No leadership or accountability: Education Dept chaos laid bare
A review of the Department of Education and Child Development has revealed the extraordinary depths of the key department’s organisational chaos.
Former Victorian education chief Peter Allen, brought in to review the department in the wake of the highly critical Debelle report, released his review this morning, and he has delivered a damning assessment of the department’s leadership, culture and organisational structure.
It paints a picture of an organisation in governance breakdown, with the review finding the department lacked the leadership, commitment or momentum to deliver the State Government’s education strategies.
It reveals a department gripped by fear of risk, where officers are locked in vaguely-defined meetings of committees of ambiguous purpose for more than 11,000 hours each year.
Among other findings, Allen says the department:
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- Did not get the clear sense of direction, momentum and focus from senior management needed to drive delivery of outcomes.
- Modified or failed to act on executive decisions with little or no follow up or accountability
- Appeared unable to establish authoritative leadership, organisation wide commitment, and the momentum necessary to deliver the challenging government strategic priority of ‘Every chance for every child’.
- Operates more like a group of isolated camps, looking for integrated leadership, but not at the cost of their own part of the organisation.
- Has a risk averse culture, and if anything goes wrong the ‘system’ gets the blame.
Allen’s review says the department has an “organisational architecture that appears to work against the achievement of mission”.
The review also reveals the findings of the first stage of a governance review of the department completed by Price Waterhouse Coopers in May 2013.
This review identified more than 160 committees or governance structures across the department.
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“The review reported that nearly 20 per cent of the committees did not have finalised terms of reference or charters, and (on conservative assumptions) an estimated 11,400 hours of department staff time was spent each year attending committee meetings,” the review said.
The PWC report also found confusion about the structures that govern the department, a lack of transparency around decision-making, and “committees or groups operating with no clear purpose”.
Allen said the impact of these shortcomings, reinforced by observations of senior staff that he interviewed during his review, was “confusion about who could decide what, and whether decisions made in one section of the department could be overridden without consultation”.
He makes 14 recommendations to improve the department’s structures and performance, but appears to question whether it has the capacity to turn things around, particularly given new challenges emerging in relation to the Federal Government’s school funding and accountability reforms.
“The breadth, scale and complexity of reform would challenge any organisation, much less one now emerging from an annus horribilis,” Allen says.
Education Minister Jennifer Rankine said today that the Government would implement all of the recommendations.
“I will now work with the Chief Executive of the Department, Mr Tony Harrison, to make sure the necessary changes are made and the South Australian public have greater confidence in the way our education system is administered,” she said.
Harrison, a former senior police officer, was brought into the department as a new broom about 10 weeks ago, after Allen had been appointed to review the department.
The review’s recommendations include developing clearer lines of responsibilities and accountability, guidelines to ensure the Minister and senior Department officers are advised as soon as possible of any allegation of a criminal act and new strategies to improve leadership within the Department.
The Chief Executive will report at least every three months to the Minister with details about the process of the implementations and any issues that may arise.
The report comes one day after Harrison announced that two senior executives would be leaving the department in the wake of the Debelle report, which was damning of the department’s response to a sexual abuse case at a western suburbs school.
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