‘The type of person needed is one possessing a wide humanity’: the development of the NHS national administrative training scheme

Abstract

The first national training scheme for NHS administrators was established in 1956. A successor scheme continues today. This article draws on archival research and oral history interviews to examine its development. It argues that while the well-established shift from ‘administration’ to ‘management’ in the NHS and other important changes can be seen in many of the ways in which the national administrative training scheme has developed, there are also many remarkable elements of continuity which suggest that such changes may have taken place over a longer period of time than has often been recognised.