What do UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon, former US commander in Iraq General David Petraeus and schools secretary Ed Balls have in common? They all possess a Master of Public Administration (MPA), a postgraduate qualification popular among officials around the world. Indeed, in some countries MPAs are more or less essential to top officials – but in the UK, the dynamic is very different.

A year ago we revealed the most-studied postgraduate qualifications within the senior civil service (see Whitehall & Westminster World, 9 September 2008, p5-11), demonstrating the preponderance of economics MSc’s and the growing popularity of Masters in Business Administration (MBA) courses. Although there wasn’t a single MPA graduate in last year’s figures, the courses are rising in profile and numbers. So what can they offer career-minded civil servants, and how do they compare with their commercially-focused progenitor, the MBA?

International example

Most of the elite – and many of the not-so-elite – universities in the United States contain adjunct schools of public administration or public policy, offering MPAs and other kinds of professional training for government. It was back in 1936 that Harvard University founded what is now known as the Kennedy School of Government. In countries as disparate as Singapore and France, there has been an expectation that top officials will have completed rigorous, MPA-style qualifications before ascending to senior jobs. Yet notwithstanding the tailored training provided by the Civil Service College (which later became the National School of Government), the UK civil service – particularly its upper echelons – has tended to be populated by bright people with good undergraduate degrees: what used to be known as ‘gifted generalists’.

The professionalisation agenda of recent years may have signalled the death of the generalist, as NSG principal Rod Clark indicated to this newspaper last year. “People shouldn’t reach the conclusion that they need a postgraduate qualification for their career to go anywhere,” he said, “but it will be increasingly difficult to develop within some specialisms without a postgraduate qualification.” However, Clark was referring to specialised functions such as HR and finance; the kind of intensive, general management training offered by MPAs (and indeed MBAs) is not yet seen as key to career development for the senior civil service. Patrick Dunleavy, who oversees the MPA programme at the London School of Economics – which he says is dominated by overseas students – claims the UK civil service is still stuck behind other countries in its attitude to MPA-style training. “If you go to Japan or Korea, a department will identify who their rising stars are and pay for them to go off and do these qualifications,” he says. “The UK civil service is still locked into a 1970s mindset.”

So, what exactly do the MPAs in the UK offer? The University of Liverpool’s is the longest-running in the country – now entering its 21st year – and course director Mike Rowe says he hopes his participants leave with a “broader understanding” of the context in which they work. If they better comprehend the range of political and administrative influences that affect their work, he says, they will become “reflective practitioners; not simply people performing a function, but actively engaged in influencing and shaping”.


MPA versus MBA

Rowe is keen to draw a distinction between his MPA and most MBA courses. But as our breakdown of UK MPAs reveals, most courses are taught by business schools and often share significant chunks of the MBA curriculum. Richard Wheatcroft oversees Masters programmes at the Open University’s business school, and says its MPA shares just over half its content with the mainstream MBA. “I think it’s important that, even if you are in the public sector and intend to stay there, you still know something about how the private sector works,” he says. Robin Wensley, course director of Warwick’s MPA – which is run in partnership with the NSG – says many of the strategic management and leadership principles taught on an MBA are relevant for the civil service and wider public sector, but must be complemented with tailored content reflecting differing types of accountability. “The public sector has issues of accountability and political direction that the private sector does not,” Wensley says. “We talk about managing relationships between politics and organisational delivery.” One business school, Birmingham, has this year converted what was previously marketed as a ‘public sector MBA’ into an MPA, with a leaner curriculum more focused on the needs of those in the public sector – specifically, policymaking and governance.

The LSE’s Patrick Dunleavy is concerned that some of the courses described as MPAs would be seen as overly business-oriented in parts of the world where the qualification is more established, and says both applicants and institutions should be “very careful” about the use of the term. But the growth of MPAs suggests that applicants from the wider public sector – if not yet from the civil service – find them more useful than the majority of MBAs. Mike Rowe senses a growing interest in courses specifically aimed at public sector needs, and “scepticism about the value of MBAs” among public sector managers. “If you are doing an MBA module, it tends to be general and abstract, using private sector case studies. How does that really relate to a public sector manager?”

But what of the MBA itself? It can fairly claim to be much more established among civil servants than its younger competitor, the MPA – whose early adopters have overwhelmingly come from outside central government. Providers are confident that many of the top UK MBAs offer the skills – not to mention the prestige – sought by ambitious civil servants. Imperial College London is one of the most popular business schools among civil servants, and has particular success recruiting from the Home Office and the Ministry of Defence, according to Simon Stockley, the programme director. Stockley says he understands concerns that MBAs are too commercially focused, but contends that if the civil service wants to modernise management performance then officials should learn from, and alongside, the best in the world. “There is increasingly an emphasis on the ability of civil service managers and leaders to innovate and be entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurialism and innovation are core strengths in our MBA programme,” he says.

