I’ve written before about our supply chain.

It always strikes me as bizarre that as a profession we talk about the value of people, but we seldom discuss, in real detail, the production of the resource that is central to our being.

Education.

Anyone who has been involved in education in any form will know that the one thing that defines our education system is constant change.

We plan our education policy on cycles of a maximum of five years. And yet our educational cycle is a minimum of 14 years. Which means that as a child, as a student, you could easily have four or five different educational policies in place during your education.

Different targets

Different focus areas

Different  inspection regimes

Different syllabuses (syllabi?)

Different exams

And the changes introduce unnecessary drag and inefficiency in to the supply chain as teachers and leaders attempt to understand, assimilate and implement the requirements of the latest policy.

But not only does that inefficiency mean that we’re not maximising the return on investment in educational resource, it also means that we are providing confused and often contradictory messages to both students and parents.

If we are serious about skills and education providing a competitive advantage to the UK, we need to take a longer term approach that builds consistently towards a future skills agenda and underpins our economic success.

Which means taking it out of the hands of politicians and raising it above the quagmire of vote winning, electioneering soundbites and delivering it into the hands of expert educationalists and economists.

I wrote a piece for HR Magazine recently on this, but simply put, if we want to be serious about our role in the strategic direction of our organisations and United Kingdom Plc, it needs to start with us taking education seriously.

So when the canvassers come and stand on your doorstep, don’t just ask them what their policy on education is, ask them how they’re going to ensure long-term stability in education.

Regardless of who is in power.