Education Farce - Lib Dems withdraw from process

5.09.21pm UTC (GMT +0000) Tue 7th Jun 2005

Liberal Democrat Councillors have withdrawn from the formal appointment process currently being conducted by Camden Labour Party and Camden Council. This move is in protest at the farce and sidelining of education. The moves comes as it emerged that internal applicant was consulted on the draft job specification before they created and confirmed a shortlist of one for the top job for Education and Social Services.

Cllr Margaret Little has issued an explanatory statement which follows here in full:

As a school governor myself, I have been closely following and sharing the widespread concern amongst Camden's governors and head teachers about Camden's much-criticised plans to appoint a new Director of Children, School and Families from a ring fence of one person with no education experience. So I would like to bring you up to date with my group's approach to what has been happening.

This morning I declined to take part in the appointment panel for the Director of Children, Schools and Families. My colleague Cllr Keith Moffitt made a similar decision in respect of today's panel to select the Director of Culture and Environment, and Cllr John Bryant has indicated that he will not be taking part in this Friday's selection panel for the new post of Housing and Community Care.

All three of us feel that much of the appointment process is deeply flawed as it favours the incumbent, and prevented national advertising of these posts that could have provided a wider field of applicants.

We were particularly disappointed to see that the person specification prepared by Camden for each of these three posts was identical, suggesting that the personal attributes required for running an education authority, maintaining our streets and overseeing sensitive social services work are totally interchangeable! The person specifications made no mention of the specialist knowledge the directors would need.

In particular, the person specification and much of the job description for the Director of Children, Schools and Families, was generic and bland, merely setting out requirements that would be expected of any high-level local authority director, and only one of the twelve "accountabilities" mentions improvement in education.

The job description and person specification, fitting as they do any good general manager, belied one of the key reasons Camden and the consultants gave for not advertising the post of Director of Children, Schools and Families nationally, i.e. that there were unlikely to be candidates "out there" with both education and social services skills.

In view of all this, we were amazed to discovered today that not only all of the Labour Executive that runs Camden but also the applicants themselves had had a chance to have an input into the draft job description and person specification over a week ago, while the other members of the appointment panels had only received these working papers a couple of working days before the interviews were to be held. It least one of the applicants had written their supporting statement before the final job description had been completed.

All of this gave us the impression that the job descriptions had been written to suit the in-house candidates. We therefore felt that the actual interviews would be a charade in which we could not in all honesty participate.

We need to be sure that we have the best person for the job and that the appointment process is not driven considerations such as the size of possible redundancy payments. This is in no way to criticise those applying for these posts internally. It could be that they are indeed the best people for the job, but as Camden has failed to advertise nationally, we shall never know.

Yours sincerely,

Cllr Margaret Little

Camden Liberal Democrats Education Spokesperson