In a Times report the other day about how the ever-generous taxpayer continues to lavishly fund UK and other consultancy firms out of the foreign aid budget, was the story of average payments by DfID of £4,765 for writing a blog post. There were 146 of these and I'll let you do the math. I hope they were long posts – perhaps at least as long as some of the expensive policy reports that were brief in both senses. If £4,765 a pop seems steep (NB to DfID, I'm available for much less), taxpayers should be relieved that one company originally asked for over £10,000. Well done vigilant officials.
The Times included the global learning programme in its list of unproven value extravagance. It wrote:
More than £14 million of taxpayers’ funds was spent encouraging teachers across the UK to “build their skills and confidence” in talking about global issues as well as promoting teaching about development, documents from the Department for International Development (Dfid) show. The Global Learning Programme was judged to have succeeded after teachers were allowed to carry out their own assessments “as part of their reflective practice”. Three years after the programme began in 2010, Dfid committed further millions despite not a penny going to developing countries and difficulties in accurately assessing the project’s impact. Review documents gave the programme an A, the mid-ranking grade denoting “met expectation”, after finding it improved understanding among some pupils across 13,227 schools. Dfid said that the programme would eventually reach half of all British schoolchildren and that it was normal practice for teachers to assess such projects.
Make of that what you can, but it was instructive to see this listed amidst far more egregious examples of poorly-accounted for spending. The "met expectation" is worth dwelling on, as some (including me) think that this has nothing to do with teachers building skills and confidence, but everything to do with buying public support for the DfID policy of spending 0.7% of national income on aid. DfE, meanwhile, sits on its hands.
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