Public sector workers what would you change?

[cunoyerjudowel]

So there's a lot of talk about how the eee is a massive shortfall in the budget and how bad it is in the public sector.

So where do you work (as in teaching / council / hospital etc)?
How bad is it?
Where do you think savings could be made?
What do you need to provide the service the public need ?
What would you scrap?

I personally don't think many people realise how critically underfunded the public services are

Savings? None to be made in education. We need more money to provide special units or more special needs school places. Plus my LSAs need a decent pay rise. Ofsted needs a overhaul and parts of the curriculum too.

Honestly, I know it’s a cliche but there are so many levels of managers that aren’t needed in the NHS, and don’t get me started on how much is spent on large Comms team. I would put that money into more health care assistants/ activity Co-ordinators/ peer supporters with therapeutic value on mental health wards.

Ex teacher.

There needs to be a complete review of inclusion. Some childrens needs are not best served in mainstream education. There needs to be more SEN schools.

Early intervention and support is key. Parents waiting 5+ years for their child to be assessed for autism etc is not acceptable.

Complete review of behaviour required. I've seen pupils mess up others right to an education with little to no consequences - it is just not right and many parents are just not interested.

Now that I think on it - it all needs reviewing/re looked at. By professionals who have done the job - not some government ministers who figure themselves to be experts simply because they went to school themselves.

I left teaching 2 years ago with zero regrets. It's a shit show.

Also how much of a real term pay decrease have you had?

It will turn into public v private sector workers, but honestly having worked for 20+ years in the private sector and 15+ in public sector, the work rates of staff are simply not comparable, so for me a change of work ethic/ better management is needed in the public sector. IME the work ethic of managers in the public sector is pretty poor too and I know I work much less hard than I used to

Basically what @BrightYellowStar says.
Although I do wonder what could be achieved if the enormous salaries paid to executive heads and directors of trusts were to go into actual schools 🤔

Properly funded APs - at the moment schools are shelling out thousands of pounds to APs from their budgets, because they don’t have the resources to support the child in house.
Recruiting/retaining teachers - again, thousands going on supply staff who are often doing no more than babysitting (not always)

So where do you work (as in teaching / council / hospital etc)?
How bad is it?
Where do you think savings could be made?
What do you need to provide the service the public need ?
What would you scrap?

Teaching
Extremely bad

It will be impossible to make cuts to school budgets and provide a service.

Things that can improve school budgets:

stop paying MAT CEOs hundreds of thousands of pounds salary.

Scrap Ofsted and tell schools they no longer have to pay thousands for companies to come in and do ‘mocksteds’ in preparation for an Ofsted as the repercussions of failing are so dreadful for schools and individuals. Staff will be much less stressed if they weren’t trying to second guess what Ofsted want and spending weeks rewriting intent documents, they may not leave and then schools would have such a high supply/cover budget and recruitment will be less of an issue.

If there are schemes schools should be following-eg phonics schemes or units of work-put them online like the QCA did under the last Labour government and let schools use them free. Don’t make every school up and down the country subscribe to a phonics scheme at thousands of pounds, meaning they have to make staff redundant to pay for it.

What was your role in the public sector?

I know that teachers and LSAs are flat out all day every day to the point of often not getting to eat or wee. I can't imagine nurses are taking it easy either. I think the blanket terms 'public sector' and 'private sector' hide so much variation. Care workers can be private sector and they're flat out too.

I know the term 'key worker' was divisive and flawed but it actually helped a lot of very busy, underpaid, public facing workers feel seen.

I work in adult social care and where I am the staffing levels are so bad that the service just partially closes if I'm ill. I'm one of 3 staff that does my job. Lone working. That's it 3. So if one of us is ill the there's just the other two who can cover. Obviously that's not always possible. We do 12 hour night shifts. So they just shut the part of the service I'd be in charge of if I'm not there.
It's really sad but they just don't have the funds to recruit people. The pay isn't great and they don't get many people applying for the job anyway. The work is hard and it's permanent nights.
I love my job but I wish there was more money to recruit more staff and pay us all better.
I'm employed by the council and they are good in terms of holidays and treating you with respect etc but there's just very little money.

I work in an ALPB delivering statutory work on behalf of central government. Our budget is one-third of what it was 20 years ago when I started and we are expected to deliver more now (grants aside, those are a tiny fraction of what they were) than we did then. There’s no room to cut anything more unless the government tells us what not to do on its behalf. Some of those changes would need primary legislation so it’s not as though we are doing unnecessary work.

Teacher here.

