Early years

From time to time I wonder why it is that central government makes such an awful fist of making provision for early years education, with total provision seeming to be well short of total need, a total need which is pretty well known: not many children do not have birth registrations and not many children come to this country in their early years. So a piece by Polly Toynbee in today's Guardian caught my eye.

It seems that an outfit called the Institute for Public Policy Research (http://www.ippr.org/), about which I know nothing, thinks that Ofsted is neither much cop at assessing the quality of early years provision nor much cop at doing anything about it, to the point where it may be that they are actually detracting from the efforts of local authorities.

Which makes me think that it is all part of the two part agenda of our central government. First, remove all serious functions from local authorities. Central nanny knows so much better than local nanny, a belief which governments of all persuasions seem to share. Heaven forbid that local authorities should actually have any authority. Second, by making inspection and quality a central function rather than a local function, one paves the way for privatisation, a favourite of the current government. Don't you worry who provides the service, we are keeping an eye on what they get up to for you.

I then wonder how many people Ofsted have to do this eye keeping and turn up their annual report, which while glossily produced and presented tells me nothing about their own staffing arrangements. But being in an inquisitive mood I keep trying and turn up a rather less glossy affair called annual report and accounts, which seems to be very preoccupied with the emoluments, perquisites etc of their senior staff, which I do not find very encouraging. Not a good sign that we feel the need to spend so much ink on such matters. But they do devote a very small amount of ink on a total of nine numbers (on page 47) about staff in general, which tell me that staff numbers have fallen quite drastically in the last couple of years, without any nearby explanation. Leaving us with around 1,500 people to keep an eye on some 25,000 schools and, I dare say, various other kinds of providers as well. Which must be hugely less than the staff in LEA's, even these days, but are they delivering the goods? Would we get better VFM if we were to leave LEA's get on with their job?

The article also mentions Gibraltar, the subject of another two glass wonder. We manged to offload Hong Kong onto the Chinese by the wheeze of Hong Kong remaining a semi-detached part of China for the time being and with a lengthy transition period. Lots of reserved rights for the Hong Kong'ers. Why on earth can't we do something similar with Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands? Why on earth should we let such small numbers of people in such unattractive parts of the world cause us so much bother?

OK, so there is the little matter of the treaty by which we borrowed Hong Kong for a while, rather than acquired the freehold, but I don't see why that accident of history should make so much difference.