Stephen Lee, professor of strategy at Henley Business School – another popular destination for civil servants– says his institution’s offering belies the allegation that MBAs are too abstract. “At Harvard, you’d probably spend a lot of time listening to the top theories of management gurus,” he says. “At Henley, we focus entirely on the application of theory to practice: students get an introduction to the theoretical approaches, and are expected to apply them immediately.”

The popularity of the MBA in the wider public sector is evidenced by a survey carried out in 2007 by sector skills council Government Skills, which found that a third of public organisations were funding employees to take the course. Graham O’Connell, registrar at the NSG, says both MBAs and MPAs can offer substantial benefits to government departments. The NSG has partnerships with providers of both: Warwick in the case of the MPA, and for the MBA, Henley. “We’ve partnered Warwick on their MPA because they’ve got a tradition of people who can bring inputs from the public sector,” O’Connell says. “Henley has a different tradition; theirs is an excellent MBA with a wide range of people from the international private sector, so you rub shoulders with some very interesting people.”

Cost concerns

Whatever the merits of the respective qualifications, cost is always a factor – both for the student, and for the department considering sponsoring one. MPA fees range from a competitive £3,390 at the University of Portsmouth to over £32,000 for the LSE’s full-time two-year programme. MBAs are even pricier, with London Business School’s prestigious MBA costing an eye-watering £45,000. Deciding whether or not to sponsor an employee is far from straightforward, says the NSG’s O’Connell, and departments must decide on a case-by-case basis whether the prospective MPA or MBA will add enough value to the organisation to justify the substantial financial outlay. “Like any investment, there needs to be a decision about whether this is going to be worthwhile or not,” he says. “It’s not like investing in a cash account, where you know what the value is going to be; it’s more like investing in the stock exchange, where the value could go down as well as up.”

Balancing the cost of the programmes against the benefits derived for employers is the imperative behind an ongoing Government Skills plan to negotiate a procurement framework for departments sponsoring MPA and MBA candidates. Head of engagement at the agency, Chris Bloor, says a more strategic scheme for purchasing these services is needed: “At the moment individual departments, and in some cases business units, are going out for their own MBAs and MPAs on an ad-hoc basis. We want to coordinate that activity so we can get better value for money.”

Bloor and her team are currently having discussions with 15 departments and university umbrella organisations, such as the Russell Group, and soon hope to go to market to buy 95 postgraduate places for students across government. The aim is not just to get cheaper MBAs and MPAs, she says, but to work with institutions to make sure the courses offered more closely reflect the needs of departments.

Most of the institutions seem keen to develop relationships with central government, not least because of the possibility of securing more business. This is particularly true of the MPA sector, where the vast majority of candidates are either from overseas, or from elsewhere in the public sector. Richard Common, who runs Manchester Business School’s MPA course – currently only offered on a full-time basis – says there are plans to introduce a more flexible part-time ‘executive’ MPA, but says he still doubts that significant numbers of civil servants will be attracted.

For many of the MPAs, success has come through developing strong links with regional and local authorities and various public service providers. Tom Entwistle, director of Cardiff Business School’s MPA course, says his programme has focused on tailoring its curriculum to those working in the Welsh public sector. “We have a pretty good mix between Welsh Assembly Government, local government, fire, police and various health bodies,” he says. “We have had some discussions with the NSG [about civil service needs] but at the moment we are still very much in our own local pool.”

The Welsh Assembly Government’s relationship with Cardiff Business School is one of the few examples of an active partnership between an MPA provider and part of the civil service. Assembly spokeswoman Ros James says the Welsh government, which is one of the 15 bodies involved in the Government Skills MBA/MPA working group, wants to fund training that will best suit its business needs, but is concerned that students don’t always seem to be able to effectively deploy their newly-learned skills back in the office.

“There is a feeling of frustration that they have not been able to bring the learning back into the workplace and use it as much as they hoped, and I think there is something of a lack of understanding by departments of what value the studies can bring and how best to make use of that,” James says. “One of the things the working group has focused on is the need to improve the initial understanding of the value of study, what is covered in each course and why we would want people to go through it – and as a consequence to improve the way in which we evaluate it afterwards.”

