Thanks, that's extremely interesting to read the account of the decision-making across those times. (I'd kind of guessed a lot of it, but still fascinating to see it confirmed)
Your own data analysis, along with that of 2-3 others (John Burn-Murdoch was one, I forget the other) was incredibly helpful to me and a couple of others for giving good, useful, non-ideologically-driven forecasts and analysis of what was happening, particularly your clarity around uncertainty.
The internal SAGE analysis and modelling used - at least as presented - always seemed a bit slanted towards worst case (which history has shown, notably in August 2021 and January 2022) - for which I don't totally blame them, they were scientists and medical officers and had a mandate to 'save as many lives as possible': the real issue was that these incredibly powerful committees/individuals weren't counterbalanced by other structures looking at the economy, social welfare, etc.).
I didn't talk about Omicron much, but then in Omicron in particular, the 'inside' modelling often seemed to be a few days behind, when evidence from the Netherlands and elsewhere - and modelling being reflected by in the FT, hardly a crank site! - was saying that it was much less lethal. But fortunately we had some highly numerate Cabinet Ministers in key positions then - Sunak, Javid, Zahawi and Barclay - who were able to interrogate the full spectrum of data themselves, not just the material coming from SAGE, and persuade the PM not to lock down or close schools (which was not without risk, but which history shows was clearly the right decision).
Omicron was a complicated one I think: it was clear from the start of December that there were going to be a stupendous number of cases very soon, but as you say the key thing was severity (there were early signs in this direction from South Africa but it wasn't 100% clear to me that it carried over because they had a younger population, they'd had a wave - beta? gamma? - that we hadn't etc).
In terms of the times that we did close schools, I think I'm with you. I don't think it was tenable to keep them open in March 2020 or January 2021, because when you're up at 1,000 deaths a day then you want to do everything you can to reduce that as fast as possible. I think even March 2021 re-opening wasn't terrible - we probably could have gone February half-term in parts of the country at least, but I'm glad the Government stuck to their guns to make that work (and like you say I think lateral flow testing helped).
The one I'm still angry about is not re-opening more widely after May half-term in 2020. It's interesting you highlight the role of the unions, because I mentioned that here https://bristoliver.substack.com/p/learning-from-error (which I still never got an answer on btw). I'd like to think the Inquiry would dig into some of that stuff: the links between ISAGE and the unions, and whether ISAGE's modelling was dodgy like I believe it was, but I'm not optimistic that they will.
Definitely agree re May half-term - and similarly sceptical about the Inquiry doing some of the real digging needed!
I agree on Omicron it wasn't clear cut and there was considerable uncertainty. One of the big things was just how rapidly the situation was evolving, literally by the day, in terms of what we knew, and that's where some of the things that you, JBM and others were doing was genuinely more up to date (and perhaps more willing to discuss things where the jury was still out) than the official processes for advice. While I think the balance of probability was in favour of the decision made, to keep things open, I accept it wasn't a dead cert and there was some risk.
I think the other thing that's complicated about omicron is that we didn't do nothing (we did Plan B type things and lots of extra jabs), whereas some of the original modelling was based on "if we do nothing here".
And then the thing that's even more complicated is that these measures were probably more effective than we maybe had a right to expect, because some of omicron's advantage was probably due to a shorter infection time (I tried to write about that here https://bristoliver.substack.com/p/the-elbow-that-saved-christmas - sorry for plugging my own stuff again in your comments!)
Iain— it was a real pleasure working with you and others on helping craft, push through and defend the passage of the HEFOSA, even if stymied (?!) at the eleventh hour. Onwards!
Fascinating, especially the footnotes and the explanations on Covid and some of the education policies that appeared then disappeared (PQA, longer school day etc).
Funding HGV training, by the way, was a reversal of a policy developed in stages between 2007 and 2016 that said that DfE adult funds shouldn't be used for statutory qualifications that employers should be paying for. Not a bad principle in some areas (eg stopped public funding for one-day basic food hygeine courses) but policy assumes an industry willing and able to organise its own training.
Another point on T levels (which I agree may have a natural limit at about 30,000 entrants a year/5% of the cohort) is that the students qualified to take them have A levels as an alternative
PS
There's a "2020" in the section about Dominic Cummings that I think should be a 2019.
