Picking Winners to Define and Disseminate Best Practice

From 1998 the Government launched Beacon award schemes in local government, schools, the National Health Service, further education and central government. The schemes were distinctive in that they all shared the assumption that organisational learning could be advanced through a competitive process of identifying successful organisations and recruiting them to disseminate their good practices. Drawing on a number of evaluations of the different schemes, this article identifies three tensions in the operation of the Beacon model. We conclude that the relative persistence and success of the Beacon idea, in local government at least, is more a function of its effects on aspiration and morale than its concrete contribution to learning and improvement