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

My experience was the opposite, I worked in a fairly ambitious section of the private sector but I always found time in the day to nip to the toilet or grab some lunch. I know there are some shirkers but there are also people who work phenomenally hard to cover the gaps left by funding cuts

Far more people in senior grades compared to the past, some are very ineffective

A whole industry has been created around wellbeing and DEI with very very little to show for it.

On the flip side our more junior grades are on minimum wage or slightly above because of the pay freeze, so we struggle to retain people that actually do the job people 'see'

Local government legal. Pay low. Can’t recruit anyone with experience or skill set. Lack of training and progression. Other employers now offer comparable or better terms and conditions.
High up on new government agenda was planning yet no councils can recruit planning lawyers for money they pay.
Legal assistant pay at our local district council is £1 hour more than my teen is on at McDonald’s yet they’ll be doing essential legal work.
Lots of work outsourced to private firms or done by locums at huge cost as too much work for too few staff.

I work for the NHS, some savings can be made by culling poor private contracts well before you start targeting upper management.
For example, Mediquip charges something to the tune of £150 for 24h delivery of assistive equipment. Why? Because they can. I am talking about even small bits of equipment like a personal alarm or a toilet raiser. Something that can be delivered by any small business in the vicinity for £4.99.
Procurement in general is shambles. Takes months, costs a fortune and arrives after the patient has already been discharged. I pay for small bits out of my own pocket on amazon (I am talking things like sensory items, squeezy toys for fine motor rehab etc. I must have paid hundreds for it out of pocket over the years).
Hospital transport shows up late or not at all resulting in the patient missing an appointment. The transport provided still bills the hospital. If I go on a home visit with the patient, I can't take uber. I have to take a pre-approved taxi. It is no more safe than Uber, the taxi driver does not have clinical training. They never come on time resulting in a loss of clinical hours and cost x3 as much as uber.
Masses and masses of useless paperwork. I have to complete referral forms when referring within my own service. I can't just provide a quick brief and patient number (so the clinician can find patient history in the very same clinical system we share), no, I have to spend 30-60 minutes filling out a form which includes full patient details and their medical history. Waste of bloody time and absolutely is not a legal requirement.
I am happy to hear that the government stopped hospital building projects, though. Because it is not about the buildings, it is about people to staff the services and wards. You can get a lot of staff and equipment for the money they will save on fancy hospitals.

Cuts to public service spending is almost always a false economy. The problem is that the economic benefits take a long time to be seen. For example It's broadly accepted that every pound spent on education returns £3 and for healthcare it's £4.

"If funding patterns among areas that increased spending the least had matched those that increased spending the most, every additional £1 spent on primary or community care could have increased economic output by £14, were a direct relationship assumed. Higher increases in acute care had lower but still significant impact, with every additional £1 spent potentially increasing GVA by an extra £11"

https://www.nhsconfed.org/publications/creating-better-health-value-economic-impact-care-setting

I am public sector and my role is vocational - it's not just a job but who I am.
So when I complain about pay and people say leave and get a better job, it is not that easy.

Teaching assistants back in classrooms and paid a decent wage.

Massive reduction in waiting times for diagnosis and more specialist training and alternative provision for those with the greatest need.

Make it easier for schools to exclude.

More options for vocational courses again. Also bring back higher and foundation tier papers at gcse.

More time for teachers to plan / mark / prepare to carry out their core role which is teaching. That could be more ppa's, fewer duties, more funding for more teachers.

Time given back when you lose all your ppa's because of sports day or running a residential trip for example.

Get rid of parents evenings....or make them an evening where the teacher books to see parents they really need to see.

A reduction in meetings for the sake of it...most could be covered in an email but someone is trying to make up directed time so we have to sit and listen for an hour after school when we are knackered and need to get other stuff done.

Overall and acceptance that often kids don't do well because they are lazy and didn't out the work in rather than constantly blaming teachers and insisting we come up with new ideas of how to raise grades.

Five gold stars for this comment. ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ .

Why on earth were SEN schools closed in the first place?

How can a teacher hope to teach and pupils learn with serious disruptions in the classrooms?

No one wins.

I work in a Council’s planning department. 60% of our planning officers are contractors who are paid in excess of £40 per hour, in comparison to full time contracted staff at £18 - £20 per hour (rough calculation). I won’t mention specifics as it would be outing, but this would be our main area of savings, improving full time staff pay to recruit and retain full time staff instead of having to rely on temporary, far more expensive staff.

Unfortunately FT staff pay is set by the NJC, who have just rejected our pay claim (again). I used the Unison calculator this morning which showed that had my salary kept up with inflation since 2010, I would currently be on £10,000 more than I am on now (and yes I can provide the proof of this calculation if required!)

