Police fix crime statistics to meet targets, MPs told

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25002927

So that would amount to hundreds if not thousands of cases over the years ranging from, say, burglary as a starting point to serious sexual assault, all going unreported. So senior officers and/or their analysts may have had no idea if someone 'prolific' or who would commit a serious crime again was operating then

Always it is so. You put people under pressure to meet targets, they will fix whatever system you give them to increase the chances of meeting those targets. Everything else becomes secondary.

Yep, think school league tables. Absolutely shag-all to do with improving education, except perhaps for some original notion of improving things.

However, the number of "there, they're, their", "should of" and "defiantly and definately" fcuk-ups appear to have increased a hundredfold since the tables were introduced; not to mention the piss-poor arithmetical skills - it seems most people can barely add up a couple of numbers without a calculator.

They do the opposite. Schools want to do better in the tables, so they switch exam boards for certain subjests as their exams are considered slightly easier. Other exam boards then leapfog them and make theirs even easier to get the school's business back.
You only need to look at past papers to see the trend. At school our geology and physics teachers have twenty years worth of past papers. You could see the gradual change.
If they want to improve standards they should have just one exam board nation wide. The same exam for every subject in every school with no financial pressure to make them easier.

On the performance of the CPS the chances of successfully prosecuting the police are nil.

If you set targets then the body will change its behaviour to succeed at those targets, it is common sense and shame the politicians who push this idea did not foresee this happening.

That's something that's always puzzled me. I just can't understand why all kids don't take the same exams.

"Because competition is always better."

In France it's part of the teachers duties to write and mark the exams, for no extra pay. Several teachers write papers and one gets picked on the day to be given to everyone. Seems to work ok

How is that any better? If a school is struggling in the league tables, the head can coerce the teachers to write slightly easier exam papers and thereby improve the school's results for that year.

Everyone takes the same paper, across the whole country. It's just that the papers get written by working teachers instead of retired/ inexperienced people and the teachers take it in turn to write them, as a draw between the ones with the right amount of experience throughout the country. Seems obvious why it's better.

Totally true

Where I work they decided one year to make part of our performance based on a percentage of projects getting signed off 1st time by snr managers
So if you put a project in and it got rejected that would count against your end of year appraisal (and so pay)

However you could put discussion papers up for consideration and they did not count. All that happened was that ALL projects were put up as discussion paper until they were agreed and only then put up as formal project. It meant that the workload the snr managers had to look at tripled so they dropped that idea the next year. It also meant that all the PMs had over a 98% success rate

It's more obvious now that you've elaborated - your previous post led me to think the approach was on a school by school basis.

I agree, it would end the competitive downgrading of exams to boost results. It would also make transferring schools a lot easier as you would be on the same exam board so would be taught the same things.

From time to time, I ask my wife about why spelling mistakes are skipped when marking. They mark not everyone, but the task at hand. So if they are writing a story, then the creativity is assessed, but not the spelling and grammar. To me, who had to write spelling mistakes out five times under any piece of work, regardless of the exercise at hand, I find this wrong. It's teaching kids that being lax in spelling (for example) is OK unless spelling is the thing being checked. They also have to write something positive on each piece of work - at times, this is difficult.

Personally, marking is messed up and needs to be more critical and mistakes being picked up. Sadly, we'll be entering a time when teachers won't be able to tell the difference between the various forms of "their" soon.

Schools are exam machines now - even primary schools. It's a damn shame as they should be encouraging much, much more.