The reality is that recruiting into the public sector is a ceaseless slog. Have you ever wondered why there are always so many adverts for life in the army? For teacher training? For the police? It’s not because recruiters like spending money. It’s because they are always in desperate need of talented new people, and such people are hard to find. These public services have to have high standards, whether that’s good qualifications, good fitness, or a clean criminal record. Pay isn’t great. Working hours are tough. Scrutiny is endless. And the UK has more people already in work than at any point since the early 70s.

No wonder the NHS has more than 100,000 vacancies. Social care has more than 110,000 vacancies. The police, the army and the fire service tend to get plenty of applicants, but they end up turning thousands away because they don’t measure up. The army met its recruitment target last year, but only after five years of failure — and after launching a new boot camp to help the unfit get up to standard before taking their entry tests.

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Could national service save higher education?

By Mary Harrington

Half the staffing battle isn’t recruitment at all: it’s stopping people from leaving. 15% of teachers leave in their first year; 30% within their first five years. In 2010 I helped plan for a coalition policy to recruit 4,200 extra health visitors. By the end of our first meeting, the plan had transformed: we had to recruit about 9,000 health visitors, because so many were planning to retire in the coming years. The recruitment drive was then ditched by the 2015 government — and as soon as it was, numbers slumped back, falling by more than 3,000 over three years.

It’s like trying to fill a bath with no plug in it. There are alarm bells ringing about how crappy it is to work in so many of these frontline jobs, and instead of fixing those problems, we’re exhausting all our energy desperately trying to recruit people who aren’t that fussed. The difficulty of finding good people for the public sector doesn’t mean we should give up trying. But it does mean we should try something different.

Instead of panicking about the high turnover rates in the public sector, we should see them as inspiration. It probably is too much to expect people to work in a front line public service job for the fifty years that will soon comprise the average working life. So let’s stop pretending these are vocations, or jobs that should take you from pimples to wrinkles. Soon the majority of us will live for a century: everyone could expect to have two or three careers in that time. So a spell in public service should be a part of every citizen’s life.

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Our shameful social care crisis

By James Bloodworth

Initiatives like Teach First and Now Teach have got the right idea: make it clear that public service is a great way to start out in the workplace; a great way to return to work after having children; a great way to find purpose later on in life; a great way to spend your last years before retirement. Dogs may be for life, but jobs are not any more.

It’s not good for our society to have one group of people who work exclusively in the private sector making the money, and another group spending it. It breeds resentment and misunderstanding. I’ve lost track of the number of senior business people who bleat that everyone in the public sector is a lazy and inefficient jobsworth. They imagine they’re the only ones who work hard, because they’ve no idea what it’s like to hold the hand of a dying patient, or coax ambition from a struggling teenager, or wrestle an attacker from their victim.

I’d like to make it compulsory: everyone should spend a minimum of five years working somewhere in public service. You wouldn’t be able to claim your state pension unless you’d done it. The days of conscripting all our young people into the army have passed, and I’m glad of it. We don’t need armed national service. But we do need a culture of civic service, a recognition that you need to do more than just pay your taxes to be part of a society. You have to be involved.

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By Tom Chivers

The pathway should go both ways of course. Plenty of public servants have a toxic view of what life is like in business. They imagine rapacious greed and profit to be the only topics of conversation at the watercooler, and have an unhealthy contempt for words like “efficiency”. The civil service is slowly getting better at sending people out on secondment to businesses for a couple of years at a time, but there’s often still suspicion of anyone who does it. Rules set up to prevent grift end up acting as a huge barrier to anyone leaving, building up expertise about life outside government, and returning to make public services better.

By insisting everyone spend part of their career in public service, and part in the private sector, we could transform both. We could inject the values of purpose and service into our businesses. We could bring ideas and innovation into the heart of the public sector — and perhaps even make those jobs easier and more fulfilling to do. And we could build a culture of compassion and understanding between private and public sector workers, who might stop complaining about each others’ excessive pay or cushy conditions, and instead value the contributions each make.

So let’s stop with half measures — trying to recruit just enough people to fill the vacancies and then panicking five minutes later because someone retired. We should double, or treble, our ambition when it comes to recruiting teachers, nurses, doctors, soldiers and police officers. Let’s train everyone we can get our hands on. We have to make it normal for everyone to serve their country, whether it’s for five years or fifty.

