DO you ever feel that customer satisfaction questionnaires ask the wrong questions? There are the airline surveys that ask if you would recommend their airline on a scale of 1-10. Well of course I would because if you want to go to the north in winter there is no other option.
The planes are too slow and too small, the timetables don’t suit me, but I’m only allowed to comment on the staff, who are always immaculate and friendly, with pilots who fly us safely.
This is much like the Jersey Post surveys that ask you to rate the service you receive. Well the posties are lovely, the guy I rang to find out where my exam scripts had got to could not have been more helpful, but am I satisfied with the service? Certainly not. We have no Saturday delivery, our local post-box no longer has a collection after 9 am and getting a birthday card to arrive punctually is impossible.
So what function do these questionnaires serve?
There must be managers somewhere congratulating themselves that all is well, when actually it is the staff we actually meet who are doing a good job, while those at the top slash the service we receive.
This brings me to the current situation with the public sector.
Most people are incensed by the new layer of management brought in from the UK – the six posts with names that seem to have come directly from that satirical series on the organisation of the BBC, ‘W1A’.
But we are not to worry about their exorbitant salaries, because they are delivering ‘workplace modernisation’ which is going to save us loads of money – and look, folks, we are already saving money because we have 600 unfilled posts.
We are perhaps supposed to believe that these posts were filled by people sitting behind desks counting paper clips (so hot-desking will get them moving around more).
But a cursory examination of the nature of these posts, released in answer to a written question to the States last week, should cause us all grave concern.
More than half the posts are in Health and Social Services, and include a staggering 166 nurses and midwives and 12 doctors. All 335 vacancies in this department are for essential frontline staff.
So much for the pledge to ‘Put children first’ when we don’t even have enough midwives to ensure they are safely delivered. Only 123 of these posts are currently being actively recruited.
I can only imagine the effects of this shortfall – treatment delayed or denied, staff overworked and doing back-to-back shifts with the consequent loss of morale, and the costs of employing expensive agency staff and locums. Not to mention a very real risk to life.
Our safety is also compromised by the shortage of 40 police officers and prison staff. Concerned? I am.
And for the first time ever, there are 18 unfilled teaching posts. I would guess that the shortage is of secondary specialist teachers.
I suspect that this will result in teachers losing their preparation and marking time to cover. I suspect that classes will be larger and will be taught by non-specialist teachers. And I suspect that these will be the lower sets that most need good teaching, so the A-C rates achieved in the higher sets, the statistics by which managers rate their achievements, will be maintained.
Meanwhile the top heavy management ratios are unaffected.
When schools first introduced more senior managers, other teachers were having to take on a heavier teaching load to allow them more non-contact time. Their higher salaries have an impact on school budgets. Multiple assessments must be carried out so they have statistics to play with, all of which increase the workload of teachers actually at the chalk-face.
Or they introduce new time-consuming initiatives, which will be quietly dropped when the manager concerned has satisfied the requirements of the CV and moved on to a promotion elsewhere.
These managers tell us that class sizes have no effect on achievement.
Tell that to the teachers who have to deal with more students in cramped classrooms, and see their already high marking load increase, or to the parents who feel that their child is overlooked, and who, if they can afford it, will place their child in a private school with small classes.
So we shouldn’t be looking at the false economy of cuts to front-line staff, or the salary cuts that below-inflation pay rises have been delivering for the last ten years.
We should be paying attention to the recruitment and retention of these valued workers that bear most of the responsibility for keeping us healthy, safe and well-educated, and can be trusted to do their jobs well without the often fatuous and unhelpful intervention of senior managers.
