Recruitment time again, can we get a management decision?

So the arduous task of trying to recruit an electrical installation lecturer begins again. For one reason or another, we lost a reasonable member of the team last week giving us exactly zero days to replace him. A management decision somewhere I am sure, it would have been nice of them to put some thought into the decision but instead, it leaves us having to cover lessons again once more at the expense of the NVQ(remember we have now been covering for staff for 11 months) . Bear in mind that recruiting an experienced electrical installation tutor is akin to discovering Atlantis and if we did discover the lost city, it has to give us 3 months notice before it can start.

It does seem that education struggles from the top down. Management in these institutions struggle so very much to make a decision with most decisions having to be taken back to the top to actually occur. This being the case, why do we have the Principal, Vice Principals, Assistant Principals, Directors, Assistant Directors, Heads of Schools, Department Managers, Programme Area Co-ordinators and finally Course Managers if every decision has to be made back at the top of the chain? We may as well have the Course Managers reporting directly back to the principal. We could still employ a few token people to attend meetings while we are teaching to come up with other ideas as to what other demands they can place on a tutor (perhaps someone could make the decision that a teacher teaches? Sorry, flippant mode).

In my area, we all come from the construction industry and more so, the 'real world'. None of us are academics and certainly, whereas we may not have that edumacation degree, we all completed the 4-5 years of an apprenticeship it took to become tradesmen and most more too with the advanced craft qualifications. We then all go and and do another 3 years of assessors qualifications, teaching qualifications, internal verifier qualifications and the obligatory "Celebrating diversity" staff development event that is so useful to us all. Perhaps it is because of the construction background that we struggle so much with the internal wrangling of an educational establishment. On site, if a decision has to be made, it has to be made soon. If it is a big decision, then the decision must be made that day. Large sums of money rest on a decision and the time it takes to make it. Contrast this to an educational establishment. A small almost inconsequential decision takes anything up to a month to be settled, an urgent decision is usually settled by the end of the week (or second week) and a large decision starts getting measured in years. The crazy thing is, this seems to be perfectly acceptable to the academics in charge. One thing a college doesn't have is money yet seems to employ far too many expensive layers of management. These layers of management then slow down the decision processes again costing money to an already strapped college. We all then know what happens when colleges get into financial trouble, they start laying off the lecturers, it has happened all over the country in the last 10 years.

Perhaps it is because we are tradesmen before lecturers that we can see these obvious issues within education. Perhaps if we had left Generic University and become teachers we may see the need to deliberate over a decision for a minimum period of time before choosing (invariably) the wrong one. Perhaps we are just too practical for an environment that is run by academics, I really don't know. Certainly, with the amount of private training providers about all it takes is for some of them to start running the proper courses rather than the get rich quick types and colleges can really kiss goodbye to the vocational areas they struggle with. Of course, the problem then is that the government will move the academic courses back into the schools 6th forms and all these academics with their buried heads may have to go back into the real world and get a job. Imagine that?

http://www.electricalqualifications.co.uk