Let’s stop pretending that teachers and nurses are paragons of virtue
When was the last time you heard a politician being critical of schools or hospitals? Or heard of teachers and nurses being talked about in public life in anything other than glowing terms?
If you only listened to our elected representatives, you’d think that every classroom and ward in the UK were world class, staffed with heroic professionals and flawless both in how they are run and in the results they achieve. Whether it is the new Secretary of State for Education, Gillian Keegan, last week claiming that all teachers are ‘amazing’, ‘absolutely fantastic’ and ‘an inspiration’, or the endless verbal encomiums that successive health secretaries trot out to describe the NHS (there are too many to quote), the words from Government and opposition are a diarrhoea of sweetness. Yet these vacuous statements, dripping in meaningless superlatives, conflict with the realities their constituents experience every day.
An advantage possessed by nurses and teachers is that they effectively have their own political party - Labour. Politically, Labour cannot allow nurses and teachers to be successfully disparaged and intends to make it more difficult to do so.
Even those limited tools we have for monitoring standards in the NHS and schools are under constant attack. The NEU, the biggest teaching union in the country, is committed to abolishing Ofsted and league tables – both of which give parents invaluable insight into how the schools they send their children to are performing. Labour, it seems, would go further. The deputy leader of the Labour Party, Angela Rayner, not only wants to scrap inspections but also school expulsions – an absolute last resort that is used not to attack the disadvantaged, but to protect pupils and staff. You would think that such a mad policy would never get off the ground, but you’d be wrong: Southwark Council are already asking schools to sign up to a ‘no exclusion policy’. Standards will almost inevitably fall because of an ideological position taken by those who find it easy to reform schools from the safety of their open plan offices.
The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of how absurdly difficult it is to reform the public sector.
4 comments:
After the Forbidden Topic of Education Reform we come up against the Forbidden Topic of criticising Nurses or Teachers.
I know there are good teachers and nurses, some are my friends. I also know there are some poor nurses and teachers - who operate under the protection accorded their employment. The poor ones are always going to drag their colleagues down and are always going to resist change.
I'm going to mangle Pareto's Law... there are perhaps 10 percent of nurses and teachers who do not pull their weight and should be retrained or sacked - but they are responsible for 90 percent of the drag on their institutions. And sometimes they clump together in particular locations like Stafford Hospital or failing schools.
Come to think of it the mangled Pareto's law probably applies to the Police too.
"Perhaps it is because both professions are essentially about caring for others that they see reform as not just an attack on them, but on those who they look after. Proposals to change funding, or review working practices, are quickly escalated by those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, as an attempt to deprive the sick, elderly and children of the support they need."
Perhaps, but I think the truth is both more complicated and more dispiriting. The public would get very nasty indeed if nurses or teachers went on strike or began a formal work to rule. So many people depend on them: most importantly as carers for elderly parents and other relatives, and as child-minders so that both parents can work. Any politician who provoked, or even appeared to have provoked, or who even acted such that it could be spun that s/he appeared to have provoked the unions into industrial action, would not last long. That's especially true now, when the media and the general public have got the taste for removing PMs and ministers.
FDR was a pretty loathsome leftie but even he supported the law that no trade unions were allowed for government employees.
DJ - I think you are right to mangle Pareto's Law, 10 percent are responsible for 90 percent of the drag. That would drag caused by people though, there are other problems in the public sector such as inadequate exposure to incentives.
Sam - "That's especially true now, when the media and the general public have got the taste for removing PMs and ministers."
This seems to be a growing problem where reform is automatically identified as an attack on standards. As well as "too big to fail", we have to contend with "too big to reform".
dearieme - the damage they do is subtle too. They give an added level of security to people who should not be secure.
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