mph1977 said:
Mr Snap said:
mph1977 said:
turbobloke said:
Possibly less so than you'd think
When I met up with a former colleague of mine (private sector) who had a history of successfully negotiating some challenging situations of the hardball and skullduggery variety, he had just completed an assignment supporting a public sector project as an external consultant. It was a state sector education project management gig, and his first comment was that he had thought this sector would be the epitome of refinement and politesse but now considered it to be a nest of vipers, not just ordinary vipers but megalomaniac and psychopathic vipers.
one of the problems is that the easiest way to deal with a teacher or Nurse who is crap at actually doing the job is to promote them out of harms way ... ( reduced 'caseload' = fewer complaints about them ) and then the peter principle applies. this is in comparision to other jobs where the more senior you are you still retain a 'caseload' ...
Piston Heads welcomes intelligent opinions from well informed experts in the fields of both health and education.
Sadly, Mr mph, you don't even come close.
So how would explain the number of the poor practitioners in both of these professions who have been quite clearly promoted 'out of trouble' ... ( such as those who have remained in 'middle management' roles for 30 years despite having made it past the 'pinch point' where the pyramid narrows considerably ? - that is almost certainly indicative of the 'peter principal' at work where someone has been promoted to their 'level of incompetence'... )
I see you chose not to answer the point about the way in which some professions construct their middle and higher management jobs to avoid core service delivery... this is particualrly apparent in Nursing as many other Health professionals retain clinical commitments right to the highest levels ( Midwives cannot maintain their registration without evidence of hands of practice, the job plans for Medical directors of trusts are no secret and include acute takes, clinics and ward work , the higher graded HPC professionals routinely engage in hands on practice), yet there are band 6 nurses whose job allows them to shy away from actually delivering hands on care and to see anyone above band 7 actually hands on with patient outside of a few settings ( A+E, 'urgent care' , Community Matrons ) as all but unknown, it;s certainly the exception rather than the rule to see hospital Matrons engaged in in the delivery of care as an expert practitioner ...
a similar pattern is seen in secondary schools as well were increasing seniority reduces your teaching load to near- zero fairly quickly ...
I do not claim to be an expert , but i do take exception to your defamatory slight towards my level of informedness especially with regard to Healthcare, as my knowledge of teaching is at best second hand.
So, there we were happily talking about education. Me and Turbo finding a rare moment of internet lurve (A bit like snogging My Aunty Beryl, the one with the 'tache).
Then you come along and spout off some unsubstantiated stuff about "health" and attempt to conflate that with what happens in education. So far, so complete non sequitor.
Then, when I don't bother to answer, you say what you said about health only really applies to nursing and then you say you know f
k all about education anyway, but, all the same, you still reckon that's how it probably works.
Honest, I'd try to answer your point, if you'd actually made one I could answer...
If you seriously believe that teachers get promoted in order to sideline them, then you're living in cloud cuckoo land. Education has it's problems but that isn't one of them. You don't sideline people by giving them increasingly demanding jobs - you end up causing greater problems than if you simply left the ineffective teacher in place. How stupid do you think head teachers and their boards of governors are? You sideline people by bypassing them and removing responsibility from them and that does happen.
As for the Peter Principle, that isn't the fault of the person who's been over-promoted, it's the fault of poor management and it occurs in every industry. If you have hard proof that education suffers endemically from this problem, more than any other industry, then please feel free to post it here and pass it to that nice Mr Gove. If you could give him proof, it'd be headlining in The Daily Telegraph tomorrow morning. Similarly, if you have proof of lots of teachers being promoted in order to sideline them, he'd probably appreciate the heads up on that, too.
