Educational Establishments’ Current Financial Irresponsibility

A large proportion of the taxes paid by the British public goes towards the support of state (public) educational establishments. This is right and proper so long as it is spent wisely.
Having spent a lifetime in industry and frequently experienced the financial requirements and prudence necessary for the survival of companies, my husband is constantly dismayed by the lack of fiscal control currently exercised by schools. Examples of this relate to discretionary spending and lack of improvements in work force quality, competence and efficiency.
A company experiencing financial difficulties will introduce several measures of additional control including discretional spending. In spite of educational cut backs, including many cancellations of schools building projects, discretionary spending still seems to persist with little apparent control. How can it be right to allow head teachers to continue spending significant sums of money on luxurious hotels for 'team building' when there are not enough funds for potentially essential schools building programmes and when there will probably be a call later in the academic year to cut the working hours of some ancillary staff?
Improvements in work force quality, competence and efficiency are normal in a commercial organisation seeking to survive. At times of economic difficulty such needs are intensified. Over the past few years companies have made it the norm to remove the lowest performing staff - typically 5%. The benefits of cost cutting - overall workforce improvement with employees working harder to avoid being in the lowest rated 5% and opportunities for new and better talent - are very clear. Even without these measures there can be grave consequences for any manager off-loading poorly performing staff to another part of the organisation. At best such activity is regarded as avoiding proper management practice, otherwise known as laziness or incompetence, and unfairly giving the problem to another manager with overall detriment to the company. In the commercial world, such failures in management can lead to serious disciplinary action. How can it be right or acceptable to the people at the top of the educational organisation that there have only been 18 teacher dismissals for incompetence in 40 years?
In the past Barry has worked with Peter Gershon and Martin Read (ex-industry leaders employed as Government advisors on public finance) both of whom will be very familiar with normal financial controls, particularly in times of difficulty. Are their voices ignored?
This is a criticism, not of teachers, but of the top levels of management at or near ministerial rank. It is at that level that matters relating to financial discipline and work force competence must be set. It seems that Ed Balls, the minister responsible in the Labour government, was pretty incompetent. Can we be assured that the current Government will do better by delivering more effective financial controls, introducing effective plans to improve teacher quality, removing inept teachers and disciplining head teachers who fail to comply?

Careers advice for seven-year-olds

Ed Balls has been the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families since June 2007.

Mr Balls (and you have to feel a smidgen of sympathy for someone who has to go through life with that surname – how he must have been teased/bullied at school. Now he's married and it's obvious who wears the trousers – Mrs Balls! Ta-da!!) in his infinite wisdom or otherwise misguided by one or several advisors, has decided that careers advice should be available for seven-to-eleven-year-olds. The scheme is being piloted (don't you just love that verb? It smacks of large ships being guided into small harbours or pilot whales corralling shoals of cod when squid are scarce) in several primary schools. One inner-city school in Norfolk has been trialling (another verb rich in meaning, bringing to mind horse and motor-bike trials, sea trials, television series) the scheme for two terms. Listening to someone involved in it I was not impressed by the lack of clarity exposed during the interview.

Where has Ed been during the last few years? Surely it cannot have escaped his notice that many seven-year-old children can barely manage to speak in sentences, let alone read or reason. How can career advice help them? As they are monosyllabic 'career' is a word too advanced for them. They will have had little experience of the world of work even at second hand since disgracefully there are growing numbers of families whose members have not worked for several generations. For these children, growing up and leaving school means 'going on the dole' with no hope or expectation of ever earning money through employment. Even worse, a significant number of eleven-year-olds enter secondary school unable to read or write fluently or coherently or express themselves articulately. Surely the emphasis should be on helping these children to learn the basics needed for everyday life and the extra funding earmarked for this absurd initiative should be spent on employing teachers gifted in teaching reluctant or slower learners.