DWP Summer School
I’ve spent the past couple of days at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Summer School at King’s College, Cambridge. It’s a tremendous event - and one that has been going since just after the Second World War - which is attended for one week by around 100 members of DWP staff as ’students’. They are joined by senior staff - who deliver lectures and host seminars and workshops - and the school can usually count on featuring an appearance from at least one minister, the DWP’s permanent secretary, several agency heads and programme directors and sometimes even the Cabinet Secretary.
From 2002-6 I was a tutor at the Summer School, which was then organised and delivered largely by academics, but from 2007 onwards the DWP decided to organise the school internally and adopt a more internal focus. This year, however, I was invited back to deliver a lecture on the ‘Changing Context of Welfare’. This provided me with the odd experience off delivering a talk dealing with the demise of the Keynesian welfare state not only in Keynes’ old college but in a lecture hall named after Keynes and featuring a bust of him on the stage! Slides below via Slideshare…
