In recent months, my blog has been read more
in the USA, Russia and France than it has been in Britain. I’m very pleased to
have a thriving international audience, but having lots of non-British readers
is challenging. In particular, it behoves me to explain some of the quaint and
idiocyncratic, not to say bizarre, things we get up to in the place some people
still like to call the United
Kingdom.
That brings me to The Knowledge.
If you want to drive a black taxi cab in
London you have to take a test. It’s called The
Knowledge. The Knowledge is one of the most difficult tests in the world. You
have to study for years to memorise the city’s 25,000 streets and the shortest
routes between them.
It may sound like a good idea to require
every taxi driver in London to have intricate knowledge of the city’s labyrinthine
streets. But a little black box that costs less than £100 and which you stick
to the windscreen of your taxi makes The Knowledge just a little bit
unnecessary. It’s called a Satnav or a GPS.
It’s all too easy for tests designed to
ensure professional standards to become unnecessary or irrelevant. Sometimes
the people who think up the tests have the best motives. They want a better
service, more knowledgeable personnel, more satisfied ‘customers’. But the
content of the test must be justified by being strictly related to the
knowledge and skills which are required to achieve clearly defined tasks
competently. The test mustn’t become just a hurdle that people have to jump in
order to get into the profession. It mustn’t become just a way of keeping
people out. And it mustn’t become a con trick to mislead members of the public
that something is being done to improve professional standards when it isn’t.
That brings me to the government’s ill-fated
Assessment and Accreditation scheme, which is currently being rolled-out for
children’s social workers in England. As I’ve said before the Government provides no detail about where its so-called knowledge and skills statements, on which the accreditation scheme is
based, come from and no justification for them. And it provides no proposals
for how these knowledge and skills statements can be reviewed, improved and
kept up to date in future. So, its tests are really pretty arbitrary. Rather
than being a basis for improving the safety and quality of practice it is
beginning to look rather like The Knowledge – a difficult test to pass but not
really necessary.
Heather Wakefield, head of local government
at Unison, has recently
described the Assessment and Accreditation scheme as “ill-thought out” saying
that “… it threatens to make things worse, not better. It doesn’t accurately
assess the work staff do, and could prove the final straw for many experienced
employees, who may well vote with their feet and leave.
“Ministers,” she
says, “should think again, and instead of making dedicated employees take this
ill-conceived test, provide more resources to enable them to do their jobs
properly.”
I
say spot on, Heather! If ever a nail was hit on the head, then you have hit this
nail smack on.
This
ill-conceived test is going to do nothing except create a little industry about
passing it. It’s a distraction, an irrelevance, a waste of time. And it is
fundamentally misleading. It doesn’t make practice safer. It just makes people
jump through hoops to stay where they were in the first place and consumes
time and resources which could be much better used.
