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Why is the Department for Education so bad: my organising theory --
a) it's got very very little institutional memory. Islington complaining ought to have set off alarms.
a) it's got very very little institutional memory. Islington complaining ought to have set off alarms.
b) In 2010, it was in charge of 217 schools and ~150 LAs. Since then, it's acquired direct responsibility for several thousand academies on top. It's left a lot of people doing work of old LAs - but (whatever you think of LAs) the DfE don't have experience/knowledge to do it well
c) Its ministers now all ape Gove's weird press strategy: pretending there was never an alternative under consideration to any decision and the whole "the unions are our enemy who must be crushed" play-acting. (See Williamson briefing about a "battle" to keep schools open)
d) It has good institutional instincts on a lot of issues: officials have been right on which free schools were dodgy, Steiners, grammars, budget control etc etc -- but it can't operationalise them, or ministers face perverse incentives to overrule them.
e) Bolting universities onto the dept has been a terrible error -- it's weakened HE within govt, and bound a relatively high-functioning area of bureaucracy (HE/HEFCE) into a very bad area of bureaucracy
