Anyone who knows me knows I'm a lover of targets - daily to-do lists, step challenges, running streaks and the like - all play a big role in my personal life. Having worked in local government for a decade, and now on the other side of the fence working in the private sector but with a number of public sector clients, targets also feature heavily in my professional life.So I was fascinated to read a new report, published last month by the Institute for Government, on the use of targets in public service delivery. The report attempts to answer the all-important question: do targets improve public services?Tracing the history of new public management, the report provides an overview of 40 years of target culture before focusing on two areas - health and education - where targets have been used extensively and where there is relatively strong evidence on the impact they have had.
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