Francis Beckett

A socialist supporting Tory government public sector cuts?  Sounds against nature. But if the rumours that George Osborne intends to take on the Training and Development Agency for Schools are true, I'll happily hold his coat and cheer him on.

This is a bloated, arrogant, and criminally wasteful bureaucracy.  I've seen it from the inside.  I've watched six highly paid officials sit round a table for hours at a time, sub-editing a tiny magazine by committee, then submitting it to their boss who demanded that the task be started all over again. 

I've watched weeks of work, costing the taxpayer tens of thousands of pounds, scrapped on a whim by a top official.  I've seen drafts of publicity leaflets circulated around dozens of highly paid officials, each of whom wrote lengthy essays in the margin agreeing with each other about the placement of punctuation.

If a campaign to get people to take up teaching as a career is required, let the government go out and hire a communications consultancy to run one.  It will cost a fraction as much, and you will get people who know what they are doing.