If there is a sense that those who provide MPAs – and even MBAs – need to better tailor what they offer to the civil service, then there is also an acknowledgment that departments need to have a clearer grasp of what they are paying for. What’s more, the MPA is some way from overtaking the popularity of the business Masters, and even further from achieving the kind of pre-eminence in the UK that it enjoys in the US and Far East. However, Robin Wensley of Warwick, whose MPA is perhaps most established in government circles, is convinced that the growing clamour for centrally-based civil servants to better understand frontline delivery could create demand.

“The MPA is critically concerned with the relationship between policy and delivery at all levels,” he says, pointing out that this focus chimes with current thinking within the civil service and among politicians. “All the signs are that, whatever the political administration, there’s going to be more concern about connecting policymaking to frontline delivery.”


MPAs currently on offer in the UK

Aberdeen Business School
The course Masters in Public Administration
The cost £5,640
The requirements: Candidates should possess either: a relevant honours degree; a qualification from a professional body; or enough relevant professional experience to justify exemption from other requirements.
The structure: Full MPA lasts one year full-time, three years part-time. Consists of eight modules and a dissertation. Candidates can leave after completing four modules, gaining a postgraduate certificate, or after eight, gaining a postgraduate diploma.
What else? The first and only MPA available in Scotland, it aims to cater specifically for public sector managers working north of the border. Programme director Kirsteen Close describes the course as “heavily student-centred”, with an emphasis on group discussion and analysis.

Birmingham Business School
The course Masters in Public Administration
The cost £7,650
The requirements: Either: an upper-second class honours degree or better; or a lower-second class honours degree with excellent work experience. Although five years’ work experience is preferable, government-nominated fast-streamers will also be considered.
The structure: MPA takes one year full-time, two years part-time. Programme consists of four compulsory modules – governance; making policy; managing public money; and leadership – and two optional modules selected from a list.
What else? This is the first year of the programme, which replaces a previously-offered public service-themed Masters in Business Administration. Online course manager Carol Yapp says the new offering involves less time in the classroom and has been particularly popular with managers in the Health Service and police.

University of Brighton
The course Masters in Public Administration
The cost £3,780
The requirements: Either a good first degree; or an equivalent professional qualification and experience.
The structure: Full-time one year, part-time between two and three years. Composed of six core modules and one research project.
What else? Run by the university’s School of Applied Social Science, the course offers “a critical social science appraisal” of the public sector reforms of recent years.

Cardiff Business School
The course Masters in Public Administration
The cost £11,990
The requirements: Two years of managerial experience, plus either a good undergraduate degree in a relevant discipline, or professional training in a public service. In exceptional cases, candidates with no qualifications may be accepted with five years’ public sector managerial experience.
The structure: Studied part-time over two years, with six modules – each studied in two three-day sessions – and one “project-based” dissertation.
What else? Course director Tim Entwistle says the course is largely made up of managers from inside Wales, but hopes to broaden its appeal.

University of Exeter
The course Masters in Public Administration
The cost £12,500
The requirements: Applicants should have a 2:1 honours degree or better and experience in the public sector, though exceptions may be made in cases of “exceptional experience or professional qualifications”.
The structure: One year full-time, two part-time, and three on a modular basis. Three compulsory modules – management and governance; policy and politics; and accounting for managers – and five optional.
What else? A new offering, taught jointly by Exeter’s business school and politics department.

University of Greenwich
The course Masters in Public Administration
The cost £4,890
The requirements: Candidates are expected to have at least a relevant 2:2 honours undergraduate degree from a recognised university. Applicants with a diploma in management or a diploma in public sector leadership from the Chartered Institute of Management are also considered.
The structure: One year full-time, three years part-time. Eight core and two optional modules.
What else? Graduates awarded associate membership of the Chartered Institute of Management.

University of Liverpool
The course Masters in Public Administration
The cost £4,751
The requirements: A relevant 2:1 honours degree and at least two years’ work experience
The structure: One year full-time or two years part-time, with students completing six compulsory modules, three elective modules and a 15-20,000-word supervised dissertation.
What else? The oldest MPA programme in the UK, now in its 21st year. Programme director Mike Rowe says the course is less like an MBA than others and aims to produce “reflective practitioners”.

London Metropolitan University
The course Masters in Public Administration
The cost Full-time £4,050, part-time £450 per module
The requirements: Normally a good honours degree in a relevant subject, but applicants with significant professional experience will also be considered.
The structure: Full-time one year, part-time two years. Consists of five taught modules, work experience at a UK public sector organisation and a dissertation.
What else? LMU says the qualification is particularly useful for those interested in international development, and offers a small number of placements in the United States.

