All ministers go mad, but some go mad faster than others. A sure sign is a craving to appoint “tsars”.
It emerged today that education secretary, Nicky Morgan, is appointing a school behaviour tsar, Tom Bennett, to eliminate “low-level disruptions” in class. These disruptions have been identified in Whitehall as passing notes, swinging on chairs, playing on mobile phones and “making silly comments”. Morgan, a dead ringer for Colonel Cathcart in Catch 22, works out that these misbehaviours cost pupils precisely “38 days of learning a year” and they must be stopped.
Bennett’s remit begs ludicrous questions. Why only “low-level” disruption? Faced with classroom warfare in the lower-fifth, will he say, “Sorry chief, that is too high-level for me?” He says he wants to tackle “an elephant in the classroom”. Is that a high- or low-level elephant? The lack of a comma in his job description suggests his task is only with “low-level behaviour that unfairly disrupts learning”. Does that mean “fair” disruption, so fashionable in management schools, is OK?
Morgan is tying Bennett’s hand behind his back. She surely realises that swinging on chairs, playing with mobiles and silliness in comments start at home. Why no tsar for low-level domestic silliness? Where is her parenting tsar?
Needless to say, when we scratch the surface, Bennett, like all tsars, will not go near the serfs. He need not even associate with kulaks, or teachers. He will spend the brief life-cycle of a Whitehall tsar attending meetings, organising groups and hiring consultants. He will perhaps then prove he has reduced “learning days lost” from 38 to 34 and go back to a day job.
The word tsar is meant to cloak a passing ministerial frustration with an aura of brute decisiveness. Borrowed from Roman caesars via ancient Russia, it sweeps aside considerations of consultation or democracy. Who needs a wimpish under-secretary or director-general when a full-blooded tsar is on the scene? Modern governments have thrown tsars at curbing litter, drug-taking, rough-sleeping and cancer. Appointments rarely last more than a few months and all they are really meant for is a headline. They embody stupid government.
Morgan says Bennett proves her “commitment to social justice”, so that “every single person in the country has access to the best opportunities Britain has to offer”. This waffling faith in the state as sole purveyor of human happiness comes from someone who calls herself a Tory. She sees insurrection in a swinging chair, dissidence in a passed note, counter-revolution in a silly comment. She has gone native. She should just pay teachers to do their jobs and leave them alone.
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