Nanny has special friends, on whom she likes to lavish her largesse and favours. One of those special friends is the ever popular, and much respected, Crapita.
Nanny decided to waste £100M of our money on her much vaunted, yet inept and useless, reward card scheme designed to encourage teenagers to attend school.
Whatever happened to a sound beating instead, as a means of "encouraging" attendance?
It could have paid for more than 3,300 new teachers, 250,000 laptop computers or replenished understocked school libraries with 10 million new text books.
Anyhoo, the £100 million was wasted on the Connexions Card, which has now been axed. However, not all was wasted; £66M of this went to Crapita, who ran the scheme.
Nick Seaton, the chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said:
"Millions of pounds of taxpayers' money has ended up
in the coffers of the Government's friends at Capita because of this gimmick.
This money would have been much better spent in schools and colleges
on raising basic standards,
so that pupils have the necessary levels to continue with education."
The Connexions Card was launched by Nanny's Department for Education and Skills six years ago. It was designed to give 16 to 19 year olds an incentive to stay on at school by giving them "loyalty points" that they could exchange for discounts on CDs, clothes and tickets for events.
Needless to say, Nanny was warned that her daft scheme was utter bollocks. However, being a person never to listen to facts, Nanny continued to back the scheme; even though there was no evidence that it had improved teenagers' motivation, or led to more staying on.
In fact, less that 4% of teenagers had redeemed points with the card. Just 54,788 had used it by the end of 2004, fyi the target was 1.7 million.
Whilst the scheme was failing, Crapita made £66M and (under the contract) is due to receive a further £41M.
Nice work if you can get it!
I wouldn't be quoted on this, but leaked from the teenage grapevine was the rumour that using the Connexions card would allow the Connexions "personal advisers" to "spy" on the kids who used them by tracking where they had spent their Connexion card points. (They seem to have noticed how Nanny feels about kids eating too many hamburgers, etc.)
ReplyDelete(For "personal advisers" read: nosy would-be social-workers with minimal training, supposed to give careers advice interviews but with a tendency to ask intrusive questions about the teenager's family background.)
My "teenage informers" tell me that the kids at their school wouldn't have touched the Connexions card with a barge pole as they were determined to outwit Nanny's "spies"!
Interesting input from anonymous.
ReplyDeleteI bet Crapita initiated the idea as well - they seem to have plenty of scam going which make them money without there seeming to have been any real competition for the service (if that is a reasonable description) provided. Presumably it is a closed shop agreed with New Labia.
I suppose it is just possible that the 54,000 users were all kids of people who worked for Crapita. Or could just be one or two people with multiple identities as for so many other government schemes it seems.
Erm and now the founder of Crapita, Rod Aldridge is the sponsor of a new Academy....
ReplyDeleteMmm no connection I'm sure