UK education lagging behind the world's best?

I invite you to try this sample of the Pisa maths test at http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/

The tests and results are interesting, for several reasons.

The questions are surely ridiculously easy for a 15-year-old, even at the highest test level.

Sub-common entrance standard? At this level of intellectual challenge, errors due to carelessness may be as common as errors due to incompetence.

As a likely consequence, some 29 countries score at or above 90%, which might put the differences above that score firmly into the zone of statistical error.

I still don't understand the sampling methodology, and as any statistician will say, the main threat to proper inference is the risk of sample bias. Is it really possible to use a common sample frame across so many disparate communities and cultures? 

Shanghai may score highly among the kids that go to school. But what about the ones that don't?

In other words the Shanghai results may be better compared with those from UK private school students.

I have no idea how our educations standards really compare internationally, and I remain uninformed.

Academic social psychology is mostly bunk

You may have caught a wireless programme on the BBC Home Service last week in which the Hawthorne effect was debunked. 

Milgram’s notorious  “torture” experiment findings were similarly trashed in The Times yesterday. 

I always suspected that academic social psychology was mostly bunk. 

Two of the most famous studies now appear to demonstrate little more than poor experimental design, a predisposition to conjure corroboration from experimental noise and positive credibility among readers.  

Any guesses as to the next sacred cow to be revealed as horse flesh?

The Liverpool Care Pathway catastrophe

For students and practitioners of organisational change (as I have been for over 30 years) the NHS’s withdrawal of the palliative care protocol is only too common a story.

As The Times said, “when the system, devised at the Marie Curie Palliative Care Institute in Liverpool, worked properly, it worked well, offering high quality and compassionate care. But as yesterday’s report from an independent review found, in too many cases the LCP was so badly implemented that it became a byword for negligence.”

But what was implemented precisely? 

It was a process, a set of instructions about inputs.  What was not implemented elsewhere were the supporting resources, the feedback systems and the leadership that existed in the Marie Curie Institute. 

It is notoriously difficult to transfer good practice, much to the frustration of politicians and Whitehall- (or Leeds-) based civil servants. 

But it’s their own fault.

So long as organisations are viewed as machines that can be re-programmed at will through the adoption of a new process in isolation, or a new structure or a new management information tool, failure is almost inevitable.  Only by addressing the whole system, in all its exasperating complexity, will change stick.

Sadly the Department of Health, under all recent administrations, has been swallowing organisational change snake oil.  It needs better advice.

You wait for ages and three come along at once

Somewhat like buses (so I’m told), official pronouncements calculated to raise the blood pressure come in packs.

So, following hard on from yesterday’s release of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, my attention has been drawn to Pension Minister Steve Webb’s comments on CDC. 

Yes, you might well ask. It turns out to be nothing to do with communities, development or corporations, but is about pensions: Collective Defined Contribution arrangements, to be precise.

Webb’s beef is that now that almost all the good old final salary (and other defined benefit) pension plans are being closed down (except for many public servants, of course), people’s only real option to save for retirement is to build up their own individual fund. 

They and (thanks to auto-enrolment) their employer will pay specified amounts into the fund which, they hope, will grow to fund pension benefits later on. 

The problem is that lots of small individual funds cost a lot to run, and individual members are at the mercy of the investment markets at the time they want to cash in, so whilst some people will do well, others will cash-in at a bad time. 

And many will be put into “lifestyling” funds which gradually move their pension into boring funds with (probably) lower returns in the last few years before retirement – swapping the potential of decent returns for some safety.

So what’s his idea? It’s using a collective approach which pools investment returns and annuity mortality. That got me thinking. 

What if someone could design an investment fund which took the worry away from individual investors and smooth out their returns? 

It could collect contributions and invest widely in equities, property, gilts, etc and decide on a yearly basis how the profits should be allocated among members – let’s call it an “annual bonus”. 

In a good year, it could tuck some excess return under the mattress so that in a bad year, it could continue to provide a smoothed return. Once profits had been allocated, they couldn’t be taken away. 

And if, when a person retired, there was still cash under the mattress, they could be given a special “terminal bonus” to reflect the overall return made on their contributions.

Suppose we took it a stage further? What if it were a mutual company offering such a fund? All the profits would be available for the members, even the mortality profits when annuitants die before their allotted three-score and ten.

Now there’s an idea – a mutual company  running a fund with smoothed returns and with profits for its members. Hang on…

Change your culture or go to jail

Paul Myners has said, in response to this morning’s release of the ParliamentaryCommission on Banking Standards, that “nothing much will happen at least for 24 months”.

That seems to us to be a reasonable assessment of the prospects for action by a Government besieged by banking lobbyists and conflicted by its own desire to keep the economy going.

Yet, despite the industry’s efforts to keep all this change at arm’s length, there is some evidence that the patient may be recognising the need to heal itself, beginning perhaps at Barclays, in response to the Salz Review.

The key word, in our view, is “fiduciary”: the implicit duty of the Board of a company to act in the interests of those who have entrusted their monies to it. Shareholders, in the case of listed companies, and members in the case of mutuals.

Sadly, the executives of mutuals have been no less generous in rewarding themselves than those of listed enterprises.

“When I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach for my gun” has, apparently, been wrongly attributed to Hermann Goering. But the truth in that aphorism is that changing the culture of an organisation is not a task to be undertaken lightly.

And we have advised more than a few clients to find a more effective way of achieving behavioural change than just announcing a new set of corporate values, supported by so-called town hall meetings involving all staff.

Above all else, what matters is what the guy at the top does. And what the people then do. And what gets measured.