On top of that, the soaring cost of tuition places a disproportionate debt burden on poorer students, who are less likely to have help with living expenses from family; they graduate £57,000 in debt, compared with the £42,000 debt of their better-off peers.

We need a new approach. One that will reduce the total number of graduates to better fit the UK’s employment requirements, while levelling the economic playing field between rich and poor and improving the quality, attitude and employability of new graduates.

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Why liberal feminists don't care

By Mary Harrington

My radical policy would make university degrees fully government-funded, including living expenses, but make them contingent — for the entire UK student body — on prior successful completion of two years’ public service, either in the military or (for conscientious objectors) the NHS.

To make it work, we would need to widen the definition of military service beyond the frontline. After basic training, young people might drive minibuses on unprofitable public transport routes in rural locations, help fill in potholes, or provide Meals on Wheels to the elderly. It would be important to provide accommodation — as much for esprit de corps as to act as a social leveller — as well as food and a small stipend. There should be no impediment to public service on grounds of economic background.

For egalitarian reasons, it would be essential to ensure service tasks were assigned rather than chosen, as a precaution against the sharp-elbowed middle classes pulling strings to ensure their offspring received a cushy posting. And the scheme would need to offer roles compatible with mobility issues or other access requirements, for young people with disabilities.

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By James Kirkup

Why do it? As things stand, academics describe a student cohort that has been so over-praised by parents and teachers that they believe themselves automatically entitled to good grades. They approach education as paying customers, which feeds the entitlement, and drives grade inflation. Eliminating the consumer dynamic would be the first step in getting higher education back on track.

The MoD’s Army Leadership Code describes its values as “Courage, Discipline, Respect for Others, Integrity, Loyalty and Selfless Commitment”: two years spent internalising these values, while rising early and doing as you’re told would be good preparation for taking undergraduate life seriously. And a little practice in the art of temporarily subordinating personal desires in pursuit of the public good might not hurt either.

It would put some off applying. This is no bad thing. It would be a quick and easy way of reducing our surplus of graduates. Filtering out those young people without the character to complete two years’ public service would also raise the calibre of those graduates, ensuring they’re ready for the challenging world of work.

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By Peter Franklin

The policy might also improve access to top universities for the less well-off, by deterring their more highly-strung and overparented middle-class peers from applying. Research has linked helicopter parenting — a distinctly middle- and upper-class behaviour — to increased neediness and lack of self-reliance in students. Requiring young people to commit two years to communitarian service would either reduce the number of fragile middle-class university students in favour of their more self-reliant, working-class peers — or else cure them of their fragility. Either outcome would be a net benefit to universities, which are currently experiencing a crisis of mental health issues as well as student entitlement.

The policy would doubtless cause outrage. But an inverted version of it already exists in the UK, in the form of the Army Undergraduate Bursary — which offers up to £24,000 paid throughout your degree, conditional on completing a subsequent year at Sandhurst and three years’ service as an officer. Similar schemes to the UK army bursary operate in many countries, including Turkey and the USA.

Objectors might also complain that housing, feeding and paying two million young people for an extra two years, on top of funding their university education, would be prohibitively expensive. But the outlay needed to facilitate two million young people performing public service would hardly be money wasted.

In any case, higher education is subsidised by the taxpayer even now to the tune of nearly £4bn. If we take into account the fact that only 17% of students are ever forecast to pay back their full student loan, this figure is much higher. The government is just keeping that £100bn of mostly bad debt off the books. Why not re-route it?

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Why 'separate but equal' is a fraud

By Polly Mackenzie

At present, the system of tuition positions higher education as a transactional good, sold to student consumers on the basis that the ‘graduate premium’ outweighs the cost of loan repayment and as such is worth the investment. This approach has been justified on the basis that it has improved access. But so far, marketising higher education has neither improved the quality of degrees — quite the opposite — nor done much for young people’s employment prospects apart from raising the bar for the ‘graduate premium’.

Restoring full funding for university education in exchange for civic participation would level the socioeconomic playing field for applicants, and also reintroduce an older understanding of education not as a consumer good but as a public good that benefits all of us. It would also underline the fact that the purpose of higher education is not personal enrichment but to train the future leaders of society for a lifetime of service.

Those wishing to embark on a life of leadership and public service should see no hardship in performing some of this upfront, while those seeking only their own selfish advancement would be welcome to study overseas, at their own expense.