Management Style

One of the tired defences of Tory MPs making lots of extra money from outside jobs is that it enables them to bring in experience of “the outside world.” You could have fooled me. From the performance of cabinet members, it’s clear that few of them have any awareness of how organisations run, or how good businesses motivate their staff.

Take education. Now, apparently, is a really good time to step up the frequency of Ofsted inspections. Schools also need to be prepared to run mini mock exams at regular intervals, so that if Covid stops us running the proper exams then we’ll have a neat column of figures ready waiting for us to fall back on. Of course. Why didn’t we think of that before? In fact, why not run them every week? Who needs teaching if you have a test available?

Actual teachers, who work in schools and know what staff and pupils have been through during the last two years, can see both these strategies as self-defeating and disastrous for morale. But our leaders, inspired by the management style of a nineteenth century mill, blunder on regardless. That’s what you get, if the only qualification for running a ministry is to be able to chant “Get Brexit done!”.

P.S. You’ve also got to be able to make lunatic promises about the numbers of new nurses and police officers, knowing that those won’t happen either.