Integrity: the SELF test for decision makers

More than 25 years ago the Committee on Standards in Public Life held an inquiry into Parliamentary scandals and created seven principles that everyone in public life should adhere to. 

In my forthcoming course, The Principles of Managing Public Money, there will be a section on making decisions about public money. Making such decisions requires the decision-maker to have integrity and I will be referring to the SELF test for decisions. To pass the SELF test a decision should meet the following: 

• scrutiny—will the decision withstand public scrutiny by the community and oversight bodies?

• ethical—is the decision ethical and in compliance with the policies, practices or procedures of the organisation? Does the decision comply with relevant professional and ethical standards?

• lawful—is the decision compliant with all laws, regulations and instructions?

• fair—is the decision fair on the community, colleagues, your family, yourself and others?

You can get a one-page summary of all seven principles of public life here. 

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What are the principles of managing public money?

I’m working on an online course about the principles of managing public money. The course is aimed at everyone in the public sector, whether employees, politicians, volunteers, etc. I want it to be a great course that is valuable to the people who register for it. I’ve got over thirty years’ experience of managing public money and there is a temptation to cram all my knowledge into a single course, but that would not be a good idea.

There’s not a technology reason why I could not have a course comprised of hundreds of lessons that would take the learner many weeks to complete. There is, I think, a practical limit on what a person is willing to take on, especially if it is additional to their work commitments. This means that one of my challenges is to find the balance between including enough material for the course to be valuable without going into too much detail and becoming onerous — or worse, boring. I’ve spent quite a bit of time, therefore, deciding what to include and what to exclude and I’ve had to delete some sections and ideas that I would like to teach in order to keep things focused.

The platform I am using for my courses allows lessons to be grouped into modules. I think five modules, each taking one to two hours to complete is about right. This is something someone could complete in a day if they really wanted to, but more likely they could complete it over 1 to 4 weeks to fit with their schedule.

The five modules I have now decided on are set out below.

1. The big picture—to cover what the public sector is for and the differences in financial management between the private and public sectors.
2. The principles of funding public services—so that learners understand why some services are funded from taxes whilst others charge fees to users
3. The fundamental importance of the budget in the public sector—because it is.
4. Principles for making decisions about spending public money—in order to get the best possible public services in terms of value for money.
5. Being accountable for the use of public money—because anyone who handles public money has to be willing and able to account for what they did and what they did not do.

These are my thoughts on grouping the course into modules. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts and observations in the comments section.

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Become a friend of Ibba Girls School and help girls in South Sudan to finish their education

I am the treasurer of a charity in the UK, the Friends of Ibba Girls School, which exists to build and operate a school for girls in the southwest corner of South Sudan. As well as being the world's newest countries, South Sudan is one of the poorest and most fragile. We all know that education improves the life chances of children and, in practice, their families, too. That's why it is important that Ibba Girls School, and the other schools in the country, exist.

If you have two minutes to spare, here's a video about the school featuring some of the girls whose future we want to enhance.

Building and running a school in South Sudan is not cheap. There are 200 girls currently getting an education at the school and because it is a boarding school, they are also being fed and kept safe as well. As a charity we need to raise GBP25,000 a month to keep the school running. If you want to make us a gift please visit the donation page on our website.

Tax avoidance doesn’t pay

I have worked on a freelance basis for over 13 years. For various reasons—to do with employment law and VAT mainly—I operate through a limited company. This means that I am actually an employee of a company, albeit a company which is 100% owned by me. This means that I operate a payroll system (I use the Xero online accounting system and I recommend it to anyone running a small business) which means that I get regular (at least one a week) emails from HMRC about payroll matters.

Earlier this week I received an email about ‘disguised remuneration loan charges’. I am not an expert in this but I believe some organisations with employees on high salaries use devices where they ‘lend’ money to the employee rather than pay their salary in order to avoid the tax, presumably for both the employer and the employee. Rangers Football Club lost a case at the Supreme Court in 2017 about the use of employee benefit trusts to channel payments to players and management in the form of loans.

None of that is relevant to me but I did notice the following paragraph in the email.

Tax avoidance doesn’t pay. Most arrangements simply don’t work and people can end up paying more than they were trying to avoid. Users may have a long-term requirement to deal with the cost, commercial and tax fallout from these transactions with no support from the promoter of the original arrangement.

