Towards the end of my teaching career, I became increasingly aware of the dead hand of bureaucracy that was starting to strangle the life out of the place. Members of staff with something about them, characters with a recognisable personality, a streak of nonconformism and eccentricity, charisma even - the teachers whom their pupils will never forget - were being phased out to be replaced by grey men and women who seemed to lack any spark of unorthodoxy and originality. The school was the poorer for it, I felt, but as I was coming to the end of my time, I kept my counsel and lamented quietly. I suppose all generations bemoan the passing of the good old days and complain that things ain’twhat they used to be….
But has there really been a sea change? Have our institutions become top-heavy with bureaucracy?
It is undoubtedly true that administration has proliferated. When I was on the staff, the headmaster had a secretary, the bursar had a secretary, the Accounts Department had an assistant….and that was about it. Nowadays, every department seems to have a secretary – I’m sorry, I mean a PA – and the administrative staff greatly outnumbers the teaching staff. How can this be? Does the extensive network of heads of this, directors of that and managers of something else help the school to function more efficiently? Were we such poor teachers that we needed such support, such guidance, such direction?
My response to the reams of paperwork – latterly emails – that were generated by the bureaucracy was either to bin it or to mock it. There was one circular sent round that I remember vividly. For some reason, somebody somewhere needed to know the destination of each pupil for Half Term. Dutifully, I pinned the notice on the board and the responses made me laugh out loud. Variously, my boys were en route to…Knutsford Services, Cloud 9, In bed with my girlfriend, The Dark Side of the Moon, Timbuctoo, Starship Enterprise, M6 J5, Greenland, Anywhere but here, etc etc. I sent it back whence it came but heard no more about it. There was another form for me to fill in from ‘Elf and Safety, a risk assessment before a cricket tour to South Africa. What were the potential hazards facing me, it demanded. Once again, I could not resist the temptation. My answers included: the plane might crash, we might be bowled out before lunch, David Nash might lose his passport (he did!), my wicket-keeper might break a finger, our captain on winning the toss might foolishly opt to bowl, one of the team might get a local girl pregnant, etc, etc. I never heard back about that one either. I think the powers-that-be raised their eyes to heaven and felt they couldn’t wait for this old dinosaur to retire.
Yet lately I have been giving this more considered thought. My eye was caught by a recent article in The Times posing the same questions I have been asking. Are our institutions more efficiently run with all the bureaucracy and administration underpinning them? The journalist made some telling points. Wes Streeting, the new Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, has stated publicly that NHS chiefs who fail to deliver ought to get the chop. There was general outrage at the announcement. How dare anybody suggest that a manager ought to get the sack because he wasn’t doing his job properly? Fewer than 20% of NHS Trusts, it would appear, have ever sacked a single one of the hundreds of middle managers they employ for misconduct or inefficiency. It begs the obvious question; why are they there and what function do they fulfil?
In truth, the correspondent averred, the NHS Trusts don’t deliver health, doctors and nurses do. The Department for Business and Trade doesn’t deliver business and trade, businessmen and women and traders do. The Department of Education doesn’t deliver education, teachers do. The government departments just sort of supervise. Tony Blair, when he was PM, once asked a respected head of a state school what single change he would make to improve state education. He met the uncompromising reply that all the bureaucrats in the Department of Education should be machine gunned. Owners of small businesses, doctors and teachers are fed up with the plethora of directives, mandates and targets issued by faceless pen-pushers. The important workers are those who deliver frontline services – the doctors, nurses, bus drivers, farmers, builders, chefs, bar staff, shop workers, police, prison officers and everybody else whose job it is to help us – not the desk jockeys who issue endless guidance and instruction. It was the correspondent’s sincere belief that these people ought “to sling their hook”. I’m not alone, it would seem.