Very good points on T-Levels and on HGV training! I can sort of see the logic on the latter, but with a flexible labour market like ours I do think you can get market failure as each company would rather someone else would spend the money and then poach them. The bootcamp approach - where companies put some money in but Government does too - seems fairer and more likely to get good results for the country. I still hope the LLE might cover this sort of training, too, one day.
"Fortunately for me, Gavin Williamson (Education Secretary) found himself in need of SpAds 2019 General Election" is missing 'after the'
"that (a) that" is an excessive number of 'that's
"deliberatelysabotage" would benefit from a space.
"assenior" would also
"Skills of Jobs White Paper" sounds like it should be "Skills for Jobs", and indeed you call it such later on.
"as I heard from more than who joined the department" missing 'one'
Footnote 64 has an 'and' that I think is meant to be a 'who'
"themw" has stolen a letter and should be made to return it.
Footnore 77 "Dame Rachel de Souza as Children’s Commision" is probably missing an 'er'
While I believe mumbers should be controlled for all our safety, I think you meant 'number controls'
I don't know what "Remove the faith cap in schools" means (our school at least had no compulsory hats, faith based or otherwise), so perhaps this doesn't say what you want it to? Remove the cap on faith schools?
Thank you for a very honest and extensive recount of your time as a SpAd. This was a long article, but I couldn't stop reading it. I continue to love your witty footnotes.
I regrettably used insider short hand on faith cap. I meant the rule that if a new faith school opens (or converts to an academy) it can only award 50% of its places on the basis of faith.
The spiteful clause that stops SpAds getting a payout for losing their job at a general election if they're standing as a candidate is probably from a fear that public money might effectively be being used to support a campaign. (I realise the timing is a bit off, but one might feel one can afford to campaign instead of work because the payoff is coming.)
I don't think this is actually coherent - once the government has paid you this money you can do what you like with it, including donating it all to someone else's campaign - but I imagine it was what was raised in the meeting that decided to introduce this rule.
As you say, not coherent, as it's your money being given because you were made redundant, and if you get three month's salary it's up to you how you spend those three months (and what you do with the money). And in practice most SpAds who aren't standing ending up voluntarily working on the campaign! But I can imagine that being why it came about.
This is absolutely fascinating - thanks for writing it. It is not exactly surprising how chaotic a lot of the Covid stuff in education was, but it is always interesting to learn the details and particularly to see how much of it seems to have been pushed down on the department from the centre.
Working in [insert HEI], I have to say my over-riding memory was that any time the government wanted us to do something - often an ostensibly bad idea/very unpopular/at extremely short notice - we were a public institution that simply had to obey orders. Anytime any students - often entirely justifiably - complained about something we had been told to do, suddenly we were a private body again, which had to work it through with them, with the prospect of the courts/OfS/HMG intervening if we got it wrong.
I know that wasn't a feeling limited to universities, but there were some moments where it seemed particularly acute. I appreciate it probably also seemed very different from inside Whitehall.
Many more people now seem to accept that closing schools was a huge mistake, but the damage done to the 2018-2020 entry cohorts in universities gets less attention.
One typo that I don't think anyone else has pointed out - 'More broadly, other than short bursts of lockdown where to necessary to stop the NHS being overwhelmed'.
I'm always incredibly glad I wasn't at university during that period. They are unique years like no other and to have had it disrupted so much would be awful.
I think your description of government's double standards towards universities is pretty fair. Perhaps a bit less so in COVID where the government was also telling lots of private companies how they could operate, but definitely in general government does try to have its cake and eat it a bit with universities.
Yes, that is a fair point - at a zoomed out level, the pandemic just brought other sectors closer to HE's more usual experience.
I am not much one for the kind of political analysis by generational cohort that everyone seems to love these days, but I did think after the pandemic that people in their late teens and twenties, who were on average at fairly low risk from Covid and who gave up a lot anyway, might have been shown a bit more gratitude (though what that would have looked like is a tricky question).
I’m only about a third through this and really enjoying so far but as a current civil servant this caught my eye: “But they very rarely - in my experience - develop major new ideas that take policy in a different direction.”
