We were told the other day that the UK government has started awarding gold stars to universities, colleges and other places of "further" education. Gold, silver and bronze stars - sorry, ratings not stars. They're the end-product of a new evaluation process called the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), which is intended to improve standards by setting out its own criteria for "excellence" and then rating compliance with those criteria.
     You get a gold star - sorry, rating - for doing what the Teaching Excellence Framework tells you to do, not for challenging it, or coming up with a better idea. The debate "What is excellence in education?" has already been had, I guess, in some government office before the universities, etc., even get a look in. Pity our youngsters can't attend government offices for their further education, rather than universities.
     They might have to come to England, though, as the TEF is not UK-wide. "The TEF was developed by the Department for Education in England," says the website of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, which is working with the Quality Assurance Agency (seriously, it is called that) on "TEF Year 2 Implementation", which is what's happening at the moment. In England.
     Places of further education in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland can also apply for gold stars, although this TEF thing is only formally available (voluntarily; no university, etc., has to be assessed) in England. All very thought-through, right? The government gets to be seen to be busy by launching it; then, by opting in, the universities implicitly give it their seal of approval. Clever old government; gullible old universities, competing for gold stars.
     No, there's no extra money involved, except in the sense that if you get a gold star, that will come to the attention of students choosing a university (yes, it's that way round these days), and of course, recruiting more students means getting more money. No, there are no under-cover student-type assessors, in the way that hotel guests sometimes reveal themselves to be under-cover hotel inspectors judging whether a hostelry is worth, say, three stars or four.
     There is "a complete list of TEF assessors and panel members" on the Higher ... calls itself "Hefce", I think ... website, but when I clicked on the link I got an error message, and, you know, life is short. Anyway, my own "Website Excellence Framework" balks at an error message explaining that a link is probably broken because they've been redesigning their website and - my paraphrase - accidentally trod on it. Oh, and could I let them know? This is higher education, right? Bright people taking it upon themselves to spend our money assessing other people's excellence?
     Oh, wait - sorry - there are student assessors, and in exactly that hotel sense. The student guide to the TEF tells us that the assessment is substantially based on: "how many students do not continue with their studies after starting; how satisfied students are with key aspects of their teaching and learning; and graduates’ employment after they leave." I get the third one - education is aimed at employment, these days, nothing "further" than that - but the first and second? Excellence in education is a function of student satisfaction? Really? Just keep them happy?
     Also taken into account for a TEF assessment would be a voluntary submission by a "provider" (I think they mean a university) putting forward "additional evidence of teaching excellence" in a submission that "can be up to 15 pages", which is an odd limit. Very tiny typeface? But never mind. A "provider" will be assessed as excellent if it can provide evidence that it is excellent - just so long as its students agree. And get jobs - though it doesn't specify jobs that they could only get with their education - after they leave.
     No pressure, then. If you go to the Times Higher Education (THE) website and read through the analysis of the THE Teaching Survey 2017 (released in February 2017), you come up against this in the bit where they're talking about the TEF: "Only 4 per cent of academics and 6 per cent of administrators believe that the proposed framework will accurately assess teaching quality, with 75 per cent of the former and 71 per cent of the latter saying it will not. And only 12 per cent of academics and 18 per cent of administrators believe that it will improve teaching quality (64 and 53 per cent, respectively, feel it will not)."
     A university chancellor was quoted in a newspaper saying that the new system represented "the passing of the old guard". An interviewee on my radio spoke of "unintended consequences". I wondered whether it would be appropriate to write about the recent conversation I had with a fine-arts graduate, lately of a gold-star institution near here, about her aspirations, as she took my money and made me the flat white I had ordered.

And we should try not to forget the news reports last week in which it was suggested that tower-block external cladding can be simultaneously compliant with fire regulations, and highly inflammable. The overnight news brings accounts of tower-block residents emergency-evacuated because their homes turn out to be fire traps. I wonder if there is anybody, anywhere, who is absolutely one hundred per cent surprised by this. Or does it, up to a certain percentage, tally with what we know of human nature?

