... school things ...
Mostly agree. Here things are slightly different (or are they?).
The government sets the curriculum here based on a combination of some crystal ball somewhere, some common sense and corporate demand. "we need more computer people so lets spawn an initiative". One of them was very successful (BBC computing initiative) but the 10-15 year lag on idea to effect is somewhat terrible. Thus lots of people fall straight out of the education system straight into a shit show of no employment because either the things they were shaped to do are obsolete or saturated with staff.
But in that 10-15 year gap, there is another shit show of deep hierarchy. The government divides the country up into local education authorities (LEAs) who oversee the schools. The LEAs are responsible for pooling resources across schools and schools are responsible for curriculum. Now schools get a fairly nice budget and are NOT underfunded here despite the crap the teachers are mostly spouting. What happens is the schools are marketed various fads. The fads range from new teaching methodologies, training courses, magical unicorn software and all sorts of shit. So what happens is the entire budget gets burned on changing large things rather than incremental improvement and on dead end fat methodologies where are children are experimented on really.
At the end of the day, much like our health service, changing ideas and playing find the ideology eats more resources than the functional role of teaching children (or fixing people if it's health care).
The Google Classroom incursion was a really really good example of where this goes to hell because it shows that when the teachers are sold an incompatible ideology, any ability to adapt to the situation is thrown out of the window almost immediately. In this case the LEA were rolling it out incrementally to all schools but the last two that were holding on were the ones my kids went to.
The schools my kids went to were guilty of:
1. Spending £100k they on a VMware cluster they don't need because google classroom was coming in the LEA told them about it.
2. Spending £50k on ipads via a 3rd party non apple distributor that leads to £1500 a seat cost for a single fucking mid-range ipad with NO ADDITIONAL SOFTWARE. Not only that, none of their existing estate worked with it so the teachers got a free ipad each out of it basically.
Now I was a parent governor at one of the above schools which I found was a role which had "conduct rules" which were tantamount to "you can't speak about these problems". I quit so I could speak freely.
So the problems here are:
1. Idiot fads sold by companies who are trying to turn education into a cow to milk rather than a public service.
2. Idiot short sighted school management.
3. Self interest and disinterest in self-improvement by teachers (unless there's a free training course)
4. Complete lies about funding.
When I got asked recently to donate to our local school I raised an FOI for their accounts which they declined as it'd cost too much to prepare. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Headmistress has a nice 20 plate Audi TT...