Donnell dismissed the furore over corporate hospitality. "Senior civil servants are more transparent about the hospitality they receive than in any other sector. It is a vital part of the job of running BERR [the business department], for example, to build relationships with businessmen and women."

The cabinet secretary said he was "proud" Whitehall permanent secretaries had volunteered to forego their bonuses. But he acknowledged the need to improve leadership further. While the capability reviews had been a success, with departments showing a marked improvement on their previous scores, there were still weaknesses. The global downturn has forced the pace of collaboration between Whitehall departments: the civil and diplomatic services are having to work together even more closely to ensure domestic and international initiatives to reinvigorate markets are as co-ordinated as possible. But this is just the beginning.

"Departments will need to get better at collaborating with others. And we need to bring capability and delivery together more explicitly in the overall performance management framework."

Whereas in 2006, too many of the top 200 civil servants spent all their time on narrow policy areas, now their workload is much more evenly split, with departmental and civil service-wide issues taking up more of their time.

Swedish government provides possible model for Conservative policy

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:00:00 GMT

The Swedish government provides a glimpse into possible future Conservative policy for the UK

Does the conservative coalition government in power in Stockholm since September 2006 allow us to glimpse what policy emanating from Westminster after our next general election might feel like? The Tories think and hope so. They have been hot-footing it to Sweden lately and the Swedish prime minister, the leader of the Moderates Party, Fredrik Reinfeldt, has been coming to London to have dinner at maison Cameron.

At first glance, the Tory-Swedish connection is incongruous. Public spending sits above 50% of GDP and the "bourgeois alliance" (its own description) has shown no appetite for cutting it. Taxes have been cut, leaving average Swedes about £80 a month better off after the latest round of reductions in income tax in January. But Swedish public finances are in remarkably fine fettle, thanks (ministers admit) to the housekeeping of the Social Democrat government under Goran Persson, who lost the last election more because of the public's boredom and dislike of his personality than enthusiasm for the alternative. Tory visitors to Sweden will note, too, that the polls have been fairly consistently showing the Social Democrats ahead by a comfortable margin.

None the less they are intrigued by two areas where the Moderate-led coalition has departed from its predecessors' script. One is squeezing recipients of unemployment and incapacity benefit, to push up the numbers in work and the second is radical contracting for public services - Sweden has done something that would be wildly controversial here and contracted out accident and emergency hospitals.

Little noticed in the UK - and not yet an explicit objective of Tory policy - the Swedish right has succeeded in cutting trade union membership. By reducing unemployment benefits, the government has made union membership less attractive (because unions are major providers of unemployment insurance schemes). But a result could be (so one of the trade union confederations warns) more wildcat strikes as the established unions lose control and cannot deliver on Sweden's famed national pay bargains.

Private companies
What has attracted attention is Swedish involvement of private companies in providing schools. Under the conservative government in power in the early 1990s, the Swedes established "free" schools - a scheme under which parents could contract with (non-) profit school providers at the government's expense. About one in 10 Swedish children of school age now attend such schools. The Tories are keen, seeing this as a way of realising their ambition of establishing vouchers in England. Not to be bested, Labour ministers have invited the Swedish company Kunskapskola to prospect for secondary academies, albeit on a non-profit basis.

The Swedish healthcare company Capio is already contracting for treatment centres in England. At home, Reinfeldt's wife - who is a local elected official in her own right - has been pushing to expand use of contractors in health and social care in the greater Stockholm area. Tory visitors have also been visiting Stockholm city council, controlled by the conservatives, which has expanded private provision of care homes for the elderly.

Northern conservatives
But the "blueness" of these northern conservatives should not be exaggerated. The right of centre thinktank Timbro is deeply disappointed and cannot fathom why the Reinfeldt government has not garnered more support for its tax cuts. Ministers in the government play down their radicalism. The minister for employment Sven Otto Littorin says he has no wish to follow even New Labour in contracting out job finding to the private sector. The state employment agency does a perfectly fine job, he says and he welcomes moves by some of the unions to brigade together in a social enterprise that will help long-term unemployed people find places in the labour market.

In education, the Reinfeldt government is much less keen than the Cameron Tories on pursuing parental choice. It has turned its attention to the UK's 1990s agenda for schools and wants to reform the curriculum and teacher education, in order to boost the quality of classroom teaching in state schools. If that means wresting controls from Sweden's powerful county councils, so be it.

