(Small) bonfire of the Quangos

For anyone who hasn't heard yet, the government has announced the list of quangos that it intends to abolish. See here in the Independent.

One of those quangos is Ufi - the parent company for Learndirect and the disastrous UK Online. It was with the latter (UK Online) that we first learned about the government's actual attitude to talking to it's citizens online - - censor them if they don't agree with you.

Now if you were to look at the sites listed above it would look like Ufi/learndirect actually did some worthwhile work. It did in it's first year or two, very successfully in fact. But then the targets bullshit culture took over and it morphed rapidly into a horrific tax eating monster filled to the brim with completely pointless jobs and ever changing "targets" and "priorities". It sucked in taxpayer money from one end and out the other produced - literally - tonnes of patronising acronym-filled meaningless bullshit.

Also, most of the actual teaching took place in independent learning centres, previously private businesses that then became effectively Ufi franchises. This would have been OK if the said businesses hadn't been jerked around constantly by changing targets and funding models that would alter sometimes within months of the last regime being imposed. As a result lots of previously good learning centres went to the wall or became completely ineffectual.

I came to despise the organisation with a passion after working there for two years and as it seems to be receiving it's long overdue and richly deserved destruction I thought it was the perfect time to share my resignation letter from five years ago, which I sent to the entire company.

Read it here