Maintaining continuous improvement in any organisation is difficult.  Doing it in the Public Sector is further complicated by complex staff terms and conditions which seem designed to put individual performance beyond the reach of management.  Not long ago, I was discussing the management of sickness absence with the Chief Finance Officer of a Further Education College and her first consideration was how her career would be adversely affected by the Grievance Claims made against her if she started asking difficult questions of people who were abusing the system.

Performance management also involves analysis of trend data, looking for the correlations between sequential results and discovering the activities that have contributed to them.  Many years of experience – usually involving the pain of having made the wrong decision – give a feel for when something is right or wrong at an intuitive level, which presents the opportunity to spot false trails earlier.

It is not surprising, given that throughout the years of the Labour Government, every time GCSE results were announced the number of students getting the highest grades moved inexorably upwards, many commentators suggested that for the results to be so good, the examinations must be getting easier to pass.

The reaction to this was inevitable.  Ministers would huff and puff about how such comments “denigrated the hard work of teachers and students”.  Teaching unions would deploy their seemingly unending supply of pomposity in support of their members.  After a couple of days, the story would blow over and the media, ever in pursuit of the next story, would pass to other news.

What passed unseen and unheard, was the reception that young people received when they went for a job interview and discovered that employers required a higher standard of knowledge than their qualifications delivered.  Whenever employer groups are asked for comment, they bemoan the fact that young people frequently do not have the skills required to be employable.

The result is that over the past ten years, unemployment amongst the population under the age of  twenty five has moved steadily upwards – a trend particularly apparent for those under eighteen.

There is no doubt that some teachers have improved the performance of their students – an example is at Thirsk School, where particular focus and a huge amount of additional support is given to those who are identified as being “borderline” for Grades C and D in Mathematics.  Commenced last year, this resulted in a massive increase in Grade C and above GCSE passes, so it has been repeated this year.  However, an inevitable consequence will occur this year – this will maintain the results – repetition will not necessarily continue the upward trend.

It follows that analysis can reveal a number of single issues that have had an impact, but none that justify the continuous upward trend in GSCE results.  One example, the use of vocational courses in GSCE tables, another is giving the higher grades on the basis if marks scored, rather than the percentage of students within the population attaining a given mark (historically the basis for grading).  Both of these will make a difference, but neither would present continuous improvement.

One was always left with the suggestion that has always been decried by the education establishment – that “the exams are getting easier”.

This week the Daily Telegraph revealed a new and previously unknown issue – the exams are NOT getting easier, but taking them is.  In a “sting” operation the paper secretly videoed seminars held by the awarding bodies, where teachers were told what the questions were going to be and as if that was not enough, how to include particular words and expressions in answers to score the highest marks.

It has already emerged that these bodies – who are, lets remember, custodians of the employability of our young people – were also prepared to sell their examinations to schools on the grounds that they were “easier” than those from their competitors.

There is no doubt this story will run on.  Michael Gove, the Education Secretary who has inherited this mess from Labour and who was sceptical of the inexorable upward trend in opposition – once famously describing the results as “productivity figures from a Soviet Tractor Factory” to the apoplectic reaction of his fellow panellist on “Any Questions” – has announced an investigation.  The Daily Telegraph has sensibly kept further revelations away from this weekend, because of the dominance of the news agenda by the European Summit.  Watch them reveal more excruciating detail next week.

What worries me is where else in the Public Sector this sort of conduct has been occurring.  During the same period, we have seen hospital waiting times and crime rates fall and some of these trends have shared the suspicious nature of the education results.

Labour introduced a “target” culture whilst in Government, so that Gordon Brown‘s obsession with micro-management of the entire public sector could inform his thinking, first at the Treasury and then in Number 10.  In doing so, the emphasis for management within individual services has, in many cases, stopped being about effectiveness and more about numbers.

The present administration has, to its credit, made it clear they no longer want to have these targets and have made that message flow through their departments.  However, there is evidence that it is not getting through at a local level – for example, Theresa May, Home Secretary, has on more than one occasion had to remind Chief Constables they should not replicate targets locally.  Not only does this not seem to be happening, but commentators on the police service frequently refer to “gaming” when talking about crime figures.

If you base your decisions on a misunderstanding of which activities are having an effect, then you waste your time (and money) doing the wrong things.