Biography in the study of public administration: towards a portrait of a Whitehall mandarin

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on part of an on-going interview-based study of the eight permanent secretaries who served at the Department for Education from 1976 to 2012. Following a discussion of the relevance of biography to the study of public sector administrators, it presents a portrait of Sir Tim Lankester. Based on his own account and that of relevant others it draws on a four-stage career model to describe his life before and during his time as a civil servant. Centring on his career as permanent secretary in three it considers, inter alia, his working relationship with his Secretaries of State; his view of the role of permanent secretary; his policy contribution; and, his style and achievements. Following an examination of the merits of such research, the paper concludes with a brief discussion of the possible contribution of prosopography and a call for ethnographic studies of public administration.

KEYWORDS:

• Biography
• portraits
• Lankester
• career
• permanent secretary
• prosopography
• ethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Peter Ribbins is Emeritus Professor in Educational Management at the University of Birmingham where he was formerly Dean of the Faculty of Education and Continuing Studies. He has researched and written extensively on leaders and leadership in the Public Sector.

Brian Sherratt was from 1984 to 2005 head teacher of Great Barr School. His doctoral studies focused on the role of the permanent secretary at the DfE. Since retirement he has continued to pursue his research interest in education policy making and policy implementation.

Notes

1. The term ‘mandarins’ designated senior government officials in imperial China. In the UK and Commonwealth countries, used informally of major Civil Service posts, it has come to refer mainly to permanent secretaries. In Lankester’s case – ‘Top mandarin agrees to go’.

2. The literature is sparse (e.g. Kelsall 1955, Harris and Garcia 1966, Plowden 1985, Theakston and Fry 1989, Nairn 1990, Barberis 1994, 1996, Barker and Wilson 1997, Richards 1997, 2008, Theakston 1999, Rhodes 2005, 2011, Eyvindr 2012, Neilson and Otte 2012).

3. The Education Department has had many names, we settle for DfE.

4. The 11 permanent secretaries we have interviewed rarely talk of ‘leadership seeming mainly to prefer ‘management’. In this they differ markedly from school principals.

5. All quotes hereafter not otherwise specifically attributed are from our interviews.

6. Normington had become First Civil Service Commissioner and Bichard had left the civil service by the time of the second interview.

7. For Bichard’s viewpoint see Ribbins and Sherratt (2015b).

8. A rare example of a permanent secretary acknowledging pursuit of a policy at odds with a Secretary of State (Barker and Wilson 1997).