We can all point to a small number of teachers and educators who have had an enduring impact on our thinking and our lives.
Sometimes it is because we may have read an amazing text that they wrote, seen an astonishing play that they authored, or simply experienced in awe the beauty of an artistic piece of music or art that they themselves produced. Other times, it's because we got to meet them. And somehow, their character and personality surrounded their ideas such that it was a joy to learn from them directly. These educators are the most remembered for they help us think about problems afresh and reset our personal ambitions and aspirations.
One of the educators who had the biggest impact on my thinking was Professor John Stewart. John was appointed in 1966 as a professor at the Institute of Local Government (Inlogov) at Birmingham University. In 1967, he established a 10-week residential course for local government directors who wanted to become chief executives. Imagine that, a 10-week residential course! This course fuelled the fire for many chief execs – notably Sir Rodney Brooke, who in his own recent book, describes John as a Socratic and inspiring figure.
John was a truly amazing educator: he realised his task was not simply to deepen the knowledge of his students but more importantly, to help them expand their creative imagination. And not just imagination about anything, but specifically about how, in the UK, power and decision making should be re-imagined locally.
I first got to know John when I attended sessions that he ran for senior local government officers at Wast Hills in Birmingham in the late 1980s. By then his seminal work Management in Local Government: a viewpoint had been published a decade earlier. But by his blending of managerial challenges with an advocacy for localism he produced a text that remains topical even now, 50 years later.
In the late 1980s he produced an important book, with Michael Clarke, on Public Service Orientation: issues and dilemmas. This argued that many councils had become overly fixated with their internal challenges and had to re-learn how to put service to the public first. He then developed this argument through hundreds of seminars over the next 10 years. He became a friend and mentor to hundreds of chief execs. And I recall many trips to Wast Hills where chief execs went simply to bask in John's erudition about the purposes of local government. His message was always that the council was a corporate entity with multiple functions but most importantly it was a vehicle for community self-governance. It was not simply a local platform for centrally determined service delivery.
I recall challenging discussions I had with John about directly elected mayors. I was in favour, he was not. But we seemed to agree to disagree despite that. When discussing things with John he was always open minded and open hearted.
His passionate advocacy of localism, openness, diversity and local government sparkled and crackled throughout his lectures. He had a basic underlying structure to what he said but he roamed effortlessly across many subjects in response to questions from his audience. John was the most unconventional of lecturers. You didn't think he was giving a lecture – he was just conversational and incredibly engaging.
He was also amusing. He dressed in suits that seemed to have been put on by someone else. His spectacles seemed so foggy you wanted to reach out and polish them. And he seemed to spend most of the time fiddling with paper clips. But what he said and how he said it, was remarkable and inspiring.
He is an enormous loss to local government.
John died in February aged 93 years. His wife, Theresa, was his equally remarkable life partner – a Labour activist and councillor, Theresa Stewart was the first, and so far only, female leader of Birmingham (1993-9). She died in November 2020 aged 90 years.
In 2014 John Stewart wrote an article for Local Government Studies, reflecting on changes in English local government from 1974 to 2014. He concludes the article in a way that speaks powerfully to current challenges. It demonstrates the clarity and force of his localist political philosophy.
‘The many problems that face the economy, society and the environment need effective responses locally. Local government can draw on its own and its citizens' ideas and aspirations, but this genuine localist approach cannot be achieved in fragmented and imperfectly accountable structures over-controlled by central government.
‘The lesson of the last 40 years is the need for a learning government that welcomes diversity. All can learn from the relative successes and failures of diversity, whereas too often centralism builds uniformity from which all that may be learnt is general failure.
‘Fundamental reform in central government is needed to overcome its entrenched departmentalism and to build into it a culture of listening, learning and support for local government. Our hope is that the country recognises that centralised government is based on a failed way of working. It needs reform on a scale it has lacked over the last 40 years.'
Barry Quirk CBE is a former council chief executive and local government adviser, and a former president and chairman of Solace
@BarryQuirk1