I would say the issue is not idea generation but idea progression. In other words, in my experience policy teams (especially those that genuinely interact with industry/frontline) are never short of ideas but the process of taking an idea into reality is so unbelievably painful that most don’t bother or ideas peter out after a certain point. To make policy a reality from the ‘bottom up’ in the CS you need to do so much ‘consensus building’ vertically and horizontally (your G6/7/Dd/Director/DG, all with their own concerns both political and resource-wise, plus those same command chains of other policy teams affected by your idea, and then repeat this for other departments for any policy that requires money or an ask of another dept) even before you get to ministers that it usually simply isn’t worth the effort, no matter how good the idea. This imposes an incredibly high bar on new policy thinking. The system you describe is therefore rational in that it prioritises thinking from the top down. This isn’t a good set up - and I think the CS should and could be much more innovative in how it tries to capture new ideas/thinking from teams - but outside our maybe a couple of policies I’ve seen develop somewhat organically and eventually be implemented that’s been my experience.
The BBC are reporting (with respect to Sue Gray's Salary) that "The prime minister signed off a rebanding of the salaries for special advisers shortly after taking office."
Does this mean Labour have enacted your desired SpAd pay policy above? (Seems plausible - upping public sector pay and then blaming the Tories for the country being even more out of pocket than it was when they took the reigns seems to be their current MO.)
Indeed, this appears to be a 'one rule for her' situation rather than a general salary uplift. There have been quite a few articles about how many other SpAds have had to take pay cuts (even coming from Labour HQ) or are being paid less than their Tory predecessors, to the extent that they have joined a union!
Yes. I'm not sure 'pay the person at the top more than the Tories did, pay the people at the bottom less' is exactly the look Labour were going for, but it does seem to be the reality they've delivered. (I guess we don't know if they're paying their common or garden variety SpAds less than the Tories did in government.)
Thanks, that's extremely interesting to read the account of the decision-making across those times. (I'd kind of guessed a lot of it, but still fascinating to see it confirmed)
Thank you.
Your own data analysis, along with that of 2-3 others (John Burn-Murdoch was one, I forget the other) was incredibly helpful to me and a couple of others for giving good, useful, non-ideologically-driven forecasts and analysis of what was happening, particularly your clarity around uncertainty.
The internal SAGE analysis and modelling used - at least as presented - always seemed a bit slanted towards worst case (which history has shown, notably in August 2021 and January 2022) - for which I don't totally blame them, they were scientists and medical officers and had a mandate to 'save as many lives as possible': the real issue was that these incredibly powerful committees/individuals weren't counterbalanced by other structures looking at the economy, social welfare, etc.).
I didn't talk about Omicron much, but then in Omicron in particular, the 'inside' modelling often seemed to be a few days behind, when evidence from the Netherlands and elsewhere - and modelling being reflected by in the FT, hardly a crank site! - was saying that it was much less lethal. But fortunately we had some highly numerate Cabinet Ministers in key positions then - Sunak, Javid, Zahawi and Barclay - who were able to interrogate the full spectrum of data themselves, not just the material coming from SAGE, and persuade the PM not to lock down or close schools (which was not without risk, but which history shows was clearly the right decision).
Omicron was a complicated one I think: it was clear from the start of December that there were going to be a stupendous number of cases very soon, but as you say the key thing was severity (there were early signs in this direction from South Africa but it wasn't 100% clear to me that it carried over because they had a younger population, they'd had a wave - beta? gamma? - that we hadn't etc).
In terms of the times that we did close schools, I think I'm with you. I don't think it was tenable to keep them open in March 2020 or January 2021, because when you're up at 1,000 deaths a day then you want to do everything you can to reduce that as fast as possible. I think even March 2021 re-opening wasn't terrible - we probably could have gone February half-term in parts of the country at least, but I'm glad the Government stuck to their guns to make that work (and like you say I think lateral flow testing helped).
The one I'm still angry about is not re-opening more widely after May half-term in 2020. It's interesting you highlight the role of the unions, because I mentioned that here https://bristoliver.substack.com/p/learning-from-error (which I still never got an answer on btw). I'd like to think the Inquiry would dig into some of that stuff: the links between ISAGE and the unions, and whether ISAGE's modelling was dodgy like I believe it was, but I'm not optimistic that they will.
