Public services only want to hit targets (From Harrow Times)

Public services only want to hit targets

10:02am Thursday 10th July 2003

• Print
• Email
• Share

FOR a long time now, most of our public services have been obsessed with one thing only: meeting targets. It doesn't really matter how well or badly things are going in the eyes of those who use the services. As long as those running them are hitting the targets set by bureaucrats further up the hierarchy, everything is deemed to be OK.

The targets invariably have little to do with real life, or what the public needs. As long as correspondence is answered within X working days, it matter not a jot to the target-setters whether or not the reply answers the original query, solves the problem, or says anything of any use (or sense) at all.

Complain about the way you have been treated, and you are likely to be fobbed off with the information that the organisation, department or individual concerned has acted well within the guidelines set down by Big Brother. So there. You've got nothing to moan about because everything is going according to the masterplan.

One of the areas worst hit by this manic obsession is education. Against the wishes of teachers, schools are in danger of becoming little more than exam pass factories, production lines churning out young people fitted for not much else than achieving the number of A-levels the school needs to top the league table.

But now the backlash has started. The Prime Minister has admitted that government has become too technocratic, with too much emphasis on blindly meeting targets at the cost of doing what public services exist to achieve.

And last week, a local headteacher warned the Education Secretary that interference by the Government had encouraged schools to adopt a culture of "teaching to the narrow and fragmented specifications of exams" (see page 14). The emphasis was on the "immediately accessible" and on activities which required only a limited attention span.

So perhaps things will now begin to change, and our public services can return to the real world, serving the people they are meant to serve, not the theorists and administrators.

But perhaps one area of public life which has, so far, escaped the target culture should now be subjected to checks on its performance: politics. MPs and councillors should be told to keep their promises and do what we pay them for.

• Print
• Email
• Share