Sound Therapy

Turning out the filing cabinet today I found a pile of blank self-evaluation forms from our days of running courses funded by the Learning and Skills Council. They were always a mystery to us as the people we worked with didn’t speak and certainly couldn’t read or write. So how were they supposed to fill in these forms?

We discovered there were support staff who had a vocation for these forms - they would simply fill them in, during the workshop, based on their observations of the students. Other tutors told us tales of painful sessions spent trying to get the students to fill them in themselves.

In the end we rebelled - we said we would do anything that would mean the delivery of a better service but we couldn’t see how these forms did that. We wrote to the management asking that they point out to those above them the sheer absurdity of these forms but they simply said they had to provide them in order to get funding. There were no answers to our questions Who reads them? Where do they go? How are they used to improve the service?

A local day centre manager whose students attended our courses was even more outspoken - she wrote that the courses were brilliant and the forms rubbish as there was no way to record that on them.

These weren’t the only forms of course. Each new academic year the folder was fatter. Very, very occasionally someone visited a class and observed what the students were doing. Otherwise, assessments were made and life was viewed through forms.

We left, of course, one of the saddest decisions we’ve made. Where are those forms now, I wonder. Influencing policy at higher levels? you’d like to think so. Shredded and sitting in the local landfill? Surely not…….

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