Business – stay out of the classroom!

I’ve always had time for Lord Nash as schools minister – a political outsider who, following a successful City career and undoubtedly with an eye to public service and altruism, chooses to serve in government. His feet are firmly on the ground and he’s a man of his word. But he lost me recently when he urged schools to take a leaf out of business’s book and stop giving underperforming teachers the benefit of the doubt.

He was speaking on “What is relevant in business to education” at the Challenge Partnership National Conference. Given his background, one might feel few people could be better placed. Describing occasions on which he wasn’t sure whether someone would really measure up to the job, he would perform “a risk-reward analysis”: “how much better can this person get and then what’s the downside and the upside of letting them go?”.