Two years ago, a CSW scheme highlighted and championed a project to boost civil service recruitment among young people from under-represented groups. As the pilot nears its end, Mark Rowe sounds out its findings.

 One common public view of the civil service depicts an overwhelmingly white, male, middle class organisation brimming with bowler hats and crisp suits. Such stereotypes about a monoculture in terms of background, gender and race are wide of the mark but, as the civil service has itself recognised, not completely undeserved.

For some years, the civil service has taken a keen interest in improving the diversity of its recruits and upper echelons. These issues were very much at the fore in 2009 – when the key questions revolved around the profile of new recruits, rather than the victims of job cuts. So when Paul David, head of diversity consultancy in the Home Office’s Strategic Diversity Action Team, entered an in-house competition with an idea for improving awareness of the civil service among black and ethnic minority communities, he got a warm reception.

That competition was the 2009 Lion’s Lair, a scheme run by CSW publisher Dods and based on the television series Dragon’s Den. Designed to identify and champion examples of innovation and best practice in the civil service, the event involved civil servants pitching their ideas to a panel of permanent secretaries augmented by a consultant from sponsors Ernst & Young and one of the TV ‘dragons’, Peter Jones. David’s presentation was a convincing one, and Jones quickly backed it. “It’s about communicating the values of the civil service to a group of people who don’t know them, and I think it’s fantastic,” he said. “I’m in.” Panellist Helen Ghosh, then permanent secretary at the environment department, became the scheme’s designated civil service ‘champion’.

David’s project, Making the Connection, sought to engage students at Greenwich Community College in Plumstead, South-East London, with the Home Office, showing them how the civil service goes about its business, its relevance to them and their community. Initially, David admits, there were formidable barriers to overcome. A questionnaire filled out by the students found that 95 per cent “had no idea what the civil service was about”, he says, and none would consider a career in it or recommend it to a friend.

“Their response was that the civil service is full of suits and university graduates,” acknowledges David. “Their only connection was with the uniformed side – the army and the police.” Part of the problem, David explains, was a lack of role models. “They’d never known anyone who’d had the opportunity to join the civil service. A lot of them aspired to be doctors, lawyers and accountants, but none wanted to be civil servants. They had a perception that the civil service was different from those professions.”

In response, David and his colleagues illustrated how the civil service could be relevant. “We shed some light by pointing at the UK Border Agency,” he recalls. “The people there are civil servants who would have allowed some of [the students’] relatives to come in, and refused entry to others.”

Despite such efforts, David admits, the underlying sentiment was that the civil service is, as he puts it, “not for the likes of me”. Faced with that accusation, David tried to unpick what made the students feel awkward. “We showed them people who have come up the ranks and entered the service through very different routes: people who started out stacking shelves in supermarkets, got an administrative post in the civil service, and worked up to senior roles handling multi-million pound budgets.”

The Greenwich students also spent a week shadowing young, fast-track civil servants from across government, attending high-level meetings and visiting projects. “We gave the fast-streamers the terms of reference and let them get on with it,” says David. “They were very enthusiastic about stepping out of their day job. There was a lot of goodwill, and they felt it portrayed a different face for the civil service.”

In a second scheme, civil servants established e-mentoring relationships with the students, supported by the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust. This enabled students to get advice from civil servants on career paths and appropriate qualifications. The decision to involve the trust went beyond giving the initiative a “badge” of credibility, argues David: “Of course, the trust had good contacts, but this was a clear move away from the civil service shaping and defining a programme. We wanted to show that we are working with local communities and shaping the project with them. They could see we were engaging with them, rather than telling them what to do.”

One of the project’s key recommendations is expected to be a call for a more open-minded approach to recruitment – helping not just those from black and ethnic minority backgrounds, but also people without high-level qualifications. “We’ve got the fast stream, but below that we want to capture people with different learning experiences – not just A-level students, but those with BTEC qualifications,” says David.

The fear, though, is that as recruitment remains frozen and competition heats up for the newly-defined jobs in reformed civil service structures, diversity objectives will lose out. “We have to be very watchful,” admits Helen Ghosh, who’s now the permanent secretary at the Home Office. “We must make sure that when people apply for roles in the new structure the posts are all equality impact-approved. The most talented and skilled people from diverse backgrounds have nothing to fear. The intention is to increase diversity, not diminish it.”

The Stephen Lawrence Trust endorses the project, with programme manager Eleanor Howard describing it as “very focused”. But Howard is mindful that any achievements in breaking down preconceptions and barriers will stand or fall on the basis of future recruitment, and worried that the shortage of jobs will narrow the range of recruits: “With the economic climate, even when recruitment starts up again it will be harder than ever for people from BME [black and minority ethnic] and low-income backgrounds,” she warns. “The jobs will go to those with firsts from Oxbridge.”

The public spending cuts are also contributing to a lack of certainty surrounding the future of the project, which is scheduled to end on 29 June. “The government position is still unclear as to whether the pilot has a future,” says Howard. “As an employer with such a range of jobs, the civil service should be leading the way. The civil service touches everybody’s life, so it should reflect that in its recruitment. We need to keep banging the drum for fair access to opportunities.”

One of the key lessons for all departments, Ghosh suggests, is that the students have little interest in the notion of a ‘job-for-life’ – a fact that should perhaps influence long-term recruitment policies across Whitehall. “The next generation doesn’t necessarily want the career [we] had,” she says. “The prospect of flexible careers will increase the attraction for young people. We want them to get a broad range of experience with us, work elsewhere and then come back to us.”

For her part, Ghosh is adamant that the Making the Connection project will not confirm another civil service stereotype: that any initiative that involves profound change gets quietly shelved. “There is a strong moral argument for greater recruitment from diverse backgrounds, but I always rest on the talent case,” she says. “I want the largest possible pool to pick from. A diverse team doesn’t just lead to more diverse thinking and reflect the communities it serves; it maximises my chance of picking the best talent.”

Written by Mark Rowe