SOME £40,000 and a number of weeks later, the long awaited review of the management of the Education Department is being criticised for doing what it set out to do: not recommending drastic action.
Understandably, the reviewer’s approach has disappointed many, with critics left feeling cheated or having been presented with a whitewash. One of the leading deputies spearheading the attack on Education has simply given up in disgust.
Yet as we argued last week, the report is actually a damning account of a key States department that is broken in all but name with a catalogue of directional, strategic, relationship and leadership issues that have to be resolved.
Things, as the reviewer stated in one of his rare direct observations, cannot continue as they are.
The issue, then, is who is to fix Education. The current board cannot do so. It has spent the last four years failing to identify the underlying issues or – if it did do so – failing to do anything about them.
The task of rebuilding Education has to fall to a new board and those elected to serve need to be chosen in the full knowledge of what it is they have to achieve.
That job is particularly wide-ranging because the report also touches on the review of the machinery of government and the consequences of merging 50-plus committees into just 10 ‘super departments’.
Just how that is supposed to operate, what the relationships are between officers, individuals and the Policy Council all require work.
Council staff came in for widespread criticism for both interfering and failing to be sufficiently supportive.
That friction and lack of clarity are likely to be experienced elsewhere and are symptoms of a ‘new’ system that even after four years has not completely bedded in.
It also indicates that a leadership vacuum – political and professional – existed and needed filling.
These are institutional shortcomings that need more than a quick fix, no matter how impatient Education’s critics rightly are.
There is no quick fix
SOME £40,000 and a number of weeks later, the long awaited review of the management of the Education Department is being criticised for doing what it set out to do: not recommending drastic action.
Understandably, the reviewer’s approach has disappointed many, with critics left feeling cheated or having been presented with a whitewash. One of the leading deputies spearheading the attack on Education has simply given up in disgust.
Yet as we argued last week, the report is actually a damning account of a key States department that is broken in all but name with a catalogue of directional, strategic, relationship and leadership issues that have to be resolved.
Things, as the reviewer stated in one of his rare direct observations, cannot continue as they are.
The issue, then, is who is to fix Education. The current board cannot do so. It has spent the last four years failing to identify the underlying issues or – if it did do so – failing to do anything about them.
The task of rebuilding Education has to fall to a new board and those elected to serve need to be chosen in the full knowledge of what it is they have to achieve.
That job is particularly wide-ranging because the report also touches on the review of the machinery of government and the consequences of merging 50-plus committees into just 10 ‘super departments’.
Just how that is supposed to operate, what the relationships are between officers, individuals and the Policy Council all require work.
Council staff came in for widespread criticism for both interfering and failing to be sufficiently supportive.
That friction and lack of clarity are likely to be experienced elsewhere and are symptoms of a ‘new’ system that even after four years has not completely bedded in.
It also indicates that a leadership vacuum – political and professional – existed and needed filling.
These are institutional shortcomings that need more than a quick fix, no matter how impatient Education’s critics rightly are.
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