I agree with everything previously said my teachers particularly with regards to SEN provision and diagnosis. Personally what would make a difference to me would be class sizes. In September most of my classes are 32 students including mixed ability classes of 32 at GCSE with the whole range of abilities and needs. They would probably be bigger but the classrooms are not big enough. More money for teachers to reduce class sizes. I would also like more money to be able to buy resources. All I can buy for my dept are exercise books and very basic stationary. I can replace anything that is broken or falling apart as there simply is not enough money.

On top of this the building i teach in is falling apart. The building was built before modern technology needs and therefore is not fit for purpose. On top of that we've got temporary buildings due to RAAC that look like they will be around for many years to come. This is sorting urgently. I can see two blocks of my school being knocked and rebuilt eventually but right now we are struggling to fit the students in.

Since 2008/9 real term pay decrease of 40% apparently

Mental health.
I work for a service which is used by the NHS but is owned by the council. It has crisis beds used by the NHS, so serves as an in between hospital admission and home treatment. It also has other uses such as respite care for people with mental illness and also longer term care for people with mental illness who are facing housing issues or have come from hospital with no home to move back into, or who have come from the prison service, or who are care leavers. There is also a phone line for advice and support which runs 24hrs which we man.
It's a service covering a lot of things!! Which can also be a problem

All that fat was trimmed in the austerity years. The additional jobs disappeared long ago. Pay has been frozen or increased in tiny increments since then so pay is effectively worth way under what it should be even just indexed for inflation. Until 2022 my pay had risen by 0 or 1% for over ten years.

Thousands of jobs have been removed from the public sector, and people have noticed.

They have noticed spiralling NHS waiting lists and GP wait-times.

They have noticed the huge delays in criminal cases coming to court.

They have noticed the lamentable state of our roads, more potholes than carriageway.

They have noticed rising levels of youth crime.

Just to pick a few examples.

How have you not noticed these things yourself?

I work in a hospital.
We need to get rid of several managers and then we need to get managers who know what they're doing. People with management skills work in real businesses, not in public sectors. Just because you are a doctor and old doenst mean you should be a manager. We actually questioned one managers (doctor) decision on budgeting and he said "if my doctors say they need this then they do. I won't question it and nether will you" and he signed it off. So fuck that.

All decisions made are about short term savings. We need to invest fuckton of money to make long term savings. We need an actual strategy that can be implemented instead of vague bs. Someone needs to manage the change and not leave it to individual managers without any management skills. Everyone is only looking for their own interest and covering their own ass.

I work in the legal department of a local authority dealing with children’s safeguarding.

We need more. More staff, more support, more money — we’ve got admin assistants compiling court bundles with mortuary photographs of dead children and taking home £22k a year for their trouble. We need more social workers, on higher salaries, because at the minute they qualify then spend 3-5 years becoming more and more burnt out before jumping ship to CAFCASS for better pay and less stress. We need management to stop pretending our jobs and pressures are anything like the legal team dealing with property or litigation. The team I’m in all work like dogs but if we can’t magic up additional hours in the day we’re told we have a time management problem and not a chronically understaffed and overworked to the point several members are off sick at any given time problem.

I do my job because I love it, I find it genuinely interesting and very rewarding, but my god it’s hard.

From my experience in a former life working in training for NHS Education - I think it would be hugely beneficial if the right people with the right skills were recruited in the first place, and more attention given to proper performance management and weeding out the dead weight earlier, rather than just sending them off somewhere else to become somebody else’s problem. When I think of the millions spent and clinical time wasted through staff having to be sent on courses teaching them things like that individual patients have individual needs and you can’t deliver effective healthcare without recognising this - the mind boggles.

I mean our services really limps along but it's such an important service imo. I really believe it's so useful. An in between hospital and community is important as hospital can be very damaging to people and should be a real last resort for mental health issues.
But we have the bare bones of staff. We had to drop a crisis bed recently. And like I said we just shut down the crisis beds and the phone line if none of the 3 night staff are available to work. Because there's no one else to do it. Occasionally a manager or day staff member will step in and do it but obviously they all work fulltime day hours and these are 12 hour night shifts on top of that.
The service is trying to do multiple jobs at once. We also get a lot of street homeless people, addicts etc who we are dealing with constantly who don't really fit the bill for the service but have no one else and no where to go.
There's just so much less provision than there used to be so there's a lot of pressure and the few council/NHS services which remain.

There are so many managers who are surplus to requirement. External training being delivered that costs lots of money that is woeful and not relevant. Departments not collaborating enough. I would be confident these problems are at the heart of most, if not all, public departments.