Ministers will bring in a new “school of government” for senior civil servants to train them in AI and other skills – more than a decade after David Cameron axed the previous college for Whitehall.
Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the prime minister, will announce the new body in a speech on Tuesday setting out the government’s plans to “rewire” the civil service for modern times.
Cameron’s decision to close the previous national school of government at Sunningdale has been widely considered a mistake, with growing fees for external providers.
Ahead of the speech, Jones said he was determined to “work with the civil service to change the system, promote innovation and build in-house state capacity to get things done ”.
Aimed at improving the training of senior civil servants, its programme will include knowledge on economics, finance, policy, leadership and management, commercial, AI, data and digital, programme and project management and delivery.
The school will launch later this year, building to full capacity over the next three years.
Jones said that by “bringing in-house, high-quality training and education for public servants, the School for Government and Public Services will help support our ambitions for a world-class professional civil service”.
“I am also determined to support civil servants with training as the use of AI is expanded in the public sector in the years ahead,” he said.
“I want to work with the civil service to change the system, promote innovation and build in-house state capacity to get things done.”
His speech, due on Tuesday with a promise to “move fast, fix things”, will build on existing plans to halve government spending on external consultants and reduce departmental administration costs by 16% over the next five years, delivering savings of £2bn a year by 2030. In an interview with the Times last week, Jones also suggested he would increase performance-related pay and more civil servants would be “shown the door” if not meetings standards.
The original vehicle for Whitehall training was for decades the civil service college, which was axed in 1995 by then Cabinet Office minister, Stephen Dorrell, deciding it was unfit for purpose and would have to close. Its successor, the National School of Government, was shuttered under Cameron and his efficiency chief Francis Maude, in an era when civil servants were called the “enemies of enterprise”. It was replaced by a national civil service learning programme which lacked its own campus.
Keir Starmer’s government has embarked on its own efficiency drive, with the prime minister controversially saying too many in Whitehall were content with a “tepid bath of managed decline”.
Last week, Wes Streeting, the health secretary, criticised the centre-left for an “excuses culture” that blames the UK’s slow pace of change on Whitehall officials and interest groups.
But Jones, the PM’s chief secretary, said at the same Institute for Government conference that plans for reforming Whitehall were about improving the system rather than civil servants.
He said: “Civil servants are as frustrated as us … but over the years we have ended up with a system that does not enable them to do their work in the same way that politicians might want it to be. The question is why … over time it has become bloated and, as a consequence, on permissions and mandates and risk taking, we have a lot of internal discussion and not enough doing.
“I’m not going to criticise civil servants and I’m not going to criticise departments because ultimately it is for ministers to reshape that in the way that they want to. Digital ID will be part of that.”
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