Outstripped by CEO’s of MATS.

Much more responsibility on the Director of Children and Young Peoples Services (DSC) ( responsible for every child and young person, education & safeguarding plus adult learning, early years, school place planning, SEND, etc etc ). My DSC has over 300 schools aside from social work teams, adult learning, school place planning, early years etc. Earnings of £120,000. Deserves every penny for that huge responsibility.

CEO of MATS in the same LA. £250,000 - responsible for 8 schools, £150,000 responsible for 10 schools. All of the extra DSC responsibilities other than school based are taken by the LA DSC too, not the CEO.
CEO wages, especially in ‘mates MATS’ should be drawn into line ( especially when the begging letters to parents go out!)

What made a difference in the early noughties were multi-year funding settlements/agreements. There is a significant amount of waste avoided if you can plan medium term.

I'd also have finance such that there is no mad rush to spend the budget in February and March each year.

I'm not going to say where I work, hope you respect that.

NHS: counter-intuitively, nursing managers need to be paid more because currently there is a drop in pay when someone goes from being a senior clinical nurse to doing a management role. Between the top of band 7 and bottom of band 8a a person loses money when the extra remuneration for working nights and weekends is taken away. So good staff don't go for management roles, and poor candidates go for management roles and get them, often because they are the only candidate. There are some very bad nursing managers, some of whom get away with bullying, and the lack of any other candidates means no-one wants to get rid of them. This is causing a huge churn of staff through their departments, which costs money. Sometimes vacancies caused by poor management cannot be filled. Just making the pay difference between band 7 and 8 greater would help. Also paying senior clinical staff at the top of band 7 more would help reduce staff leaving to become managers who would actually be better remaining clinical. The fact that most highly experienced clinical nurses top out at band 7 with nowhere to go without undertaking a rather pointless additional 2/3-year masters apprenticeship is leading to a loss of the knowledge and skills and experience these people have as they have to go into management for long-term earnings progression. TLDR: Basically pay senior B7 and B8 nurses more

25 years in LG. (Not health, education or social services, but a local gov't function that is essential to everyone's life every day).

Funding cuts, recruitment freezes, not replacing skilled staff with years of knowledge, so massive (think multiple millions by nearly every council, every year) spend on consultant fees - because we no longer have anyone directly employed to do this.

As PP said - procurement is a joke, the private sector is taking this as a joke in what they are charging for basic things.

And yes, people have left for the private sector as they pay more - but will then be working on contracts for their ex-LA employer!

The main saving would be to slash the reliance on contractors - but to do that you need to boost salaries to improve recruitment and retention first.

I never understand why people say that.
Presumably they wouldn't be best pleased if everyone actually took their advice, and suddenly their rubbish went uncollected, their kids didn't have teachers, and they couldn't get treated at hospital?

Pay TAs a professional wage.
Fund SEND provision properly.
Fund proper family support so that schools aren’t trying to fill the gap left by the closure of Sure Start and other early help services.
Give teachers adequate PPA so that we don’t lose so many to burnout.
Scrap the ridiculous accountability measures that schools are judged on - both in their exam results are Ofsted and look to the more holistic and sensible approaches that schools in Europe use.
Make sure school buildings are fit for purpose.

I used to work in a MAT where the CEO was on over £150k. Couldn’t tell you what she did all
day but I can tell you the dept I worked in couldn’t afford new textbooks. I’ve worked in education for over 20 years and I’m glad my kids are grown up and out of it, I wouldn’t want them in it right now.

It has never been this bad.

As far as flexi time goes this is a thing of the distant past for us- the majority of my colleagues are 100s of hours in credit on their flexi time. Flexi leave is almost never available to book because of "operational requirements" and even when it is booked is often cancelled at the last minute by managers. Any time we leave an hour or so early is made up by working plenty of additional hours.
Annual leave in school holidays has become increasingly difficult to obtain- no- one on my grade got 2 full weeks this summer and I will only get the bank holidays at Easter.
Management can and do require us to work till 7pm or start at 7am often with little notice.
I have currently twice the caseload that I should have and we have now been given an additional responsibility that takes usually a day out of our week to complete for no extra pay.
As far as our salaries go the last 13 years- in 9 of those years we received 0% or 1% Pay increase. There is nowhere left to cut.......

I dunno, in many cases it feels like the productive element was cut during austerity, yet the bloated management got away with it.

Pay TAs a professional wage.

I think lots of people would leave teaching and become a TA tomorrow if this were the case!

I'd prefer not to say exactly. But civil service and legal.

The Treasury absolutely hates long term planning. The short-termism rooted into Whitehall is a real false economy.