Guido thought he would check in on how Darren Jones’ new Civil Service school is going. Civil servants are being trained on clay modelling…
A report published this month by the Cabinet Office and the government agency Policy Lab details a programme “to explore how civil servants navigate Learning & Development across their current roles and wider career journeys, aiming to ensure that the skills system is grounded in lived experience and co-designed with those it serves.” Whatever that means…
To provide feedback on their experience in government last year civil servants tried “sensory ethnography… rooted in the principles of both sensory and participatory ethnography, which allowed us to elicit deeper responses and experiences which are often not volunteered in interviews or similar research approaches.” They played with clay models…
Policy Lab boasted about designing “creative, self-guided exercises.”
“The exercises were tactile, varied and experimental, inspired by a wide set of references from ancient Andean knotting and record keeping practices (khipu) to British popular culture (my career radio), and clay modelling.”
The rest of the report is full of meaningless jargon. Policy Lab said it “translated insights” into “speculative proposals” for learning in the civil Service and its project “informed the creation of the National School of Government and Public Services, announced by the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister in 2026, and offers a model for how government can move from lived experience to system‑level insight, and from insight to delivery.” Darren Jones is moulding the Civil Servants, it gets him fired up, co-conspirators can put their own clay puns below…
Speaking at his speech on how to achieve “progressive capitalism” Wes Streeting fired a dig and Andy Burnham:
“Bond markets are not bond villains and fiscal rules matter.”