To further my research, I was sent by a friend an essay she had read, written by an American academic. In it, he pointed out that Milton Keynes - once again, I must apologise for my schoolboyish sense of humour - I mean of course Maynard Keynes, the famous economist and philosopher, predicted in 1930 that by the end of the century countries like Britain and the US would have achieved the 15-hour working week. But it hasn’t happened. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this but in actual fact technology has been used to figure out how to make more work, creating jobs that are effectively useless. The reason given by many social scientists for the non-appearance of the 15-hour working week is the unexpected explosion in consumerism. Put simply, in the choice between working fewer hours and acquiring more toys and pleasure activities, we chose the latter.
But that is not really true, he argued. There are many more jobs and industries and few of them have anything to do with the production and distribution of goods and commodities for our benefit, such as restaurant meals and new cars and the latest sunglasses. There are fewer workers in industries and farming and in some sectors the workforce has collapsed dramatically. Yet at the same time, over the course of the last century, professional, management, clerical, sales and service workers have increased enormously from a quarter of the workforce to three-quarters. Here’s an interesting fact. In France, one quarter of the workforce works for the government. Doing what, I should like to know. The French have a lovely word for these pen-pushers – fonctionnaires. It is very difficult to get things done in that country because every enterprising move is stymied by bureaucracy and red tape. We are not much better in this country. About 18% of the workforce are in the Civil Service – and not many of them turn up for work in the office, it would seem. The administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services, corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources and public relations has ballooned. Put it another way, something I became aware of in my latter years in the profession; for every excellent teacher, there seemed to be three or four people who were entrusted to tell him how to do it better. In the author’s words, “productive jobs have decreased, and bullshit jobs have increased” Couldn’t have put it better myself.
In Soviet Russia, employment was trumpeted as a right and a sacred duty. The system made up as many jobs as they had to,and it was notoriously inefficient and finally collapsed. Many observers believed the extreme form of communism was a means by which the government maintained control over the population. What they certainly didn’t want was people with time on their hands to question their decisions.
Animal Farm
This theme was famously taken up by George Orwell in his excoriating satires, Animal Farm and 1984. Animal Farmexplores the idea of the exploitation of the working class. Napoleon, the leader of the pigs, puts the animals to work building a windmill to produce electricity (useless) which leaves no time for food production. As a consequence, the animals starve, except the pigs of course. “We pigs are brainworkers,” Napoleon tells them. Poor Boxer, the horse who is the strong, loyal backbone of the farm is brainwashed to repeat to himself, “I must work harder.” In the end, he works himself to death. Of his book 1884, Orwell said, “So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance…. Work was the central part of the government’s control over the population, not to increase their standard of living.” So, there we have it: we need to keep people working, no matter how useless their job, because an idle population is a threat to the ruling classes.It’s an interesting theory.
1984
Although it is not a cast iron maxim, more a rule of thumb, but the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid well for it. Consider this. What would happen if this entire class of workers simply disappeared? Life would come to a standstill if bin men, mechanics, teachers, dock workers, builders, nurses, shop assistants, delivery drivers vanished in a puff of smoke. But it is not entirely clear what catastrophic consequences would result if all CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, legal consultants, Health and Safety officers, business system managers, sustainability officials, diversity supervisors and the like were to be kicked out. Many might be tempted to think that the world would be a better place.
The Circumlocution Office
Finally, you would not expect me to sign off without a literary allusion. In the mid-1850s, Charles Dickens published his novel, Little Dorrit. In it he satirised the largest department in the government (the Civil Service), calling it the Circumlocution Office, in which the establishment is shown to run purely for the benefit of its incompetent and obstructive officials. It deliberately wastes time on bureaucracy to the detriment of any business. Mr Tite Barnacle, one of the titled family that dominates the department (the name is an obvious metaphor for the parasites that cling to the ship of state), announces pompously, “One of the principles of the Circumlocution Office is never, on any account, to give a straightforward answer.” The office was full of workers not doing very much, except preventing other people from doing anything at all. It rings true. How many times have we thrownour hands in the air in total exasperation at functionaries who drag their heels to leave us floundering in a morass of ineptitude? What do these people do all day?
“Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.” (Honore de Balzac, French novelist)
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