Is this normal for the public sector? Feels a touch illegal

[Nightingaleuk122]

I am four months into a new director position within a UK FE institution, after ten years in the private sector. I am gobsmacked by the chaos, lack of focus on the most basic areas of business and treatment of staff, including me, which includes:

I have an autistic daughter and, as agreed with HR, it was written into my contract that my on site hours are 8.30 until 4 with remaining hours completed at home. Since starting this has been entirely ignored, no accommodations have been made and I have to stay late approx 3 times per week.

I have been included within the duty manager rota, that includes regularly staying until 9pm. Responsibilities include suspending students for poor behaviour (including violence), fire drills and lock down procedures for if there is a threat to student welfare (not unlikely given the location). For this I have received 45 minutes of training on lockdown only, with the words 'just use your common sense' used. I feel utterly unprepared for if the situation occurs.

Last week duty managers were called upon to go to the car park to deal with gangs. I am a petite woman with zero experience in this situation. I feel like they are putting me at risk.

The workload is off the scale because it is not managed. Despite a busy week with a large project I needed to deliver, I was given a written report to prepare for Monday entitled 'ideas', which just seemed so utterly thoughtless and not strategic. I will now be spending my Sunday completing said report.

The structure seems chaotic. The CEO asked me to design a project plan which they then agreed to. I started to implement the project but was called out by the other members of the SLT team for not running the project past them first. I now have no idea who I'm supposed to check things with.

The organisation has a huge HR department, yet their focus appears to be small, inconsequential projects eg arranging menopause meet-ups, instead of fixing the fundamental issues like the above training issues or recruiting crucial staff members.

The problem is, I think I'm the only one who sees this as a problem. So the question is, is this normal? And if it isn't, what the hell do I do about it?

I left a job I loved for this.

Oh and don’t try to come up with a good idea for a better working practice because those “in charge” will see it as undermining them

Yes, my position involves no interaction with students or teaching staff, and the conversations I had with HR before accepting the position confirmed my belief that the agreed hours were achievable and the adjustments are reflected in the contract.

I did my research too. With people in similar posts and governors of the organisation. Their responses and my experience are vastly different.

The work still excites me. I know exactly what needs to be done to make a difference. My worry is whether the culture will prevent me from doing what I need to do, or the stress of working there will erode my confidence to a level that I feel incapable of making change.

There's that

There's also the problem that often any of these ideas will inadvertently expose those who aren't doing any work. Or who are pretending that a particular task takes half a day. I remember showing a lady how to do a task differently because I was so naive, I thought she'd be glad to save the time

It turns out she was relying on her bosses not knowing that the job could be done in half an hour rather than four hours. Fortunately, the penny dropped for me while I was talking her through it. And I said "oh hang on, you don't want to know this do you?" And she whispered "no, but you can say you spent the morning helping me and it wouldn't work so we can just have a chat".

Other people have referenced important staff being made redundant, e.g. security guards. It's particularly infuriating because you can't put forward any plan for efficiency because simebody - or more than one person - might lose their job. But they blithely get rid of essential staff.

and things just continue to fall apart.

Hi, working lots of unpaid additional hours, dealing with violence and aggression and giving up your home life is normal in my experience. I’ve worked in some very well organised departments and some that were chaos. Friends who work in the private sector think I’m exaggerating (or I suspect they think I’m the problem) when I have to cancel long arranged plans at the last minute to safeguard a young person.

That’s what left me perplexed about the lack of assertiveness over the contract. It seems to be a high up role and I would have felt the OP would have more “gumption” to not allow that to happen

You could be describing the place I worked at for many years. It wasn't like that originally but certainly in the last few years where the managers could only be described as cowboys took over.

Yep. 100 per cent

You won’t be allowed to make a difference

Sounds very familiar. As to the specific issue of hours, it depends a lot on your contract, I’ve personally never seen one that guarantees set ours because it’s not fair on others to have to do on call all the time and one person gets none, also everyone works extra hours

Sounds pretty standard for public sector. Absolutely zero consideration for employees. We are not important. We are regularly being told to do addional work and being told it's our "moral obligation".

I was going to say ' welcome to FE!' in a flippant way, but making exactly this point. Governments over many, many years have been going on about youth unemployment, skills, vocational qualifications etc etc for as long as I can remember, but FE is so, so overlooked and underfunded. Where do people think these things take place? I left FE a few years ago ( initially not through choice as I perversely love teaching teenagers!) but moved elsewhere and didnt go back. Sounds exactly as it was when I left.

I want private to public and love it, esp the pension!

Okay that makes more sense in terms of meetings but if you feel you need to be at these meetings in order for you to do your job then the question is are you able to do your job within the hours on site.

I’ve seen from one of your other replies that HR led you to believe that it was doable that’s really quite unfair and again could be seen as an implied breach of contract in terms of trust etc. but that’s harder to prove although could lead to constructive dismissal.

