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Sunday, July 6, 2025

Fit for purpose 5: Policy vs implementation

by

Mariano Browne
301 days ago
20240908
Economist Marino Browne

Economist Marino Browne

Nicole Drayton

In pre­vi­ous ar­ti­cles, I dis­cussed how the civ­il ser­vice was struc­tured and how the Cab­i­net in­ter­act­ed with the ser­vice to co­or­di­nate gov­ern­ment busi­ness. Last week, we ex­am­ined the Cab­i­net note as the ba­sis for all Cab­i­net de­ci­sions. We sur­mised that a de­ci­sion was on­ly as good as the re­search that sup­port­ed the in­for­ma­tion and rec­om­men­da­tions con­tained in the note. There­fore, a Cab­i­net can be bad­ly ad­vised, and this will re­sult in poor de­ci­sions.

The com­put­er apho­rism “garbage in garbage out” is uni­ver­sal. Poor-qual­i­ty in­puts will give poor-qual­i­ty out­puts. “Col­lec­tive Re­spon­si­bil­i­ty” means that all Cab­i­net min­is­ters are equal­ly cul­pa­ble/re­spon­si­ble for the de­ci­sion if it fails or praise­wor­thy if it suc­ceeds. Since fail­ure is an or­phan, in prac­tice the pub­lic looks for a scape­goat, and the min­is­ter who pi­lot­ed the note should ac­cept re­spon­si­bil­i­ty and re­sign.

There are some in­tractable prob­lems for which there is no cor­rect an­swer, or where all the op­tions are bad and one must make the least bad choice. The re­sults of some de­ci­sions take a long time to ges­tate, and the out­comes, favourable or un­favourable, on­ly be­come vis­i­ble much lat­er when those re­spon­si­ble for the de­ci­sion are out of of­fice.

In those cir­cum­stances, the gov­ern­ment of the day, or the rel­e­vant min­is­ter, be­comes the “fall guy” for the re­sults of de­ci­sions made long be­fore com­ing in­to of­fice. A good ex­am­ple would be Bas­deo Pan­day’s an­nounce­ment of uni­ver­sal sec­ondary ed­u­ca­tion and the abo­li­tion of the Com­mon En­trance Ex­am (re­brand­ed as SEA) on a pub­lic plat­form.

The civ­il ser­vants did a great job of en­sur­ing that every stu­dent was in­deed placed in a sec­ondary school, even if the stu­dent did not meet the qual­i­fy­ing stan­dard. We are see­ing the ef­fect of that dis­as­trous de­ci­sion in many ways in the 24 years since its “suc­cess­ful” im­ple­men­ta­tion.

Ed­u­ca­tion is a con­vey­or belt in which stu­dents build on the foun­da­tion taught at low­er lev­els. Not every child learns at the same pace or at the same age. In ef­fect, the de­ci­sion to move every­one (those mak­ing 30 per cent or more in the SEA Ex­am) in­to a sec­ondary school, whether or not they had mas­tered the pri­ma­ry cur­ricu­lum re­quire­ments, cre­at­ed se­vere learn­ing gaps.

Rather than im­prove the teach­ing stan­dards and out­comes at the pri­ma­ry lev­el, in ef­fect, the de­ci­sion low­ered the bar for sec­ondary en­trance. It was a bad de­ci­sion, in the short and long term.

The re­sult was that stu­dents who had not mas­tered the pri­ma­ry cur­ricu­lum were ex­pect­ed to per­form well in a sec­ondary cur­ricu­lum. The re­sult has been a high dropout rate in sec­ondary schools be­tween forms one to five and is com­pound­ed by low suc­cess rates at CSEC.

In 2019, 18,844 stu­dents did the SEA ex­am. In 2024, five years lat­er, on­ly 14,035 stu­dents at­tempt­ed five sub­jects or more, in­clud­ing Math­e­mat­ics and Eng­lish. On­ly 45 per cent (6393) achieved five or more sub­jects, in­clud­ing math­e­mat­ics and Eng­lish.

As a re­sult, every ed­u­ca­tion min­is­ter will be blamed for a poor­ly func­tion­ing ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem un­til the pri­ma­ry school sys­tem is fixed. What hap­pens with the ca­su­al­ties who fall out of the sys­tem?

This ex­am­ple, sim­plis­tic as it may ap­pear, demon­strates the com­plex na­ture of gov­ern­ment prob­lem-solv­ing and the dif­fi­cul­ty of se­lect­ing the “right” or ap­pro­pri­ate pol­i­cy choice ver­sus a choice that would be po­lit­i­cal­ly pop­u­lar. Is it a good pol­i­cy bad­ly im­ple­ment­ed, or a bad pol­i­cy well im­ple­ment­ed?

The prob­lem was not how many chil­dren were ac­cess­ing sec­ondary school ed­u­ca­tion. The prob­lem was whether the pri­ma­ry school sys­tem was ad­e­quate for the task of prepar­ing a base for fur­ther ed­u­ca­tion, be it tech­ni­cal, vo­ca­tion­al, or aca­d­e­m­ic.

This is an im­por­tant ex­am­ple. It gives the con­text and ra­tio­nale for politi­cians to be prop­er­ly ad­vised be­fore mak­ing pop­u­lar pub­lic de­ci­sions. What did the pro­fes­sion­al civ­il ser­vants ad­vise? What should have been the ap­pro­pri­ate pol­i­cy choice? Were the civ­il ser­vants over­ruled, or did they sim­ply fol­low or­ders? It is an ex­cel­lent ex­am­ple of a wrong de­ci­sion suc­cess­ful­ly im­ple­ment­ed.

The point is that af­ter every cab­i­net de­ci­sion, the civ­il ser­vice ma­chin­ery kicks in to be­gin the im­ple­men­ta­tion process. The fol­low-up is the same as in any oth­er or­gan­i­sa­tion: who, what, when, where, and how?

Are there re­sources to make the de­ci­sion a re­al­i­ty? Is it a pri­or­i­ty in the con­text of the avail­able re­sources? These ques­tions of­ten lead to im­ple­men­ta­tion de­lays. There­fore, it is not un­rea­son­able for mem­bers of the pub­lic to ask why it takes so long for a project or de­ci­sion ap­proved by the cab­i­net to be im­ple­ment­ed by the gov­ern­ment.

Notwith­stand­ing what is said on the po­lit­i­cal hus­tings, nei­ther cab­i­net min­is­ters nor po­lit­i­cal par­ties im­ple­ment gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy and cab­i­net de­ci­sions. That is the do­main of the civ­il ser­vice and per­ma­nent sec­re­taries who man­age the or­gan­i­sa­tion­al struc­ture. So why isn’t the pub­lic ser­vice syn­ony­mous with ef­fec­tive, ef­fi­cient, and time­ly de­liv­ery? Who is re­spon­si­ble for en­sur­ing the de­liv­ery, mea­sur­ing per­for­mance, and mak­ing sure all is in place to achieve de­liv­ery? And how is the per­for­mance mea­sured? By a stan­dard sys­tem or by per­son­al­i­ties?

Suc­cess can on­ly be achieved if the or­gan­i­sa­tion is de­signed to achieve suc­cess. What was the civ­il ser­vice de­signed to achieve? 

Mar­i­ano Browne is the Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer of the UWI Arthur Lok Jack Glob­al School of Busi­ness.


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