London School of Economics
The course Four different Masters in Public Administration:
MPA in Public and Economic Policy;
MPA in Public Policy and Management;
MPA in International Development;
MPA in European Public and Economic Policy.
The cost £15,876 for first year, £16,511 for second year
The requirements:  Applicants must have a minimum 2:1 honours degree and provide official grades from all previous studies.
The structure: Taught full-time over 21 months, with students able to take one of the four specialised streams. In the first year, students take a set of core courses involving political and economic analysis; the second year sees them prepare a dissertation and give advice to a major public, private or voluntary organisation. Participants can also elect to spend one year studying at one of LSE’s partner institutions: Columbia in New York, Lee Yaun Kew School of Public Policy in Singapore, Sciences Po in Paris or the Hertie School in Berlin.
What else? Programme director Patrick Dunleavey says the “vast majority” of his students are from overseas, but he would like more UK civil servants to hear about the course.

London South Bank University
The course Masters in Public Administration
The cost £3,695
The requirements: Usually at least a 2:2 honours degree, but relevant work experience is also considered.
The structure: Part-time only, with five semesters over 30 months. Consists of eight core modules, two elective modules and a dissertation.
What else? Also offers a summer school with European partner universities that also provide MPAs, including Esade Barcelona and Copenhagen Business School.

Manchester Business School
The course Masters in Public Administration
The cost £16,800
The requirements: At least a 2:1 honours undergraduate degree, plus evidence of two years relevant work.
The structure: One year, full-time only. Course includes core modules, elective modules and a 15,000-word dissertation. Manchester stresses the uniqueness of its tuition, which is “practical and project-based”.
What else? Programme head Richard Common says the school is thinking of offering an “executive MPA” on a part-time basis in an effort to attract more civil servants.

Northumbria University
The course Masters in Public Administration
The cost £4,100 full-time; £2,500 part-time
The requirements: Usually a 2:2 undergraduate degree, but applicants with relevant experience are “encouraged to apply”, according to the website.
The structure: One year full-time, comprising six modules (three core and three optional) and dissertation.
What else? Course promises to explain the most recent developments in public administration and place them in a variety of contexts – local, regional, national and global.

University of Nottingham
The course Masters in Public Administration
The cost Full-time £4,970; part-time ‘executive’ MPA £7,030
The requirements: At least a 2:2 honours degree, but applicants with significant work experience will also be considered
The structure: Full-time lasts one-year, though part-time option can take up to four. Students complete eight core modules – including a 15,000-word dissertation – and two elective modules.
What else? Nottingham MPA offers a strong emphasis on international comparison with public sector management in other EU countries and the US.

Open University
The course Masters in Public Administration
The cost Approximately £13,500
The requirements: A bachelor’s or master’s degree from a recognised university or a professional qualification from an approved list of bodies. Applicants without either can enter the MPA programme by first taking the OU’s Professional Certificate in Management.
The structure: Takes between 2.5 and 3.5 years to complete. Course in two stages: year-long Postgraduate Diploma in Management shared with MBA, followed by MPA-specific courses and short elective modules.
What else? Business school head Richard Wheatcroft says the course offers much “cross-fertilisation” with the MBA.

Portsmouth University
The course Masters in Public Administration
The cost £3,390
The requirements: Applicants require either a “good honours degree” from a recognised university, a relevant professional qualification or substantial experience – preferably in the public sector.
The structure: One year full-time, two years part-time. Five core modules – including a dissertation – and three optional courses.
What else? Programme director Sylvia Horton says her course has a mix of public sector managers from a range of services, and officials from countries as diverse as Uzbekistan, China and Cyprus.

University of Ulster
The course Masters in Public Administration
The cost £3,225
The requirements: A 2:1 honours degree, and at least three years’ work experience in a supervisory or managerial capacity
The structure: Part-time only, lasts between two and three-and-a-half years. Contains five core modules, three electives and a research project.
What else? The only MPA available in Northern Ireland, but hopes to extend its intake to public servants in Britain.

Warwick University
The course Masters in Public Administration
The cost £21,400
The requirements: At least a 2:1 undergraduate degree, along with more than four years’ full-time work experience, including some at executive level.
The structure: Full-time 12 months, part-time up to three years on a modular basis. Seven core modules, six elective and one 15,000-word dissertation.
What else? Formal partnership with the National School of Government. Course director Robin Wensley says it was originally developed “after lengthy discussions with both senior civil servants and ministers”.

York University
The course Masters in Public Administration
The cost £9,000
The requirements: A second-class honours degree and at least a year’s work experience. Where the candidate has no degree, they must have relevant professional experience.
The structure: One year full-time, three years part-time online. Full-time consists of six compulsory modules and one 10,000-word ‘policy report’. Online course requires six compulsory modules, one elective and a 10,000-word report.
What else? Online course director says the flexibility of distance studying is attracting increasing enquiries from government departments.