It all sounds so simple. Our public services - health, education, social services and so on - aren’t perfect; just about everyone would agree on that. We want their performance to improve. But how are we going to tell if a particular service is really improving? We’ve got to have some way of recording and measuring its performance. But no public service is going to become perfect overnight, so, let’s tell the people in charge just how much we want the performance to improve, and when. In other words, let’s set some targets that will identify the priorities and make sure that the service actually moves in the right direction, at the right speed.

In practice, of course, it’s not as easy as that. Let’s take the British National Health Service (NHS). One problem is that the NHS is such a large organisation, and does so many different things. Therefore, any sensible list of targets is going to have to be rather long. If there are no targets set for an area of NHS activity, there’s a risk that too many of its resources will be diverted away to meet targets elsewhere.

But there are also pressures for targets and performance indicators to be simple: they need to be understood and acted on by a wide range of staff; they also attract political debate and media comment. But can a simple number do the job? For a few years, up to 2005, NHS trusts in England were given an annual ‘star rating’, from no stars up to three stars. Every year, there was intense media discussion, nationally and locally, about how different hospitals were moving up and down the star ratings, but rather little about their performance on the many separate indicators (40 in 2005), that the stars were based on, and even less on aspects of performance that were not covered by the indicators.

So, in one sense, the outcome was simple - just a number of stars - but actually the ‘star rating’ was only the tip of a large iceberg of targets and performance measures, and the rest of the iceberg was often ignored. From 2006, star ratings were replaced by an ‘annual health check’, which looks at a much broader range of issues in assessing the performance of healthcare organisations. Also, each NHS trust ends up with overall ratings on two different scales, representing "Quality of services" and "Use of resources", rather than a single number of stars. but ahain, most news coverage of these ratings concentrated entirely on the overall ratings and not on the detail that goes into them.

In secondary school education, in England, there used to be a simple way of rating the performance of schools. Take all the students in a school who are in their last year of compulsory schooling (aged 15 at the beginning of the school year), see what percentage of them get five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C, publish these percentages in a league table, the best schools get the highest percentages. Or do they? Surely some schools get a high score simply because their students were doing well even before they got to secondary school? This must be at least part of the reason that most of the schools near the top of the league were selective. So for several years, so-called ‘value added’ measures were also produced, that took account of students’ performance in national tests at ages 10–11.

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