Wednesday 24 April 2024 - Not Excelling

“I remember the staff at our public school”, Alvie Singer told us in Annie Hall, “You know, we had a saying: er, those who can’t do, teach and those who can’t teach, teach gym.  And, er, those who couldn’t do anything were assigned to our school.”

I always liked this concept that people were “assigned” to jobs.  It appeals to my communist sympathies.  When I went to secondary school, our class wasn’t necessarily assigned a teacher.  I remember in our second year we were told we weren’t going to be taught English because they didn’t have enough teachers to go around.  The classes were still timetabled, because they had to physically put us somewhere, so we would just sit in the classroom and told by a substitute teacher to read a book.  Of course, trying to get 12 and 13 year-olds to sit quietly and read was an unrealistic goal, and these non-sessions were often mildly riotous, but why the sub, to all intents and purposes a professional, qualified teacher, and English-speaking, couldn’t have a shot at trying to teach us some English in lieu of shouting at thirty pre-pubescents to stop throwing rubbers and stabbing each other with their WHSmith Geometry Set in a Tin compasses, I don’t know, but none seemed to take that initiative.

This was the 1980s and our school was in an “Inner London Authority Area”.  That label seemed to suggest that the Greater London Council had already decided that, because we were from the inner city, the goal of secondary education was futile and the ILEA councils assigned teachers, if at all, whose ability stretched to containment rather than education.  Where they found such a mediocre and oddball staff from I don’t know.  In fourth year we were given Pride and Prejudice to study but the teacher, beyond telling us at the beginning of the academic year that it was a comedy, never said another word to us about it.  Comedy in Eighties popular culture amounted to Benny Hill, a middle-age man, leering after girls and otherwise men dressing up as women.  What was funny about Mrs Bennet’s cynical and acerbic pronouncements on her attempts to marry off her daughters was lost on me, and certainly didn’t hold my attention long enough when It Ain’t Half Hot Mum seemed to me a more distracting comedy.

That didn’t stop her setting us essay questions to be entered as our GCSE examination coursework.  One was, “What was it like to be a woman in Elizabeth Bennet’s time?”  When was Elizabeth Bennet’s time!?  13^th Century?  I had no idea; olden times were all the same to me and I was a 14-year old boy; I didn’t know what it was like to be a woman now!  When I handed in my essay in the next lesson, she looked at the nearly half A4 page of writing without reading it and, based on the length alone, scrunched it up and threw it back in my face, literally.  She didn’t give me any more feedback then or for the duration of that year.

Polly Clarke: Did you ever think what it would be like to be a 97 year-old nun, Father?

Fr Ted: No.

Our GCSE RE teacher was also our form teacher and Registration happened to blend into each lesson such was the timetabling.  No-one reacted to the school bell denoting Registration was over and first class, in this case RE, begins and nothing was even attempted to be taught.  About six weeks before end of fifth year, our Form/RE teacher informed us in a panic that he had had a look at the curriculum and we were supposed to have been doing coursework throughout the two years and that he had to submit six of our best essays and could we have a look at the GCSE textbooks he was just now producing out of a bag and answer the essay questions he would give us, by next week, preferably, because there was a deadline to enter us for the exam?  We would have to share the books in that week because, of course, there weren’t enough to go around.  I remember one of the essay questions was, what was the Catholic Church’s view on abortion and, on the night it was my turn to read the two years of GCSE text, I was surprised to learn, as being a liberal even then and thinking the Church was a good thing, that it was against it, so, unlike about the role of women in turn-of-the-19^th-Century middle-class society in Hampshire, I did learn something.

I did feel sorry for the woodwork teacher whose full-time job in class seemed to be reminding us “students” to keep our hands behind the chisel, “Behind the chisel, people!”, and otherwise spent his time mopping blood out of mangled wooden ashtrays.  It wasn’t always all on the teachers; we weren’t the most gifted children to teach either.  Our PE teacher, an ex-rugby player, was better at group control and no-one seemed to mind that this was very closely related to why he had appeared in court seven times for assaulting children.  There were no DBS checks in those days so such matters were not a barrier to working in a school.  Beyond hitting us on the back of the legs with a bamboo cane to make us run faster in the school cross country, I don’t remember him teaching us anything, though.  Luckily for me, his apathy extended to his violence which was mostly directed only at those boys who had forgotten their PE kit.

