As a general rule of thumb an incoming DfE special adviser (SpAd) is probably only sketching out a two-year chunk of CV space. After all, that’s been the average working-life expectancy for an education secretary for the past decade or so. (The average has been whacked by Michelle Donelan’s eye-popping two-day term this summer, but even ignoring that it’s not much more.)
That’s a pretty depressing stat. Some make their mark (Dominic Cummings comes to mind), while others just about survive before being spat out when the boss gets the chop (me, when Gavin Williamson left office). But being spat out at some point is the only certain part of a SpAd’s job.
On this occasion, if the latest public hint from the new PM is anything to go by, there will be an election in less than 2 years. So you could safely say that this incoming ministerial team has an even shorter-than-usual expected time in office.
Being a SpAd is a fascinating job. There’s no training, no induction and no real job description. That means you can make it what you want. You could be anything from a turbo-charged press officer to effectively wielding the power of a junior minister without the need to be elected or hold surgeries (but minus the perk of the public paying for your mortgage on a London flat).
But it also means it’s important to recruit people who know something about the field, and that’s a challenge. If Liz Truss insists as rumoured on a maximum limit of two SpAds per secretary of state, then Kit Malthouse might struggle to find two Tory SpAds who know about education. While there’s a large pool of left-leaning edu-policy nerds to draw from, it’s trickier to find Conservative education wonks. That’s a broad generalisation, but James Cleverly had only one education expert and a team of others who weren’t from an education background.
Kit Malthouse might struggle to find two Tory SpAds who know about education
So this team will have less than two years to make an impact, amid a very challenging time for schools, and may arrive at it with little or no knowledge of the Jenga-like structure of our education system. If, like me, they are hired for their media experience, then they will quickly need to absorb as much as they can about the sector, follow the key players on Twitter and get to know the main ‘edu pack’ of correspondents and editors.
Luckily, the ‘SpAdPo’ (SpAd Private Office) staff provide handy folders of bedtime reading with an overview of the domain. But when your job is to try to avoid media mess-ups, the stark reality of the number of mines in this field can be intimidating.
Paradoxically, these complexities feed a certain reformist zeal among incoming education administrations keen to rationalise the system. But it seldom works that way.
Remember, a SpAd technically works for the PM and is effectively assigned to the secretary of state. That means they have two bosses, and that can lead to ugly clashes. I remember a bust-up over whether tutoring funding should be multi-year or not. When it came to writing the press release, number 10 and the treasury said no while Gavin said yes, pointing out that you couldn’t physically spend X millions of pounds on tutors without hoovering up every available qualified tutor and making them work 24 hours a day for an entire academic year. Cue: Awkward stand-off.
In the end the PM (almost) always wins this kind of battle, which is also well worth remembering. It’s why a SpAd needs to be a diplomat as well as an enforcer, negotiator, wheeler-dealer, psychologist and shoulder to cry on.
Good luck to the new team on being all that and more, and perhaps still finding time to deliver an as-yet undefined policy agenda. Education is where real life-changing levelling up could be done, but only with the right mix of feasible reform and, of course, massive funding.
Where there’s a political will, there’s a way. But the clock is ticking to make a crisis-averting and government-saving impact.
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