Researcher: There is huge potential to improve reforms
You test the engine before you put a plane in the air. This is not always the case with major changes in politics. But the testing approach should be used to a much greater extent in reforms, according to 69 percent of INVI's research panel in a new analysis. With the new public school proposal, the government is showing a greater willingness to go down this path.
Since World War II, Denmark has delivered an impressive leap in welfare and overtaken many of the countries we were on par with. This is because we have been skilled at solving so-called tame problems. Problems that are defined, understandable and where there is an obvious solution. Today, however, we are left with the wild problems. Problems that are cross-border and stubborn and that are not easily defined or solved. In fact, much of what Danish politics is about at the moment.
NEW SURVEY: Reform quality in Denmark - a survey among INVI's research panel. LINK
In her opening speech to the Danish Parliament, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen focused on a particularly savage problem: Why is it that every 7th student has not learned to read, write and do math properly by the time they leave school? And how can it be that this statistic has been the case for many years despite several political initiatives and the fact that we are spending more money per student in Danish public schools than ever before?
Need for new tools in the reform process
Wicked problems - such as the fact that around 14 percent of a school year cannot read and do math despite countless efforts - require a different approach. That was the conclusion of the recently completed reform commission, which was launched under the headline 'long recognized, already tried, but still unsolved.' We need to expand the reform toolbox.
"Examples like the 2014 primary school reform can give the impression that reforms do not contribute to the better. The responses from the research panel show that it's not quite that bad. However, there is huge potential to improve the quality of reform by testing initiatives on a smaller scale before adoption and roll-out across the country."
INVI's research panel, which includes a wide range of experts in public policy and administration, has identified a particularly interesting reform tool in a new analysis: 69 percent believe that small-scale testing of reforms before adoption and rollout improves reform quality.
Asmus Leth Olsen, professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen and chair of INVI's research panel, explains the results as follows:
"Examples like the 2014 primary school reform can give the impression that reforms do not contribute to the better. The responses from the research panel show that it's not quite that bad. However, there is huge potential to improve the quality of reform by testing initiatives on a smaller scale before adoption and roll-out across the country."
New analysis points to one interesting reform tool in particular: 69% believe that testing small-scale reforms before adoption and rollout improves reform quality.
The government's recent public school initiative includes experiments. Several initiatives will be developed and adapted through experiments in real environments close to the students' everyday lives. Curricula, which have long been a key point of contention, will be developed in close collaboration with school stakeholders and practitioners and based on several trials along the way. And practical tests need to be tried and tested to examine their impact.
How do you test reforms?
Of course, testing reforms in a society with real people is very different to testing a car battery before mass production. But the idea is not foreign to civil servants, many of whom have worked on developing methods to test policy.
In Denmark, we have been working with free municipality experiments for the past ten years, and trial actions have become increasingly common in municipalities. But if we look to the UK, the British government has set up 9 so-called 'What Works' centers that systematically test the impact of policies and practices. In many cases, these centers have saved British society a lot of anguish. For example, in 2018, the UK government introduced community-based language training to improve the integration of women from other ethnic backgrounds. They did this after tests showed that this approach significantly improved both language skills and social integration. So, rather than blindly introducing integration initiatives, they took a systematic approach. In schools, one of the What Works centers is present every day in 4,500 schools with 630,000 students to test the impact of different practices.
There are many ways to design and conduct tests - including ways that don't require large, dedicated centers like in the UK. Tests can range in scale from small prototypes to large-scale randomized trials and can be used at different stages of the policy cycle to learn about basic assumptions or the likelihood of an intervention succeeding.
So are tests a Columbus egg? No, of course not. As with anything, there are limitations and challenges. But when it comes to wild problems, tests have an advantage. The problems are characterized by uncertainty and have no one right solution. You can't know in advance whether what works in Rødovre will also work in Brønderslev. In other words, it is difficult to make predictions using social science models or to transfer a good practice from one municipality to another. Instead, there is a need to test many different interventions in different contexts to see how they actually work.
We can only hope that the test ideas in the new public school proposal will be implemented, so that together we can learn more about which of the government's proposals work. And that the government dares to repeat the approach in the many upcoming reforms.
FACTS: INVI's Researcher Panel
To provide a snapshot of the collective knowledge of the experts, INVI has assembled a panel of researchers focusing on public policy and administration, which four times a year takes the temperature of legislation and reform work in Denmark. The panel's results are quality assured by Asmus Leth Olsen, who chairs the panel. Read more about the panel and its members.