Somebody sent me a link to a talk by Bill Gates on improving education in schools by monitoring their performance. Here is the link: Bill Gates: Better data mean better schools
"The way I see forward is to use measurement to drive quality," Gates said.
Really? Most teachers seem to think we over-measure in this country, and that measurement leads to management-by-metric which leads to gaming the system. In other words the school is run so as to provide the best metrics at least cost regardless of the actual needs of the children.
I recently got a consultant appointment at an NHS hospital, but because there wasn’t a slot available in the next four weeks they said they’d call back with an appointment in a few days. This they did and everything is fine. But of course what happened behind the scenes is that they wouldn’t book my appointment in their official system until there was a slot available within four weeks. This allows them to keep their official waiting lists down to four weeks although my appointment was in fact nearly two months after I first called.
They must keep a separate unofficial waiting list somewhere and only transfer patients when the opportunity arises. Twice the work for them and twice the possibility of fuck-ups. And why? Somebody chose a gameable metric to manage them by.
This is OK when it’s me with a minor ailment but I don’t want this sort of culture in my children’s schools.
ps Malcolm has talked about this too: All in the game yo, all in the game