By Vivienne Russell | 14 November 2012
Trade unions have branded Department for Education plans to halve its running costs by 2015 as a ‘nightmarish experiment’.
Following publication of the Civil Service Reform Plan in June, the department launched an internal ‘zero-based’ review to determine how it could reorganise itself efficiently and effectively.
Its conclusions, published this week, propose increasing the department’s four-year savings target from 42% to 50%, cutting expenditure to £290m by 2015/16.
To achieve this, it recommends losing 1,000 posts or approximately a quarter of current staff. There will also be rationalisation of back-office functions, including finance, IT and human resources. On finance, the review states: ‘We will simplify and rationalise the arrangements for managing the department’s finances through eliminating overlaps between the central finance teams and teams that provide advice and challenge to policy directorates.’
The review also suggests reducing the number of DfE offices from 12 to just six, located in London, Sheffield, Coventry, Nottingham, the Northwest and Northeast. This should save about £15m a year.
A DfE spokeswoman said: ‘The review found that the department has committed and hard-working staff producing high-quality work, but that we can and should work more effectively and efficiently.
‘Over the coming months we will target our staff time and money on only our top priorities, cutting red tape and concentrating on the work that adds the most value.’
But the civil service Public and Commercial Services union accused Education Secretary Michael Gove of using civil servants as a ‘testing ground for an ideological attack on the civil service as a whole’.
General secretary Mark Serwotka said: ‘Gove appears to want to run his department as some kind of nightmarish Right-wing experiment, playing politics with people's livelihoods and putting at risk the very important services DfE civil servants provide to schools, teachers and the public.
‘Staff in the DfE will not sit back and allow their jobs and the vital work they do supporting the education and development of our children to be used as some kind of ideological testing ground for what is nothing more than an extension of an already discredited and failing obsession with cuts and austerity.’
Trade unions have branded Department for Education plans to halve its running costs by 2015 as a ‘nightmarish experiment’.
Following publication of the Civil Service Reform Plan in June, the department launched an internal ‘zero-based’ review to determine how it could reorganise itself efficiently and effectively.
Its conclusions, published this week, propose increasing the department’s four-year savings target from 42% to 50%, cutting expenditure to £290m by 2015/16.
To achieve this, it recommends losing 1,000 posts or approximately a quarter of current staff. There will also be rationalisation of back-office functions, including finance, IT and human resources. On finance, the review states: ‘We will simplify and rationalise the arrangements for managing the department’s finances through eliminating overlaps between the central finance teams and teams that provide advice and challenge to policy directorates.’
The review also suggests reducing the number of DfE offices from 12 to just six, located in London, Sheffield, Coventry, Nottingham, the Northwest and Northeast. This should save about £15m a year.
A DfE spokeswoman said: ‘The review found that the department has committed and hard-working staff producing high-quality work, but that we can and should work more effectively and efficiently.
‘Over the coming months we will target our staff time and money on only our top priorities, cutting red tape and concentrating on the work that adds the most value.’
But the civil service Public and Commercial Services union accused Education Secretary Michael Gove of using civil servants as a ‘testing ground for an ideological attack on the civil service as a whole’.
General secretary Mark Serwotka said: ‘Gove appears to want to run his department as some kind of nightmarish Right-wing experiment, playing politics with people's livelihoods and putting at risk the very important services DfE civil servants provide to schools, teachers and the public.
‘Staff in the DfE will not sit back and allow their jobs and the vital work they do supporting the education and development of our children to be used as some kind of ideological testing ground for what is nothing more than an extension of an already discredited and failing obsession with cuts and austerity.’