Definitely agree re May half-term - and similarly sceptical about the Inquiry doing some of the real digging needed!
I agree on Omicron it wasn't clear cut and there was considerable uncertainty. One of the big things was just how rapidly the situation was evolving, literally by the day, in terms of what we knew, and that's where some of the things that you, JBM and others were doing was genuinely more up to date (and perhaps more willing to discuss things where the jury was still out) than the official processes for advice. While I think the balance of probability was in favour of the decision made, to keep things open, I accept it wasn't a dead cert and there was some risk.
I think the other thing that's complicated about omicron is that we didn't do nothing (we did Plan B type things and lots of extra jabs), whereas some of the original modelling was based on "if we do nothing here".
And then the thing that's even more complicated is that these measures were probably more effective than we maybe had a right to expect, because some of omicron's advantage was probably due to a shorter infection time (I tried to write about that here https://bristoliver.substack.com/p/the-elbow-that-saved-christmas - sorry for plugging my own stuff again in your comments!)
Iain— it was a real pleasure working with you and others on helping craft, push through and defend the passage of the HEFOSA, even if stymied (?!) at the eleventh hour. Onwards!
Thank you - and likewise!
Fascinating, especially the footnotes and the explanations on Covid and some of the education policies that appeared then disappeared (PQA, longer school day etc).
Funding HGV training, by the way, was a reversal of a policy developed in stages between 2007 and 2016 that said that DfE adult funds shouldn't be used for statutory qualifications that employers should be paying for. Not a bad principle in some areas (eg stopped public funding for one-day basic food hygeine courses) but policy assumes an industry willing and able to organise its own training.
Another point on T levels (which I agree may have a natural limit at about 30,000 entrants a year/5% of the cohort) is that the students qualified to take them have A levels as an alternative
PS
There's a "2020" in the section about Dominic Cummings that I think should be a 2019.
Very good points on T-Levels and on HGV training! I can sort of see the logic on the latter, but with a flexible labour market like ours I do think you can get market failure as each company would rather someone else would spend the money and then poach them. The bootcamp approach - where companies put some money in but Government does too - seems fairer and more likely to get good results for the country. I still hope the LLE might cover this sort of training, too, one day.
P.S. Typo corrected!
"Fortunately for me, Gavin Williamson (Education Secretary) found himself in need of SpAds 2019 General Election" is missing 'after the'
"that (a) that" is an excessive number of 'that's
"deliberatelysabotage" would benefit from a space.
"assenior" would also
"Skills of Jobs White Paper" sounds like it should be "Skills for Jobs", and indeed you call it such later on.
"as I heard from more than who joined the department" missing 'one'
Footnote 64 has an 'and' that I think is meant to be a 'who'
"themw" has stolen a letter and should be made to return it.
Footnore 77 "Dame Rachel de Souza as Children’s Commision" is probably missing an 'er'
While I believe mumbers should be controlled for all our safety, I think you meant 'number controls'
I don't know what "Remove the faith cap in schools" means (our school at least had no compulsory hats, faith based or otherwise), so perhaps this doesn't say what you want it to? Remove the cap on faith schools?
Thank you for a very honest and extensive recount of your time as a SpAd. This was a long article, but I couldn't stop reading it. I continue to love your witty footnotes.
Thank you for entertaining typo spotting!
I regrettably used insider short hand on faith cap. I meant the rule that if a new faith school opens (or converts to an academy) it can only award 50% of its places on the basis of faith.
The spiteful clause that stops SpAds getting a payout for losing their job at a general election if they're standing as a candidate is probably from a fear that public money might effectively be being used to support a campaign. (I realise the timing is a bit off, but one might feel one can afford to campaign instead of work because the payoff is coming.)
I don't think this is actually coherent - once the government has paid you this money you can do what you like with it, including donating it all to someone else's campaign - but I imagine it was what was raised in the meeting that decided to introduce this rule.
That's an interesting and very plausible theory.
