Dialogue: As state servants retake control

It was too much to expect, I suppose, that Judith Aitken would go into retirement with the equivalent of a knighthood in today's New Year list. She was made a companion of the Queen's Service Order in 1996, the fourth-ranked honour in the system, but she deserves better.

Dr Aitken, head of the Education Review Office for the past nine years, was that precious breed of public servant who knows the difference between the public and the state. That is not a distinction those who now rule us can recognise.

It is one of life's ironies that designated "public servants" actually serve a minister of state. And those designated as "state servants" are employees of tax-financed schools and hospitals and the like, who consider they serve the public not the state.

But the designations are right. The advisers of ministers notice the public interest is not necessarily best served by state services. Among state employees that view, naturally enough, is fiercely resisted.

Over the past decade schoolteachers, nurses, salaried doctors and other state employees have generated highly effective publicity, sometimes through their unions but more often posing as public interest groups, to undermine confidence in competing services.

They are getting their rewards now. We have a Government of state servants for state servants.

The story of this year has been the reversion to in-house state monopolies of just about every service the taxpayer is obliged to finance.

The renationalisation of accident insurance was just the first and most egregious step. All health administration is being brought back into the ministry. Elected district boards largely will be obliged to carry out centrally directed priorities. And primary care is to be newly answerable to the boards.

In housing, the Government has given preferential treatment to state tenants rather than income-related rent subsidies for all. Bulk-funding has been abolished, zoning restored and enrolment regulated to try to arrest the competition between state schools.

Last year, Labour considered burying the Education Review Office in the ministry. At the election it promised only to "review" the office. Though nothing has happened yet, Dr Aitken's retirement is ominous.

Under her, the letters ERO raised fear and loathing in teachers who profess a commitment to public education, a good number of whom now make up the Government caucus.

She was in the habit of criticising schools out loud. Anybody acquainted with education today knows how brave that was.

The prevailing educational ethic is that criticism must be muted for the sake of self-esteem. It is more important that pupils feel good than be good. In fact, the theory is that if they believe they are good they are more likely to get better.

So it is for schools. And it is considered most important that the public is told nothing that would shake its confidence in them. Dr Aitken did not subscribe to that deceit.

Ideally there would be no need for her role. Parents of competitive private schools probably don't need her to tell them how the schools are performing. But poor public schools can survive unless somebody runs a rule over them regularly.

The Education Review Office was formed to fill a little of the information gap in a state system. Its reports are generally cautious documents written in the turgid terminology the ministry seems to need.

Inevitably, press summaries would highlight the criticisms, as any parent - or teacher for that matter - would do if reading the report themselves.

Dr Aitken's job was to expose failings not fix them, though it is a fair bet the exposure went a long way towards bringing about improvements that would not have happened without it. But in latter years she helped with repair work, too.

Her determination to disclose fault where she found it offended not only state servants but also social scientists, who are ever ready to ascribe educational failings to poverty and unemployment in the district. It was highly inconvenient to be told that quite a number of schools in the same socio-economic circumstances were doing a fine job.

The head of the ERO could be blunt, telling a parliamentary committee in 1997 that a significant number of teachers were incompetent. "I have 10,000 reports standing behind my comment. It is not a hunch," she said.

Long ago Judith Aitken was a schoolteacher herself, a Labour Party member and a leading feminist of the 1970s. Like many of her contemporaries, she came to admire the dynamism and disciplines of competition and prices, the devolution of decision-making to those closest to customers, and the clear measures of satisfaction.

She was part of the attempt to imitate that culture in the public sector, first as corporate relations manager for Electricorp, then as chief executive of the Ministry of Women's Affairs, before taking over the ERO in 1992.

She retires in the company of several of this country's finest public servants - in the true meaning of the word - who have been prepared to face down the self-servants in the state's employ. That makes her too effective for its highest honour.

I hope she knows that the public, particularly those with children in schools that were stung by her vigilance, are suitably grateful.