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

Multi Academy Trust

One of the issues in public sector is that being it standing at your role does not mean a pay rise, often the only way to get paid more is to leave or get promoted which isn't the best option

I do hope you don't work for Mental Health services...
I have ASD, it's not something I want to have. I just have it. In my whole life, I had precisely 4 sessions of counselling which was paid for by my work. Hardly a massive drain on public finances. ASD and ADHD are neurodevelopmental disorders, not psychiatric illnesses or "mental health disorders". My mental health is pretty solid, thank you.
50 years ago (the time you think of so fondly) I would have been locked up in an institution. This would very much be a drain on public finances.

In education I would do away with the vast swathes of middle management and upper management the the MAT system and advisory services seems to have created.
So many people getting paid a bloody fortune to sweep into schools, pronounce everything to be shite and then sweep out again on a cloud of their own superiority. If you’re so great then get back in the fucking classroom.

Far too many management levels in the NHS. Absolutely ridiculous and completely unnecessary. Most of their days spent meeting about meetings. We used to have far fewer
and hospitals were run more effectively. They are also paid more than nursing staff at their lowest level. We have managers who just see it as a business and others who have risen through the ranks from nursing to management. Neither group has a clue about the other side.
Wards having their own budgets is a mistake too. Needs someone central to control stock etc as lots of waste and some areas sitting on stock going out of date while other areas can’t get any.
Staff need better pay - so many leaving and retraining in other professions. Current pay and the COL means we have food banks in the hospital for staff. I have never been as badly off as I am now.
Culture badly needs changing - bullying and toxic behaviour from management which works its way down.

NHS Manager here. Never the most popular person in a room, although I would defend levels of management in the NHS to the hilt.

Two things would make a difference beyond simply ‘more people and more money’.

1. An end to short termism, with increases in capital spend allowances and investment (at the expense of revenue costs if necessary).

2. A focus on individuals rather than job roles, particularly in management. We have far too many people who are just not very good at their jobs, but not bad enough to be got rid of. If I were in charge, I would restructure teams so that the good people took on the jobs of the bad people, for a percentage of their salaries. Probably impossible to actually do, but we all know the people who are shit, and the people who could do the job well standing on their heads.

NHS (Admin side) - cut the number of managers/team leaders, deputy service managers, service managers, division deputy managers, division managers etc by 50%-75% and invest in decent pay/career progression for the lower bands (2-4).

The number of managers in my Trust, and Service alone is laughable. There are more managers than there are bands 2-4 in mine and most other teams, yet we are the ones who are expected to take on more work, are blamed every time something happens. Progression is based on who you know, not what you know. The NHS recruitment process needs a complete overhaul.

Far too many “ managers” in the nhs
In nursing alone, far too many being promoted to management when relatively newly qualified and little clinical experience.
I’m sure it’s the same in other departments. So the people at the top don’t know their arses from their elbows.

I've always been across crime and justice, not frontline. A massive issue is retention, you lose so much when experienced staff leave.

There's also a massive mismatch between private and public sector pay in some divisions. So some teams are paying really large amounts to people for doing jobs that are needed but in the overall scope of the organisation I can't see how they justify it, or how it's fair. (Ie the CEO's executive assistant is on approx £10k less than a comms officer. Doesn't make sense to me).

I'm not sure what the answer is though.

Again, some depts seem to have so many managers!

Completely agree!

Yet when you look at the actual people in the school doing all the work-they are at breaking point. In our primary, the deputy and senco are both teaching full time, all other teachers have at least 2 subjects they are coordinating and are not specialists in-with no pay or time allocated to it, yet they’ll be hauled over the coals when Ofsted come.

All the MAT system seems to have created is a whole level of ex-teachers who all get paid a fuck tonne of money.

I agree with Bigcat, when I worked in the NHS the number of managers managing managers were unbelievable.

But big open plan offices are the main reason I’m stuck working at home! We used to have an office were my team could all sit together - discuss issues, share ideas and take highly confidential calls - now I can’t even leave my screen open and it an urgent call or teams link pops up I have to try and find an unhooked office somewhere!

we can’t even sit together - hard to discuss an adoption breakdown and school move sat next to someone from accounting

I agree about incremental pay progression as well - I am top of my pay scale and can’t move unless I go into a management role which takes me away from a job I love!

we need to recruit (children’s services) and retain staff - stop using agency staff and reduce caseloads for starters

More staff, sometimes I'm the only district nurse on for an entire borough overnight (8pm-8am) with a HCA. That's providing palliative/end of life care alongside other patient needs, whilst also carrying the works mobile and triaging incoming calls from patients, OOH GP and the ambulance service.

I was doing this whilst heavily pregnant, 12 hours without a break and it was unsustainable.

