Six months ago, the Isle of Man Government claimed there was no extra money to settle teachers’ pay dispute:
At a meeting with Education Minister Dr Alex Allinson and other government representatives today they were told that any pay settlement would have to be met through cuts to educational provision.
No extra money to settle teachers’ pay dispute
Now, the Isle of Man Government is singing a very different tune, with a plan to spend almost £1 million on employing a whole suite of new education department bureaucrats:
The education department is to spend almost £1m on an interim restructure to rebuild ’fractured’ relations with teachers.
Reforms include the creation of series of new officer roles and a £100,000 annual secondment fund.
Reforming DESC will cost £954,000
My view is very simple: we should pay frontline workers fairly for the work that they do, and not create extra levels of bureaucracy. If anything, rather than vesting more powers in the centralised public servants, it would be better to push more powers to parents at individual schools. After all, parents have very obvious ‘skin in the game‘, whereas government bureaucrats do not.