With the exception of Economics, our other subject teachers were less engaged in our education and our Economics teacher eventually left the profession and got a job at the Council.  He stood out and didn’t fit in with the rest of the faculty and I don’t know if the other teachers were “assigned” to us but, given Thatcher’s country wasn’t Communist, I suppose not, but one has to wonder how such consistently mediocre, uncurious and apathetic people got into teaching in the first place.

1980s comedy was done in the best possible taste.  Unexamined Jane Austen couldn’t compete.

Thirty-five years later, I still wonder how some people get into jobs for which they have no curiosity and little interest yet manage to combine perfunctory with sanctimonious superiority in their performance.  How do they get by?  Do their employers never ask them if they have produced anything and, if so, what?  At least our RE teacher was panicked about how he might tell the Headmaster why he had been unable to enter a single student into their GCSE.  As a monitoring officer, like a headmaster, I do try to hold staff to account and it causes great confusion.  I give our suppliers an Excel reporting spreadsheet to enter details about different social value contributions they have made so that I can verify them.  These may be names and jobs of our residents they have employed, dates and times of volunteering in the borough, contracts and values of packages sub-contracted to local businesses, dates and times of school visits to deliver careers education, local charities or services to which money has been donated.  They enter these details into the spreadsheet into which I have entered formulas to add up the proxy financial value of those contributions which is how the council has chosen to measure the cumulative amount.

But it seems to me those leading on social value on behalf of suppliers of public sector services have never really used Microsoft Excel before and are not familiar with it.  Is that possible?  It certainly never occurred to me when I created the reporting template for professionals in administrative roles in the private sector to report what are essentially numerical values.  It feels that those who can’t teach gym are assigned to deliver social value.  Still, like mine and Alvie’s teachers, it still doesn’t explain where they find these people in the first place.  Yesterday, I received an email from the Operations Manager at children’s activities provider, Let Me Play, about her social value report,

“Apologies as I said I would get this over to you by Friday.

“To be honest, the form has caused a bit of confusion amongst the partnership.  Some of the cells seem to be protected and won’t allow you to add things.

“Would it be possible to arrange a meeting/training on the form?”

 

Seriously?  You want training on how to use a simple Excel form?  You enter details of the contributions in the ascribed and labelled cells and the next cell adds up the proxy values of these contributions.  This second cell is protected so that you don’t overwrite the formula and enter any value you choose without details of what it is: enter the details and you can see it then adds up the value.  What could the confusion possibly be for anyone who is not 12 years old and has never come across Excel before?

I opened up the attempt at the report she had so far made.  It was clear that she hadn’t understood the concept of numerical values.  Numbers, dates and times, formats Excel can recognise, process and formulate, had been written in using words and punctuation.  It is as if they have never come across such chicanery before as an electronic spreadsheet.  Where do they find these people that don’t understand this commonplace 20^th-Century-to-present-day technology?  In one cell labelled Date of contract award, she had entered “45290”.  Does she really need to arrange a “training” session with me to understand why this isn’t a date?  When Excel didn’t recognise it as a date, did she then try to change the formula rather than the “date” and cursed me for protecting the cell?  Under volunteering, where the proxy financial value is based on the number of staff volunteering and the times they volunteered, the cell asking for the number of volunteers is blank.  How has this confused her so?  Was no-one from the entire “partnership” able to solve this one that they then had to admit their deficiencies to me, the client?  How could they all be confused?  As an aside, and a reason I verify the contributions reported before adding the values to the council’s cumulative, what the Community initiative they have volunteered on here is “SEACC – Eid Celebration”.  What SEACC might be, no explanation is given. I will have to ask, but why celebrating Eid might be deemed a social value contribution other than the most patronising assumption that anyone from an ethnic background would yearn for having white corporate-like people acknowledge a holy day is left tantalisingly hanging but, if my assumption is wrong and it is of community benefit, at least on a level with, say, volunteering at the foodbank, doing homeless outreach or clearing the garden of a care home, they missed a trick by not claiming public money for volunteering to get pissed in the pub on Christmas eve.