Where I go to, the talk is all of big data, and getting closer to the customer by (for example) knowing what they're doing online. Where I come from, I'm chased by pop-up ads from websites I visited days ago. I buy the second book in a series, and my Kindle suggests that I might like the first. Oh, and when I drop anything off at the dry-cleaner, I get an email later, asking how I'd rate the experience.
     I don't mind. But if all this leveraging of "big" data about my activities and preferences really worked, I'd be living a much easier life. With "deep" data, which is perhaps unattainable by technology (spoiler for my conclusion?), the internet might know that I chose not to buy the thing I looked at on that website the other day; my Kindle might work out that I bought the second because I liked the first in paperback; my dry-cleaner - oh, don't get me started. I can join a "club" of people who drop off their dry cleaning there, and carry a card that identifies me as a member - no, don't get me started.
     I question whether it counts as innovation to learn a new trick with existing technology and apply it without question. We may be reaching the limits of what can be achieved via a superficial analysis of "big" behavioural data, and perhaps we're getting to the point where the customer is tolerating low-level stupidity rather than admiring how perceptive we are.
     To achieve "deep" big data, as distinct from shallow and perhaps counter-productively superficial big data, maybe the only answer is to include the human element? If you want to know what I really think of the "suggested posts" I'm offered on Facebook, for example, don't look at the three-option tick-box form I'm offered if I delete one - ask me.
     But - yeah, right. How do you ask me?
     Send for an innovator. We need something new here.

I can't rid myself of the thought that the solution to all this is not to substitute one politician for another, one political party for another. Yes, Jeremy Corbyn seems post-election to embody hope and change while Theresa May has come to embody - actually, read the body language and the facial micro-expressions. I don't want to read analysis of the former's (lack of) administrative skills, because that's what the civil service does. I can't see anybody at the top of one party who isn't either a cartoon character or somewhat too desiccated to lead; I can't see anybody at the top of the other party except its leading personality.
     None of which is important, except that we follow personalities just as we follow flags. But that's the only role of a political leader. Trusting them actually to run things is historically a mistake and even more so today. Kensington. Seems to me that what's missing is transparency in the sense of accountability. Yes, politics is going to push this tragedy down the road to a public inquiry at which we will learn lessons at the expense of having lost the raw edge of immediacy. What I feel I should know, today, is: what's being done, and who's doing it, to prevent this happening again.
     I don't want to hear that a politician is putting in place an urgent review. I want to see, via social media, that local people, firemen, perhaps even local media, are checking out the fire precautions in their local blocks and individual flats. I want to know the name of the individual, or the names of the team members, who are going into tower blocks in Kensington and checking the fire safety. Not to accuse them of anything, or even to hold them responsible, but to hear what they have to say.
     And act on it. And know that it's being acted upon now, by people on the spot, rather than years later when the public inquiry has heard from all the witnesses.

There are people to help, in their multitudes. There are more supplies than can be distributed. Central government is reported to have drafted in civil servants to help the local council, which is reported to have "gone AWOL" (one radio report, this morning). What is not needed here is government. What is present here, in abundance, is spontaneity. People just turned up; supplies were delivered. There is a lack of co-ordination and thus, I suppose, control. But I would rely on spontaneity to provide that, not government.
     I wonder how big a change is coming.

We wake up to the knowledge that the country is riddled with tower blocks like that one. There were people at upper-floor windows. A baby was thrown from an upper-floor window - and caught. As so often seems to happen, we find our sense of community in tragedy. A disaster happens, or an atrocity: doors are thrown open; beds are offered for the night; volunteers and donations arrive. This time, Muslim volunteers - the reports specified Muslim, but they weren't alone - came from all over London to help. This time, places of religion and halls and safe spaces in West Kensington are already over-stocked with donated bedding, food, clothes, nappies, even furniture. The MP David Lammy showed his emotion as he spoke to Channel 4 News about the friend he lost, an artist, who died with her mother.
     Meanwhile, in the background, the necessary conversations have begun about how this could possibly have happened. Grenfell Tower was built in 1974, same year as the film The Towering Inferno was released. Safety features fell a long way short of today's standards, and we now know that renovations, alterations, et cetera, can compromise (ie, drill through or remove) such safety features as fireproof walls and panels. 9/11 hasn't faded from the collective memory, and we now learn that there have been more or less regular tower-block fires around the world since then. Floating like so much rubbish on the tide of emotion is the politics: May doesn't care because she didn't meet the people; Corbyn is exploiting the tragedy to highlight the division between rich and poor. Nonsense. Both those individuals are human, which is enough to refute all of that.
     What happened was, I suppose, people. However well-intentioned, or self-interested, or both, or otherwise driven, people got together to make this happen. Urban planners, high-rise architects, successive local authorities, private contractors, all working within rules and to financial constraints imposed by governments. And then other people were not empowered to stop them: the poor and vulnerable, voiceless people who were given homes in the block. What might happen now is that we collectively raise the money to re-house the residents of (initially) the upper floors of all those other blocks, and we manage to do that separately from the political process, which can't operate without soundbites, arguments and "balanced" debates between party members who oppose each other and get nowhere. Politics, democracy as practised today, gives us only division.
     Maybe the disaster-relief fund will pick up enough momentum to get the job done, and the politics will evaporate. Imagine that - the revolution finally arrives, and it turns out to be a house-building project.
     Or are we human? Are we going to spend our time arguing over who's at fault and who can be blamed, as if picking a scapegoat would give us closure? There are people who will sleep tonight on the upper floors of tower blocks. Or not sleep. I say: let's stop arguing and build houses.

