As the assignment report focuses on the business of education, we have to consider employment in the sector. One group we like to keep an eye on are the ever-increasing number of Non-Departmental Public Bodies (NDPBs). While there are two different types of NDPBs we still like to call the current crop of 25, ‘quangos’.

The highest paid Chair of a quango is Professor Aynsley-Green, the Children’s Commissioner, whose £130k package is more than the person tasked with running this small body. In the CEO stakes (the actual titles vary) is Dr Ken Boston at the QCA who gets £273k. Not bad for someone who, after a distinguished career in Australia, had ‘retired’ before being headhunted to the QCA. Other quango oddities:

The Student Loans Company, based in Glasgow. As it is English students who are in hock to the SLC, then surely the 1000 jobs they fund should be based in England?
the highest spending quango is the LSC (£12bn is the most recent figure). Post-16 education has the LSC, CITB, ECITB, MIAP and the SSDA - excessive even by quango standards?
Managing Information Across Partnerships (MIAP) is a lesser-known species of quango, whose budget seems non-existent, but whose 60 civil servants ‘act as a consultative and change development forum to remove wasteful and unnecessary bureaucracy from post-14 learning and skills data collection, storage and sharing’!

Certainly some of these quangos do important work, but they should benchmark themselves against the CITB and EITB, who get no funding from government and who pay their Chairs less than £20k. While there may be some rationalisation of HE/FE quangos, when the head of one is chopped off, like Hydra, several seem to emerge to replace it. The newest is likely to be the Creative and Cultural Education Advisory Board, although it’s not clear whether this will be the spawn of the DfES, DCMS, or both.