Government must do more to evaluate L&D for civil servants, says NAO

The government has "significantly underestimated" the amount of money it is spending on developing civil servants' skills and "rarely" evaluates its impact on their performance, according to the National Audit Office.

The NAO says that the government's estimate of £275m in 2009/10 - £547 for each member of the Civil Service - falls far short of the actual amount that was spent on learning and development, because it doesn't include factors such as informal L&D activities, the value of the time spent on courses and the amount spent on profession-specific and technical training.

And it says that much of the government's heavy investment in L&D is wasted - only 48 per cent of the respondents to last year's Civil Service People Survey said the L&D they had undertaken in the previous year had helped them do their job better.

"But much more significant is the adverse impact on the performance of public sector programmes and projects. Our recent work has shown that skills gaps can have a significant impact on government's ability to meet its objectives and provide value for money," says the NAO in its report on Identifying and meeting central government's skills requirements released yesterday.

It is urging the Civil Service to help managers take a more active role in staff development; improve the information given to departments to identify, and remedy, skills gaps and to ensure L&D is more aligned with business goals; ensure talent management activity develops and uses critical skills, and do more to evaluate the effectiveness of L&D against "measurable business metrics".

The report, by NAO head Amyas Morse, examines the Civil Service's L&D arrangements immediately before the introduction in April of Civil Service Learning - the most recent of a series of cross-departmental initiatives designed to address key skills gaps and promote greater professionalism in central government. It is responsible for delivering generic L&D programmes across the Civil Service more cheaply than was previously the case and for supporting individual departments in providing more specific and professional training.

Morse said yesterday: "Tight public funding means that departments must find ambitious new ways of working to maintain and drive up levels of performance. Key elements of success will be knowing what skills are needed and which staff have them, and then deploying those staff to where they are most needed.

"These key elements are not presently in place in many departments and need to be driven urgently to be in step with major change programmes."

The report reveals that government departments are inconsistent in their review of existing L&D delivery models and their implications for their skills needs, despite the demands of budget reductions. "Without such analysis, skills needs may not be linked to the most effective means of operating," it warns.

Similarly, departments' skills strategies and governance arrangements have been inadequate in ensuring development activities were effectively aligned with their business needs. The NAO found a "fragmented" approach with highly devolved structures, which lead to unclear accountability; it reviewed the skills strategies of 13 departments, covering the last three years, and could "clearly trace the links between business objectives, the prioritised skills gaps and the solutions selected" in fewer than half of them.

Departments' understanding of the skills they already had - and the ones they needed in the future - was restricted by weak data and divided management responsibilities. "This has made it difficult to maintain oversight of skills development needs and to choose effectively between competing skills priorities," says the report. "Incomplete and unreliable management information on what skills development is undertaken, by which members of staff, and at what cost, further weakens departments' ability to manage and maintain the link between business needs and skills development activities."

Departments had made "limited use" of standardised training and the government's buying power to save money. According to the report, there were more than 250 different leadership courses being implemented across the Civil Service, with daily rates for management and leadership training varying four-fold between suppliers.

"Unnecessary costs have been incurred through an over-reliance on expensive forms of training and poor management of attendance rates," says the NAO.

"This examination identified a number of practices across government which fell short of our expectations. These weaknesses are compounded by a pervasive lack of data on the costs and benefits of skills development, which prevents departments from being effective in managing their skills development programmes and co-ordinating across government.

"The picture across government is not uniform but, clearly, it does not represent value for money."