I think perhaps this warning (the first four words, at least) should be prominently displayed on all HMRC communications and wherever wealthy people gather so that they recognise how risky the schemes they sign up with, for large fees, really are.

5 things I learned from writing a MOOC

Last year I authored a MOOC (massive open online course) about managing public money for the Open University. It was an interesting and enjoyable project to work on, and I learned an awful lot the production of online courses. Here are five of the lessons I learned.

1. Stay focused

I’m an expert in managing public money and can write about it at length. I know this is true because I wrote a book about it with over 120,000 words. It is tempting, therefore, to write as much as you can in each step of each lesson in order to give the learner as much value as possible (even though the course is free). It is better, though, to keep the lessons focused in order to give the learners only what they need to know. As Antoine de Saint Exupéry put it:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

2. Variety is important

The MOOC I was writing was destined for the FutureLearn platform. This platform has many different types of webpage that can be used. These include video and audio steps, quizzes and tests, and discussion pages as well as a basic template for formatted text and inline images (much the same as a standard blog template).

I know from my own teaching that learners will soon switch off if I just stand at the front a lecture for 90 minutes straight. Classes need changes to happen every ten minutes or so. The same is true for a MOOC. Each step in the lesson needs to be kept short enough to be completed in under 10 minutes and there should be a variety of steps making up the lesson. This means mixing up text with other media and incorporating activities and discussions along the way. If you don’t do that you are basically writing a book and one of the attractions of an online course is that it is more alive than a book.

3. Stick to the budget

When I first fleshed out my plan for all the steps in each of the four weekly lessons I went crazy with all the options for different kinds of steps. I thought I’d put together a really interesting, exciting lesson for each week. In fact, I had done exactly that. The problem came when it was presented to the producer of the MOOC and she had to tell me that the budget for the course meant I could have no more than two video steps in a lesson and depending on the fees paid for videos from third parties, I would have to limit the amount of images, etc.

I’m an accountant and I know that the budget rules. It was frustrating though. It was also frustrating to discover that the fee for authoring the MOOC was about 5% of the budget. I’d like to think that creating the content is valued more highly than that given that there would be no course without it. I should not have been surprised, really, since it’s much the same with books in terms of author royalties. 

4. Clearance takes a long time

The overall production process was about 20 weeks but only 8 weeks was planned for the writing and editing of the content. The rest of the time was needed for all the other activities like uploading the content to the draft site, building and checking hyperlinks, etc. One thing I had not expected was how long it takes to get permission from third parties to use their material. I had not referenced very many things like this but it still took weeks to get permission. 

I had also specified what I wanted as images to illustrate various steps and there was a fairly long process of findings suitable images, sending them to me to select my favourite, and then acquiring the rights to use the selected images.

There are two particular things I learned. One was that permission is not needed if you are simply putting a hyperlink into your course. This is a useful workaround if you cannot wait any longer for a response to your request for permission (as we did for one step of my course) but the downside is that it takes the learner off to a different website and we all know that runs the risk that they will be distracted by something and not come back to the course immediately.

The second aspect of this is that you can avoid the need to seek permission if you create the content yourself. This can be practical for things like diagrams and even some video material but it also brings back lesson 3 and the budget for the course. For some of the content you can’t create yourself, such as stock photos and videos, you can still look for royalty-free versions. There are lots of sites for these. For photos, I like Unsplash.

5. Leave room for the learners’ voices

It's easy to focus on delivering content to the learners but if you do that the course will be didactic. In a classroom it's always possible to stop talking if you sense someone has a question to ask. A MOOC can't be interactive in that way but it is possible to include a comments feature at the bottom of any of the steps where learners can ask questions, of the author or other learners, as well as make comments. As the author you can go a bit further and include requests in the text for learners to make comments, perhaps sharing their own experience. It is also possible to think of activities that learners can do which require them to report their answers/findings in the comments section. All of these things bring the learners' voices into the MOOC and make it a richer experience for everyone.

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I’ve learned these lessons, and more, and I am using them to create  courses at my own online school. I have lots of ideas for courses and some of them are in various stages of production. I have finished one course: 5 questions to ask about your budget. It’s a short course (less than an hour to complete) and it’s completely free. Not only is it free, you also get a copy of my glossary of financial terms as a bonus. You can find the course here.