As you say, not coherent, as it's your money being given because you were made redundant, and if you get three month's salary it's up to you how you spend those three months (and what you do with the money). And in practice most SpAds who aren't standing ending up voluntarily working on the campaign! But I can imagine that being why it came about.
This is absolutely fascinating - thanks for writing it. It is not exactly surprising how chaotic a lot of the Covid stuff in education was, but it is always interesting to learn the details and particularly to see how much of it seems to have been pushed down on the department from the centre.
Working in [insert HEI], I have to say my over-riding memory was that any time the government wanted us to do something - often an ostensibly bad idea/very unpopular/at extremely short notice - we were a public institution that simply had to obey orders. Anytime any students - often entirely justifiably - complained about something we had been told to do, suddenly we were a private body again, which had to work it through with them, with the prospect of the courts/OfS/HMG intervening if we got it wrong.
I know that wasn't a feeling limited to universities, but there were some moments where it seemed particularly acute. I appreciate it probably also seemed very different from inside Whitehall.
Many more people now seem to accept that closing schools was a huge mistake, but the damage done to the 2018-2020 entry cohorts in universities gets less attention.
One typo that I don't think anyone else has pointed out - 'More broadly, other than short bursts of lockdown where to necessary to stop the NHS being overwhelmed'.
I'm always incredibly glad I wasn't at university during that period. They are unique years like no other and to have had it disrupted so much would be awful.
I think your description of government's double standards towards universities is pretty fair. Perhaps a bit less so in COVID where the government was also telling lots of private companies how they could operate, but definitely in general government does try to have its cake and eat it a bit with universities.
Yes, that is a fair point - at a zoomed out level, the pandemic just brought other sectors closer to HE's more usual experience.
I am not much one for the kind of political analysis by generational cohort that everyone seems to love these days, but I did think after the pandemic that people in their late teens and twenties, who were on average at fairly low risk from Covid and who gave up a lot anyway, might have been shown a bit more gratitude (though what that would have looked like is a tricky question).
I’m only about a third through this and really enjoying so far but as a current civil servant this caught my eye: “But they very rarely - in my experience - develop major new ideas that take policy in a different direction.”
I would say the issue is not idea generation but idea progression. In other words, in my experience policy teams (especially those that genuinely interact with industry/frontline) are never short of ideas but the process of taking an idea into reality is so unbelievably painful that most don’t bother or ideas peter out after a certain point. To make policy a reality from the ‘bottom up’ in the CS you need to do so much ‘consensus building’ vertically and horizontally (your G6/7/Dd/Director/DG, all with their own concerns both political and resource-wise, plus those same command chains of other policy teams affected by your idea, and then repeat this for other departments for any policy that requires money or an ask of another dept) even before you get to ministers that it usually simply isn’t worth the effort, no matter how good the idea. This imposes an incredibly high bar on new policy thinking. The system you describe is therefore rational in that it prioritises thinking from the top down. This isn’t a good set up - and I think the CS should and could be much more innovative in how it tries to capture new ideas/thinking from teams - but outside our maybe a couple of policies I’ve seen develop somewhat organically and eventually be implemented that’s been my experience.
Thank you! That makes a lot of sense and is a very helpful clarification.
The BBC are reporting (with respect to Sue Gray's Salary) that "The prime minister signed off a rebanding of the salaries for special advisers shortly after taking office."
Does this mean Labour have enacted your desired SpAd pay policy above? (Seems plausible - upping public sector pay and then blaming the Tories for the country being even more out of pocket than it was when they took the reigns seems to be their current MO.)
"Most [ junior SpAds] were expecting pay rises upon entering government only to discover they would in fact be paid less." Nevermind.
Indeed, this appears to be a 'one rule for her' situation rather than a general salary uplift. There have been quite a few articles about how many other SpAds have had to take pay cuts (even coming from Labour HQ) or are being paid less than their Tory predecessors, to the extent that they have joined a union!
https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/sep/10/labour-special-advisers-join-union-over-concerns-about-pay
Yes. I'm not sure 'pay the person at the top more than the Tories did, pay the people at the bottom less' is exactly the look Labour were going for, but it does seem to be the reality they've delivered. (I guess we don't know if they're paying their common or garden variety SpAds less than the Tories did in government.)