I also get where you are coming from re the rota although it’s not right that this is expected of you. If other SLTs have an issue with this thats between them and management and if they allow that to damage their working relationships with you it says a lot about them

i think there has to be a really open discussion between you HR and CEO about your role going forward. They may need to rethink things - meetings in core hours etc or change the remit of what you do. if it’s just not doable then it could just be you need to rethink if this is the right place for your skills but ideally you want to be able to stay in this employment until a new job is found and leave on good terms.

although again as I said before entering that discussion - join a union and gather evidence evidence evidence - if they then try to be underhand and terminate the employment then push back down the legal route. If they agreed your hours and insist on making your job impossible by holding meetings outside your hours you then also possibly have a constructive dismissal claim on top of everything else 😉

I've temped at local government and my experience was very Kafkaesque but a total breeze. I spent most of my six weeks coming into a largely empty open plan office and doing very little, apart from taking the occasional phone message and passing it to other people by email - what I'd call round robin.

I didn't meet my boss, the Dept Director, whose assistant I was suppose to cover, until 4 days into the job as she was WFH. After a online teams introduction, she disappear for another 10 days. Occasionally she'd send me notification of meetings to cancel as she was planning to go on annual leave or training, but there was very little to do and practically no instruction, apart from my boss telling me that it was important that I be present in the office (otherwise empty). I was getting paid to read e-books off my phone in order to have something to do. It was pretty soulless. No atmosphere. Every once in a while, you'd see someone else in the office but apart from a curt nod people were not friendly and generally quite silent and evasive. They'd then disappear for days. In the 6 weeks I was there, I only saw my boss in the flesh, twice and about every ten days on teams. One of the Dept Heads lived in Exeter (she'd relocated during Covid) which I thought strange for a London council.

I generally work in Events (art events) which are very present and hands on and do these temp jobs in between, so it is quite a contrast. It was weird, but I've worked in government quangos that were like this in the 90s.

I'm in FE too (I could probably guess which FE group you work for as I've just left a huge one that sounds equally as insane) the things I was expected to do would make eyes pop

It’s par for the course in FE I’m afraid. They have huge issues with staff retention and often toxic subcultures within departments. I was shocked by the bullying from managers (from the very top downwards) and the lack of proper training in people management when I worked in this sector.
I was glad to leave it.

What a depressing yet illuminating thread, especially for someone who has only ever worked in the private sector. It’s not difficult to understand why this country is in the mess it is with such a vast and costly, yet completely inefficient, public sector. Just awful 😞

No normal for the public sector but sounds familiar for FE.
I joined an FE college at that level in a non education specific role (think finance or IT) and was flabbergasted to discover I was expected to be the senior manager on site about twice a month dealing with anything that came up. I had a 45 minute online safeguarding course and that was about it.

I lasted two years to get the pension, but have never seen such incompetent and unfriendly management in my life, and I've worked in all sorts. The Principal was a dictator, everyone was scared of her and it was very hard to tell her anything she didn't want to hear. Turnover was astronomical. When I joined, my role had been vacant for 6 months and they'd had 8 in the previous 10 years. I ended up staying longer than most of those!

Never again!

Yep, sounds pretty normal for the public sector and third sector organisations that carry out public sector functions. Menopause related stuff seems particularly popular just now to give the illusion of something or other and seems designed to help disguise the utter chaos of everything.

We got barked at “it’s your job”. Some of it actually wasn’t, like no H and S training given for working on an enveloping machine that you were expected to stick your hands in to retrieve paper that had got stuck

Incompetence is everywhere these days. I can remember in the 80's and 90's going to work (financial sector, aggressive) and everyone planned to be excellent, every day. Huge effort was put into performance. No-one ever went sick for anything minor.
I look at where I now work (public sector but finance-ish) and it's a different world. Absolutely useless levels of performance are tolerated.
Yes I know I sound old.

Doesn't surprise me at all. It's all very Emperor's New Clothes in many education settings - some people right at the top who make ridiculous decisions but think they are doing a marvellous job.

OMG, I worked for a charity and my old boss came from FE and you could be describing his management style - chaotic, greedy with other people's time and and dismissive.

I left and didn't look back. The sad thing is that I genuinely believe the charity won't survive his leadership.

I’m sorry you are going through this. At least some of it sounds pretty standard (I work at senior level in the public sector, extra hours are part of the deal, but so is flexibility) but some of what you describe is worse - you defo shouldn’t be involved in something you have had no training in. (I’m intrigued by the large HR dept - ime it’s usually tiny and under funded which is part of the problem.) It doesn’t sound like the culture is for you - I’d be trying to move on asap. While still there though, I’d be speaking to your line manager regularly, and trying to stay sane..

It sounds like you have been in a quite sheltered position previously and are struggling to adapt to a more challenging role. Why not rethink what you actually want from the job (flexibility , predictability,) and look for a less demanding job