Shelter from the storm

Still having problems with the new camera. I took lots of photos today and most were out of focus...



Work-rant - feel free to ignore:

What we do where I work is brilliant. I love it. People say things like, ‘No-one ever told me I was any good before’, ‘That’s the first time I’ve enjoyed learning things’, or ‘Nowhere treats you with respect like here’. Even, ‘This place saved my life’.

To get funding we have to achieve certain specific, measurable, agreed (you know the rest) ‘outcomes’. It’s not the main part of what we do but we achieve them and I’ve spent a lot of time generating forms to fill in to get the money that funds the grins, the nods, and the warmth which come from relationships that work, that help people think they are worth something and that enable them to change their lives round.

Today we were told we have to report on different outcomes. They’re better, actually. And we can report on them. But will they make any difference to what we do and how we work? No. Will devising a whole set of new forms make any difference to the time we have to achieve the really worthwhile stuff? Of course. Silly question.

I came home in a mixture of rage and despair. When will the people who don’t do the work stop trying to ‘improve’ the ‘delivery’ of the people who do do the work by asking for endless statistics? What are they for, other than to make the people even further up the tree, who never bother to visit, feel comfortable that we are being 'accountable'.

I was lucky enough to start work in the late 1970s, before accountability was invented. We were trained to do a good job, we were trusted to do a good job and for the most part we did a good job. Maybe, if you aggregated all of us in the public and voluntary sectors – from the superb to the useless – about 20% of the money we all cost was spent not really achieving what we were working for.

Then, in the 1980s, important people looked at the 20% that wasn’t working so well and decided to do something about it. The useless were rooted out. The superb left. Those of us in the middle started producing numbers for a new tier of people whose job was to analyse them.

Maybe, now, if you aggregate all of us in the public and voluntary sectors – from the workers to the analysts – about 20% of the money we all cost is spent achieving what we are working for.

Now, if I vent my frustration to people under 50, who have never experienced the good fortune of being trusted, they think I am frustrated because we’re measuring the wrong things. No, I’m frustrated because we’re measuring. Full stop.

Some call what I want to do ‘thinking outside the box’. Except really I want to set fire to the sodding box. Boxes. All of them.