The biggest overspends each year in every local authority are children and adults social care. In terms of children's social care this is primarily due to the absolute horrific placement sufficiency issue for children in care particularly those more complex children. The 'care' provided by private residential companies, never cheap, have inflated exponentially. 10 years ago it was typical to pay approximately £3000/3500 for a standard children's home per week - we are now paying closer to £8000/9000 per week.

For children with complex needs you are easily exceeding £10,000 per week. Pair this with a decline in applications to fostering and adoption nationally.

Alongside this, the stripping of early intervention services including youth work, under investment in CAMHs etc as well lack of investment in the services that support the parents (mental health, substance misuse services) means we are seeing increasingly complex children and young people enter the care system who consequently cost more.

Much more rigourous governance of the private sector who frankly are profiteering off our children, greater investment in early intervention services will be an invest to save. Oh and long term approach to funding interventions rather than one year DfE grants that are then unsustainable.

@Notmydaughteryoubitch totally agree

Oh and @VishkaVishkovsky you are frankly talking out of your arse. Come be one of my social workers or team managers or frankly anyone in children's social care for a day and tell me it's all about sandwiches and Flexi time.

I work for the council as part of the cleaning team in school and even we’ve had funding cuts, our hours have been cut, areas have been lost so we’re having to cover these, our cleaning equipment and products have been drastically reduced.. we often have to clean with just warm water these days when the pitiful allowance for cleaning products has run out for the month.
schools are run down and in desperate need of repair, they’ve also had their repair budgets cut too.

i know cleaners are seen as the lowest of the low and don’t really matter unlike school staff and teachers but the budget cuts to schools are having a knock on effect all the way down the line

and that’s just the tip of the iceberg..

That makes no sense to me - surely then everyone who works in the public sector would be either inexperienced or incompetent? How would that improve services?

I'm in health and my experience is that staff are either incredibly conscientious and very over worked, or piss-taking skivers, there's not much in between, and the latter are promoted just as often as the former (if not more).

Staffing has reduced at the level where people do the day to day work, while the number of managers has increased. For example in our area, our functional team is about a third smaller than it was 10 years ago, but we provide support services to about 5 times the number of staff we used to. But they've added at least three new managers above us, who do not, as far as I can see, contribute much to our efficiency or productivity. One of them appears to do nothing but go to meetings, but he always takes one of the other members of his team with him, they bring back all the info and do all the work which comes out of the meeting, and he takes the credit.

And as someone else said, procurement is an absolute joke. They set up multi year contracts with monopoly suppliers, who then charge insane prices for stuff you could order off Amazon at a fraction of the price - £60 for computer leads that should cost a fiver, we needed a particular piece of equipment that we sourced at a couple of thousand direct from the manufacturer, but because we had to buy it via the regional contract it ended up costing us more than twice as much!

Of course cleaners matter! Jesus, it's no wonder norovirus rips through the place if you have not been given any anti-viral cleaning products. Disgusting.

We have said the same too. Some of us were bringing our own cleaning stuff in but we got into trouble for that so now we don’t.

the cleaning stuff that we are supposed to have is awful anyway, they’ve changed suppliers to an even cheaper one, it’s watered down,not effective and the bleach we have is like water.

I am dreading this new term

NHS Nurse of 26 years here. I left a very large community trust last year after 24 years and there were so so many band 8a's doing some bullshit role. All of them Nurses who would have been so much better on the ground than in offices.

A lot of the problem with the public sector rests with central government micro managing everything

I don’t work in the public sector (vol sector) but work closely with NHS & LA. The ludicrous amount and size of returns that have to be completed for NHSE/dept of health/DLGC is complete madness. Spreadsheets that go on for ever that have to be completed daily, ridiculous project evaluation templates that don’t actually evaluate anything as they focus on activity rather than outcomes for the public

LÁ also have the double whammy of local councillors overseeing strategy and spending & making some barking decisions based on their own personal hobby horses. Some councillors are brilliant - knowledgeable, listen to advice, read their briefs but far far too many are just not up to it. They don’t listen, ignore inconvenient evidence that doesn’t fit their world view and have no idea what they’re role actually is. LA budgets are tens or hundreds of millions and our system gives ultimate responsibility to people who don’t have to have any real knowledge or expertise, they just have to be willing to be involved in local politics

NHS nurse here, it would be really useful if we could actually get rid of poor performing staff instead of passing them around different departments indefinitely, and just becoming someone else’s problem.

There are some nurses I’ve worked with that if a probationary period existed within the NHS, they wouldn’t have passed, but we have endless action plans, HR meetings, sickness, and still continue to be employed.

Also, how many more matrons of innovation and wellbeing do we need?

More staff, especially in social care. The staff are being run into the ground.

Mind it was the same 16 years ago when I left the local council.