“The problem is not that individual civil servants fail to learn from their mistakes, but that many government departments don’t have an effective way to share their experiences. Other problems include a lack of time for learning and the high turnover within government departments. ” 

“The National Audit Office concludes that investing time and resources in learning lessons from success and failure can lead to improvements in service delivery.  This is simple common sense and one wonders why government needs to be told this in the first place.  Government must be much more proactive in sharing the reasons behind its successes and failures across Whitehall.” 

Mr Bacon was speaking as the National Audit Office published its report into helping Government learn.  Government traditionally learns lessons after large projects, initiatives or crises.  The report finds that, although there is some effective learning within departments, learning is still not as prioritised as much as it should be. 

The main barriers to learning within departments are ineffective tools to capture and share learning, keeping insights and information within the team rather than sharing them across the organisation, high turnover within the workforce leading to a loss of knowledge, and a lack of time given to capturing lessons from experience.