This Post begins with a health warning for “Termites”. It may seriously damage their equilibrium. They would be advised to delete it without reading, as is their custom.

Revisit Post 1 to understand what I mean by “Termites”.

Essentially they are the people who defend their nests and cannot move on. The rest of us are humans, and we know that we have to move on.

Unfortunately termites are everywhere. They populate Parliament, Local and Central Government, the learned professions, Academia, the Unions, Banking and Commerce. They are united by one simple adage “You watch my back, and I’ll watch yours.”

This is not the world of the brown envelope so much as the buff one.

In a word, they form the System.

I title this post “ Like Hitting a Rolled-up Sock” because this is what it is like when you try to fight the System. A golfing friend of mine uses these words to describe a bad golf shot where the ball doesn’t travel very far. If you have tried to fight the System, I am sure you know what I am getting at.

Death of a Nightingale is all about special educational needs, But as I write at the beginning of the Prologue, it “provides me with a vehicle in which to travel the world.”

In my Post “Lessons from Living” (Revisit Post 11), I said that experience could be a better teacher than the classroom. I have had plenty. So I write this with feeling.

In Post 11, I wrote at the outset: If I had to nominate one sentence in my book that expressed what I am about and what the book is about, it would be Joan Errington, the English teacher, saying in the last scene of the second act “I really do wish someone would expose the lousy, stinking, hypocritical charade of those who put it about that they care.”

Termites don’t. It is not in them to.

I am certainly here referring to my experience of dealing with central and local government. But, as I have said, termites are everywhere.

Many years ago I chaired an Action Committee in the UK Furniture and Carpet Industry, representing leading manufacturers and retailers. It was formed in response to Government criticisms of the Industry, in particular its failure to offer the consumer a quality product and quality service. Out of this was born the Qualitas Conciliation Service. But we came up with a bigger package than that. It required all upholstery to be tested for performance. It required a labelling scheme complete with icons to advise the consumer how to select and use their furniture.

When the Government of the day removed the threat of legislative intervention, the termites in the Industry and its Trade Association took over. And nothing came of it. They said they cared. Some did. Most didn’t. And many of them have gone out of business since. They thought the bottom line was one year’s net profit. Short-term termites!

The bottom,bottom line is whether a company meets its customers’ needs.Those who have read earlier Posts will recognise this. It is a familiar theme.

Let me describe another experience, a better one. I chair a Care Home for the Elderly. They are regularly inspected by the Authorities. The staff happen to be very good anyway, legitimately wearing the badge of excellence that they have been awarded. But these inspections keep them on their toes all the time, the unannounced ones especially so. There are no termites in this Care Home as a result.

Now revisit Death of a Nightingale and you will begin to see where this is all leading.

Act One Scene 5

David Harding, the Director of Education in Wexborough and Gerry Thompson, SEN Controller, are leaning on Margaret Williamson, the head teacher of Brighouse School. They wants her to argue the case for closure to parents.

DAVID HARDING Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON You admit that you’re being cruel.

DAVID HARDING But I am trying to be kind. Look, you have said that half your School roll would fit into mainstream.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON Yes, if you can get it right for them.

DAVID HARDING That’s what we have to do.

GERRY THOMPSON That’s our job now.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON But you haven’t really started it.

DAVID HARDING It’s what we have to do. OFSTED will be on our backs if we don’t.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON I thought OFSTED was interested in standards and wouldn’t like what you are suggesting.

DAVID HARDING You misread it. They’ll turn a blind eye to it. They won’t put a black mark against you or your school while this is going on. And when they inspect us they’re only interested in whether we are delivering government policy and meeting government targets. That’s the way that things get done.

MARGARET WILLIAMSON And people get done.

What this Post is about is stopping us getting done.

It really is no use appealing to people’s better nature. You are wasting your time. Termites, for a start, have no better nature. They are just termites.

If a national body is interested in maintaining standards, that should be its remit. OFSTED is a good example. When it inspects Local Education Authorities it should examine all complaints made by the public against those Authorities and then put into the public domain its findings.

The same logic can apply elsewhere. I am sure that NHS hygiene and cuisine would be good candidates for the same treatment, and Government departments another.

Rudy Giuliani, the former Republican Mayor in a Democratic New York, saw the problem and the solution. Read his book “From Leadership”, and you will see how he applied it. I quote the following extract in Death of a Nightingale in relation to Education.

Notes & Quotes

The New York City school system was never really going to improve until its purpose, its core mission, was made clear. What the system should have been about was educating its million children as well as possible. Instead, it existed to provide jobs for the people who worked in it, and to preserve those jobs regardless of performance. That’s not to say that there weren’t committed professionals at every level within the system. There were, and that’s the shame of it.

Those with their hearts in the right place were the ones who suffered most. Until I could get everyone involved to sit together and agree that the system existed to educate children, fixing little bits of it was symbolic at best. Band-Aid solutions can do more harm than good.

The system needed a new philosophy . It needed to say we’re not a job protection system but a system at its core about children’s enrichment. All rewards and risks must flow from the performance of the children. If you took a broken system and repaired just enough so that it could limp along, you lessened the chance that a real and lasting solution could be reached. That’s why I resist partial control over a project. The schools should be made into a mayoral agency—like the Administration for Children’s Services or the Fire Department— so the city can enact real solutions.

So my message to all three political parties is don’t think that passing another Law, giving a few more “rights”, will change anything. The deck chairs on the Titanic are already half submerged.

Remember the old Latin tag “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Loosely translated it means find me a good policeman quick.

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