Promoting digital literacy

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 23:00:00 GMT

To prevent the UK becoming a country in digital denial, we must promote IT literarcy across all sectors and ages

While nine out of 10 people need computer skills to do their jobs, there are still nearly 5 million people without core IT skills, and in the UK record numbers of young people leave formal education without basic numeracy and literacy.

This challenges policy makers, education institutions, employers and the IT industry alike. While last year's Leitch review called for universal literacy and numeracy, it didn't mention IT skills. That was a missed opportunity. But improving digital literacy is not just about basic competence at a keyboard, our roundtable heard. While it's vital to get the one third of the population who don't use the internet and have no interest in it, it's also about unlocking the potential of IT to do new and imaginative things that many people have not even conceived of. "Real literacy occurs when the computer becomes a team member and brings an extra dimension."

The problem is that what you need to know to become digitally literate expands every day. One participant suggested the analogy of a driving test, where you get a piece of paper to say you've mastered the basics. "You get someone to become a digitally confident citizen and they will sort the rest out themselves."

Others said e-confidence was in fact distributed widely, with people using complex IT such as a Sky+ box and mobile phones every day without realising it. But the fact that technology moves so fast means that, for example, IT degrees become obsolete almost as soon as people have finished them. The IT someone learns in their 20s will be totally useless by the time they're 40, making them digitally illiterate. And as technology advances, those who lack IT skills will be left further and further behind.

t's an area where the old classic of joined-up working really needs to happen. Who is responsible for increasing digital literacy? It's about "raising the floor but raising the ceiling as well", said one participant. There has to be a shared effort between private sector companies ensuring their workers have the skills they need and aspire to, and public sector bodies providing leadership, funds and aspiration for those who are socially excluded, and therefore most likely to face digital exclusion. The new cabinet minister for digital inclusion should make the issue more of a political priority.

Getting people digitally enabled would reduce the cost of delivering public services. The cost of getting the 4.8 million people who are digitally excluded online would be £1.1bn, which would be far outweighed by savings to services. But this is easier said than done: certain people are always going to be outside the system, such as migrants or those in prison, where there are obvious risks of going online.

Argument centred around employability and giving people the requisite tools to do the job. It was pointed out that 40% of people in the UK don't feel they have the skills to do the jobs as well as they should. This is a "productivity challenge" for the UK, which fares worse than other European countries, even eastern Europe, where in Poland only 20% feel they lack the necessary skills.

If a sales assistant operates a till on a Saturday morning in Boots and knows what she needs to do to do her job properly, is she digitally literate? Only when the system is upgraded and she could then pick it up within minutes.
The way forward is to give people the confidence and aspirations to try things out for themselves and nurturing their "curiosity and creativity". This applies to management too - often executives reach a plateau of learning where they can do what they need to. They knock off the odd PowerPoint presentation but lack the curiosity to take it further; they aren't interested in what technology can do to make their lives easier. They are in "digital denial".

While big businesses can institute formal schemes of learning and also provide mentoring support to help others with IT awareness, small and medium sized businesses often fall through the net, and might need help from government or education institutions with their training needs.

But there are barriers to public and private sectors working together and providing joint funding for programmes. One participant said that if a private company is involved in funding training, bodies such as regional development agencies will back off. "Rather than saying what can the private sector bring to the table creatively, their attitude is what do they want from us?"

The emphasis on targets and measurable outputs doesn't help when you're talking about lifelong learning and constant reskilling, which is necessary with IT, participants agreed. There should be less emphasis too on the need for entire qualifications; rather, people should be able to pick and choose what they need and skills should be linked with individual aspiration.

Speakers made a connection here with citizen empowerment and the government's agenda for "transformation" in public services. We should think of technology as an enabler to transform services and this could also be a way to get government engaged in the debate. Improving IT competence helps improve basic skills too. This may be a way to attract funding, to bring in "skills by stealth", said participants.

A government scheme installed computers in 50,000 disadvantaged homes as part of a strategy to ensure that every child has access to IT at home. But the initiative has had knock-on benefits, with parents using the machines during the day as well. In a "learning culture" new ways of working are needed. Are employers purely focused on employability? Whether they let their staff download from Itunes or use Facebook can be a test of this. Skills learnt doing one thing, such as playing around with photos at home, are easily transferred to the workplace and vice versa. "The unexpected uses people put skills to is where you get innovation from."

This roundtable was sponsored by Microsoft