Birmingham Public Service Academy

Background Information

Birmingham has historically held a reputation as the “workshop of the world” and one of “the best governed cities in the world”. Today, however, the city faces profound economic and sociological issues such as unemployment, disparity in educational attainment and health inequalities.

It is recognized that these issues must be addressed to give the city’s citizens the best possible quality of life, access to meaningful employment and education, increased positive health outcomes and attract investment to the city.

The Birmingham Public Service Academy is a revolutionary way for the municipal government and the city’s premier research institution, the University of Birmingham, to come together to research, share and debate best practice public services and policies together within a strategic framework. 

Although the university and city council have a significant history of working together, there has not been to date a platform through which the mutual benefits of a more structured interaction could be established and driven forward. The Public Service Academy has been established to provide a test bed for the development of innovative ways of working between the council and the university. 

Goals of the Initiative 

The specific goals of the Public Service Academy are: 

•Act as a catalyst for the development of robust working relationships between the council and university in support of our overall strategic intent.

•Oversee the design and delivery of programs which will contribute to the university enhancing its reputation for the understanding and transformation of public services.

•Given the local-global footprint and relevance of Birmingham to a number of major cities worldwide, it will evidence key partners and target markets our capacity to engage and drive change in complex organizations, opening up new markets for research, teaching and CPD.

•Act as a platform for research collaborations with a small number of national and international partners, and ensure we are “recipient ready” for a range of research bids and leadership development programs.

•Explore the system based requirements for effective knowledge exchange, practice development and collaboration between the local authority and the university and provide a capacity for future ventures. 

Parties and Partners to the Initiative and Resources Used for Implementation

The University of Birmingham is the lead partner and has been responsible for developing the Public Service Academy alongside the Birmingham City Council. Building on the core relationship between the university and the Municipal Government, the Public Service Academy has also extended across a wider public space to include organizations from across the region, such as hospitals, mental health providers, charities and voluntary organizations.

The resources used for implementing the initiative include

The University of Birmingham provided the initial funding for the initiative with an investment of £250,000 over the first two years of the Public Service Academy. Both the university and the Birmingham City Council are supporting with substantial senior managerial resources, with half of the city’s senior management team representing the Public Service Academy Board.

The Birmingham City Council also provide valued human resources across a range of peer groups in the form of making staff available to work on the initiative and directing future research areas.

One of the significant benefits of the Public Service Academy is its ability to support and influence considerable budgets for a relatively low input. The Birmingham City Council’s budget is around £3.5 billion per annum, whilst the total public services budget for the city of Birmingham is over £7 billion per annum. Many of the key themes of the Public Service Academy, particularly localization, social cohesion and health and well-being, have a direct relevance and potential impact on these budgets.

Innovation for the Initiative

Although relationships have long existed between the University of Birmingham and the Birmingham City Council, the Public Service Academy represents the first attempt to bring these relationships together in a strategic format. To our knowledge there is no other arrangement within the sector that takes this form and there has been a large degree of learning involved.

The innovation being applied by the Public Service Academy is the leveraging of academic expertise within the university to help support and underpin policy developments and decisions taking place within the wider public services sector of Birmingham and the region. 

Under the current work program the Public Service Academy’s contributions in terms of policy and strategy implementation follow five major thematic principles:

•Localization — supporting the city council to move power away from the center and give it back to citizens where possible

•Cohesion — building an inclusive and harmonious society across one of Europe’s most diverse cities

•Health and Well-being — increasing the quality and length of life of citizens regardless of their income or demographic

•Social work — ensuring public servants are helping the most vulnerable in society

•21st Century Public Servants — identifying the changing requirements for public servants in the future, and shaping learning materials around this.

It is anticipated that as the Public Service Academy develops other parties will benefit from this relationship. We are now bringing other public service partners into the arrangement (including public, private and third sector organizations) so that they may benefit from the program and may be able to access additional capacity through this initiative. 

Obstacles and Solutions for Innovation

Both organizations work to different quality and performance frameworks, over different time cycles and to different financial imperatives. As such, we have been attempting to identify a series of small scale projects that the partners might work on in the early days of the Public Service Academy. It is anticipated that these will build trust between partners and galvanize staff from both organizations into action. These early projects will therefore be building blocks for more substantial projects in the future. 

Outcomes and Assessments

Outcomes achieved are as follows:

There is a range of different levels at which we hope to make change. Ultimately, if the Public Service Academy is effective it should have the long term effect of producing more effective public services across the city and improving the lives of its inhabitants. A successful Public Service Academy will be instrumental in transforming the image and reputation of the city on a number of levels: 

•As a leading light in the development of powerful new policies, Birmingham will be seen nationally (and even internationally) as a center for new and innovative thinking around public policy.

•Bespoke training via the Public Service Academy for key services areas (such as the currently under-performing sectors of Adult Social Care and Children’s Social Care) will support the Birmingham City Council in providing the best levels of care for those in need.

•The role of the Public Service Academy (as broker, provider of a forum for discussion and provider of strong academic analysis) has enabled the wider Birmingham public services sector to overcome substantially challenging structural changes, such as those affecting the way health services are provided. The end result for Birmingham will be better health outcomes provided in a much more cost effective manner.

•Changing the way that the university interacts with partners across the city and the region, we will have moved the university away from being part of a knowledge-based economy and into being an essential component of the city, the community and civic life.

Assessments are as follows

At a lower level we are measuring the impact via the numbers of individuals who access the different ranges of opportunities that the Public Service Academy develops, and the numbers who access the resources on the website. In the medium term we hope to measure these different activities by the impact that they have around specific changes to services and practices. In the longer term we will try and track the impact that these activities have had on the city through performance data that the city council regularly collects.

Methods Applied

The Public Service Academy has developed, or is developing, a number of specific tools and methods to help support desired outcomes. As with our work programs, these are diverse and incorporate a number of challenges:

•Blue Chip Placements Program — designed to re-invigorate a passion for working in the Public Sector and ensure the Birmingham City Council is competing with the UK’s biggest employers for the best future talent. These programs, following a competitive process, allow a select number of interns access to senior executives of the council as part of a demanding four-week work program.

•Safe Space Dinners — provide a specially hosted set of events for key leaders and policy makers to discuss, without prejudice, their thoughts and experiences around a number of challenging policy issues.

•Social Work Academy — developed as sub-set of the wider Public Service Academy, and particularly targeted at solving immediate challenges within the Birmingham City Council’s Children’s Services Department. The Academy has provided academic focus and careers expertise to help improve training and the abilities of the existing workforce within the city council, while helping appropriately shape the skills of students who will become social workers in the future in Birmingham. 

Benefits to Other Cities

The Public Service Academy is a way of structuring interactions between major partners in the city, ultimately with the aim of attempting to add capacity, in order to test out new ideas and improve local public services. Such a model may be of benefit in other cities, regions or communities as a way of increasing knowledge mobilization, testing out new ideas and creating innovative practices to help improve public services in defined locales.

The intention is that in the future the Public Service Academy will be extended beyond just the local region and include other areas of the country and even other countries. Through this process it is anticipated that knowledge will be shared, learning will be extended and other areas may add to the regional experience. Even where other organizations do not want to join such an organizational arrangement, they may wish to develop a local model based on our experience establishing a Public Service Academy of their own seeking to develop innovation hotbeds in their locality.