Today, I received mental health supported living provider, Hestia’s, social value report from their Area Manager.  Like with Let Me Play, they had entered letters and punctuation into the cells asking for numbers, dates and times.  One of the measures reported on is the “number” of Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) hours of local residents employed on the contract.  “FTE” is very common jargon for any practitioner of employment and skills but, nonetheless, not difficult to grasp; it is what it says on the tin.   The spreadsheet asks for the average hours worked by that resident each week and the next cell asks for the normal full-time hours.  The formula in the protected cell then calculates the full-time equivalent, with 1 FTE being a full-time job, by dividing the hours worked by the full-time hours.  Even before she had to submit her report to the council, if the Area Manager who has responsibility for social value had any curiosity about the number of full-time equivalent local residents working on the contract, she would already have these two numbers to hand and divided one by the other.  She had to.  There is no other way to know how she was performing against contracted targets for which she had claimed public money by proposing, in Hestia’s original bid for public money, how much of this specific measure she had delivered.

In the Ave. hrs/wk worked cell for a local resident employed in the reporting form, she entered “19.5/wk”.  In the Normal f/t hrs/wk cell she entered “19.5/wk”.  Had she just entered a number, as is how Excel works and prompted by the column heading, it would have calculated the 19.5 hours per week as 1 full-time job.  If she is content with that, then I’m wasting my time working in the wrong sector and should get an easy job in mental health supported living.  However, she didn’t enter a number; she entered punctuation and letters into an Excel spreadsheet in order to calculate a number, as is her target, despite the entire point of this exercise being for she, I and her contract manager to understand how much of her target she has delivered.  The big error message in the next cell didn’t further prick her curiosity that she might not, herself, know her own progress, never mind her customers paying for it.  But they’re only the public.  What do they have to do with it? (See Glasnost.)  I replied:

“Unfortunately, the social value hasn’t added up, giving error messages in some of the cells.

“Could this be reviewed with a view to entering the information in a format that Excel would recognise, specifically where a cell asks for a number, date or time?  I have to report their proxy financial values.

“Also, in the Employment and Skills tab, the measure HF1 selected by Hestia is measured based on the Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) of local residents employed on the contract.  Therefore, to calculate the full-time equivalent hours worked, the full-time hours for that job are required.  This is column L in the Employment & Skills tab under Local Labour.  The council wouldn’t accept that 19.5 hours per week would be considered a full-time job.”

She replied thanking me for “alerting” her to this and assigned her underling to “prioritise revising and correcting your submission”.  But the underling didn’t know how and asked me to call her.

“David!”, she answered the call, "you’re the guy I want to talk to about this social value.”

“Paul”, I corrected her.  “Great, how can I help?”

So, she’s not a details person then.  My name is right there on the screen in the Teams meeting window.  This might take a while, I thought, suffice to say, we were best of friends at the end of the meeting, she proclaimed Excel magical and thanked me graciously and profusely, “Thank you David!”, for patiently explaining to her what Social Value measures are and how to type them into the spreadsheet before, later this afternoon, she sending the same error-laden report back to me having not understood the truth universally acknowledged that to know the proportion of a full-time job hours her employee worked, or indeed the proportion of anything, one has to divide one number by another.  But I know what she was trying to say now, so happily corrected the data on what very little contributions she had to report.

The meeting today with Let Me Play’s Ops Manager was similarly successful and pointless as she did admit that claiming volunteering to help Muslims celebrate Eid as a community initiative might come across as a bit racist, but she didn’t grasp the concept of proportions.  I charitably assumed that her school when she was a child didn’t have enough maths teachers to go around, promised to correct her report for her and let her get back to arranging educational activities for school children.

The Good Place: “Ya basic!  It’s a human insult.  It’s devastating.  You're devastated right now.”  Perhaps not to someone assigned to provide a public service who are pretty shameless and upbeat about admitting it.

To this day, I don’t know the intended application of a compass but, then, I never sought out a career in geometry because I assume geometrists (are they a thing?) are a bit more selective about who they assign.  Teaching inner city Brooklyn and London children and delivering social value should be deemed just as important.