Friday 21 September 2007

Deathly dumbing down


The following story can be applied to the NHS, policing or even the classroom. It demonstrates the same underlying principles of a cost cutting dumbing down that the government has negligently forced upon an unsuspecting public. Tragically a young boy drowned and PCSOs (police community support officers) were called to the scene, unfortunately for the boy and his family the PCSOs were not trained to deal with this kind of 'major incident'.

It is not the fault of the PCSOs as they have not been adequately trained to do things that should be expected of staff that have the very important role of patrolling and policing the streets. It is the government's fault for replacing properly trained staff with less trained staff who are simply not up to the job, this is happening in many different areas of the public sector. Paul Kelly, the chairman of the police federation in Manchester, sums it up well and his logic can be applied across the board:

"The message is clear and unambiguous - it's the government, they are trying to fool the public.

"They take a person and dress him up as a police officer but they just don't have the same powers.

"Every single police officer I trained with left training school with a life-saving certificate of some sort."

He said the PCSOs might not have been able to swim and in that case they should not have risked their lives.

But he added: "People throw themselves into rivers and ponds to save people every day because it's the right thing to do.

"This is an accident waiting to happen again."

Precisely, the government are dishonestly trying to con the public with this shoddy second rate service. They are dressing up the untrained in the clothes of the highly trained and pretending that it will not make a difference, when it blatantly will. There are hundreds of accidents waiting to happen around the country as we speak.

Nurses are being dressed up as Doctors and given roles for which they are inadequately trained. While Health Care Assistants are dressed up as nurses and asked to do tasks for which they are also not properly trained. PCSOs are the example of the dumbing down in the police service, while classroom assistants are given tasks at school that they are simply not adequately trained to do as well as proper teachers.

It is dishonest, it is dangerous and it damn well stinks. Wrapping up a turd in a banana skin does not turn the turd into a banana, and one does not need to taste the turd to find this fact out. How many lives will have to be lost before this negligent dumbing down is stopped? It appears to me that this government cares not for lives.

1 comment:

Elaine said...

Sadly this has been blatantly obvious to almost eveerybody bar the government and lickspittle senior managers who do what they are told unhesitatingly. Keep up the good work FF