Actually, this was taken yesterday, but even the demands of fake news have to be respected sometimes. And there's a kind of truth to it, in that the sun didn't come out properly until this morning. It's a bright day in Falmouth, full of promise. My picture has the truth of fiction.

And there's something deeply satisfying in the knowledge that I took the picture yesterday, on the 12th, wrote the paragraph above on the 13th, today, and then didn't put in a title so that the machine would automatically put in the date. Which it did - yesterday's date. Let's just say that the apparently factual statements in this blog post are "based on a true story" about taking a photograph.

To write this into my own record, last Friday's (2/6/17) Financial Times quoted the "consultant, speaker and thought leader" Shashank Nigam on the British Airways IT meltdown. This, Nigam told the FT, is the "age of the enraged customer". Sounds right to me. Nigam is the author of Soar: How the Best Airline Brands Delight Customers and Inspire Employees (2016), which is, as you might just possibly guess, a book on airline branding. There's a generous sample on Amazon, and although my interest in airline branding is marginal at best, Nigam's opening pages brought me very close to buying. I remember Paco Underhill's Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping (1999), which I found similarly convincing although the two books are very different: Underhill is writing about people and their shopping behaviour; Nigam is writing about airlines and how they present themselves.
     We are "enraged customers", aren't we? We have so many outlets for our emotion, and rage plays better on social media than resigned irritation. I wonder whether we really feel the way we say we feel, and whether we've always felt that way. And/or - is there a lot more "provocation" these days than there used to be? Somewhere in the collective recent memory is that airline incident in which a doctor was dragged off a flight. Then, three weeks ago, we had the "ransomware crisis" and the revelation that critical systems across the UK's NHS were running on archaic, insecure software. No sooner had we had ample time to fix that issue, than an engineer flicked off a switch at a single point of failure in a critical system - to go by the company's apparently unembarrassed explanation - and that was enough to kill an entire airline. Cue Nigam.
     Floating around the internet is a short piece to camera by the film director Ken Loach (see I, Daniel Blake), pointing to food banks, benefit cuts, other welfare failures of the modern state, and moving on from all that directly to the assertion that we need a Labour government. Finishing this two days after that bizarre election, I think I'll sidestep the question of whether we need somebody else heading up the government. No comment, except to say that the two major parties will be playing very different versions of "spot the election winner" in the coming months. Today's state does fail the poor, the sick and the disadvantaged (and I'm sure there was a news story recently - a mental illness is being redefined so that fewer people qualify for financial support), but I don't buy the idea that the solution is to switch from one group of politicians in the top jobs, to another. Speaking generally, you understand; not thinking of any specific individuals.
     Applying a version of Occam's razor to current British politics, I find it a lot easier to believe that there is no money left to do anything, than to believe that any political vision, with or without costings, can be applied in a way that will immediately (or even slowly) bring a marked (or even perceptible) improvement in anything. That doesn't mean I would argue for any policy of "austerity" that was to be implemented by politicians (of all people); it's just that I don't believe the current macro-political, macro-economic system is any more capable of being fixed than a modern car is capable of being made to fly. And while I'm at it, I've never been "delighted" by an airline (or "inspired" by an employer, come to think of it, although that would be down to my career choices).
     The common factor here, common to the paragraphs about airlines and to the paragraphs about politics/welfare, is human nature. So many words have been spoken, written and posted about the importance of building "redundancy" (duplication) into critical systems. And yet, three weeks after ransomware (ransomwaregate?), whatever systems review they undertook (not?) at BA ... missed that switch. Welfare is a vast labyrinth of people, administrators of people, systems and administrators of systems, regulators, politicians, journalists, patients who need care, patients who could just as easily have visited their GP or local pharmacist, opinions, entrenched positions, did I mention politicians? It's too big. There are too many people.
     And if you blur out the welfare-specific details, that makes it sound just as unmanageable, just as beyond any hope of change, as any other large organisation. I've seen it written that globalisation doesn't work any more. Big organisations certainly seem to fail very easily, even if they're held in place by spin or dogma. I wonder: what about national government?