tyger on the outcry about school and hospital league tables and targets
I understand totally the publics point about the misrepresentation and queering of statistics, but I must protest about the general hostility towards statistical analysis. We have a saying in business that goes What gets measured, gets done. It’s true to a point too.
When large organisations attempt to instigate change and manage progress, they like the individual, need feedback. Now when you have a reactionary and irrational press – take a bow The Daily Mail and The Daily Express – who are quite happy to demolish the reputation of entire governmental departments on the strength of one or two anecdotes, you can understand why the government feels it needs statistical evidence to support its work.
Now like all ‘ideas’ they can be taken to the extreme. The current folly in the education system where kiddiewinks are taught to pass exams (for the schools statistical benefit), as opposed to being taught to develop their own faculty for enquiry and comprehension, is evidence of a dangerously ideological approach to implementing targets. However surely we need to measure the value of our education in some way? Likewise we need to ensure that we are receiving value-for-money from our National Health Service too.
We have an incomprehensible loathing of statistics in this country, and yet in the States and Japan where industrial productivity is much higher, statistics are fundamental to the management of the organisation.
It is not statistics per se that are the problem; it is their ideological application.
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I quite agree – government need to set targets and monitor progress through reporting on those targets. There are no businesses that get this exactly right, or even close to right, so why should government be expected to do so? That´s no excuse, they need to try and, just like business, need to continually amend and tune their measurement systems without it appearing like political spin.
This “government obsessed with targets” nonsense hollered by the right leaning press is just playground politics. I would hope for far more mud-slinging if the government poured money into schemes and policies that they then failed to monitor.