Making policy better: remembrance of things past

In a recent book, Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, distinguished and long-standing commentators on public policy analysed what they called ‘blunders’ of our governments over the last forty or so years (King and Crewe, 2013). They asserted (p 25), and with much justification given the rest of the book, that ‘Blunders on the part of government are certainly nothing new’ and that certainly matches my own experience as a researcher into higher education and other policies over much the same period. What is it that goes wrong, and how can it be improved? This paper outlines King’s and Crewe’s ideas (drawing heavily on my review in Higher Education Review (Pratt, 2014), and sets out some additional ideas to improve what I have called ‘institutional memory’ as part of the solution.