I feel the Government has confused targets with bench marking. The article considers the problems with targeting which start because they are top down. Bench marking is a bottom up exercise where you look at how to make improvements. Trouble is that requires hard thinking rather than ticking a box

Richard, West Midlands,

The mistake is confusion of outcomes and objectives. The outcome - a higher score - becomes a proxy for better health, education, police work... and all energy diverts into "making the numbers". In theological terms, taking things out of context to worship them blindly is the heresy of idolatory.

Geoffrey Morton-Haworth, London,

goal setting theory (from Locke&Latham) requires that a correct combination of process, performance & outcome goals to be used-setting the wrong types of goals will end you up in the mess we see these days in schools and hospitals (amongst others), but without goals you are rudderless...

simon, richmond, uk

Theoretically and as a Ph.D. economist, I agree with Mr. Parris. As an MA psychologist working in US public mental health, I daily see how expensive and intrusive the measurement of target compliance is: the process of measuring seriously and negatively affects the process it is supposed to measure.

Wolfgang, Boulder, CO, USA

'Have you noticed how the cry of “quality can't be quantified” tends to come from the professions? From the lips of doctors...'

Own goal, I'm afraid, Matthew. Remember how this government forced the GPs to adopt a new system of payment, only to discover they'd been doing far MORE than they thought?

Tom Welsh, Basingstoke,

Very perceptive article, Mathew. Many of the comments demonstrate your point. Public employees can come up with 100 reasons not to be measured. So could employees in any business but it would not work. Freedom of information is the key. The public can work out for themselves what the measures mean.

Anthony, Richmond, UK

The trouble with targets, like statistics, is that they are being used like a drunk against a lamp post, for support rather than enlightenment.
They have become an end in themselves rather than a means to an end. As we all know they can and are fiddled.

Steve Lux, Caerdydd,

My assessment is a good article Matthew. But would it have been a better article had you written another ten pages? Can quality be measured by amount? The bricklayer has to lay so many bricks in a day but it has to be done to a standard. In my experience in the NHS at the moment quantity is king.

baz, basildon, uk

Schools are given advance notice of inspections because they have to produce half-a-ton of paperwork for the inspectors. And SATs are not reliable, whether as summaries of what the child has achieved or as predictiors of what it can achieve. They take up a lot of time to little purpose.

Henry Sopwith, Montpellier,

Matthew, the problem with league tables is that they encourage schools to focus on less difficult subjects in order to achieve a greater headline rate of passes. Hence, the absorption of Physics and Chemistry into 'General Science', much to the detriment of the country's educational standards.

Paul, Coventry,

"Worse, you will hear the view that nobody is better qualified to assess a school class's performance than its own teachers. This is nonsense, but seductive."

So who else is better to assess them then? who else sees them virtually every day? who else sees the work they produce? answer me that!

Nathan James, Liverpool, UK

Matthew Paris misses the obvious conclusion: that public sector service provision should only be used as a last resort. Private organisations, profit-making or charities, go out of business unless they give the customers what they want. State bureaucracies can go on giving a poor service forever.

Dr. Keith Anderson, Durham,

A "target" culture is part of the apparatus of Corporatism and the attendant Managerialism that goes with it. It is all about making the existing system "work" better. Politics is rendered into management and management proves its worth by audit. It prevents challenges and new thinking emerging.

Ron Tod, Sydney, Australia

Andy, Measuring MP's. The quantifiable - time spent in the house and on committees, questions asked, speeches given, constituency issues dealt with to the satisfaction of constituent. At least its a check on effort put in. And a periodic vote on quality delivered.

Robert D, London,

Jon Livesey: there was a lot wrong with English education before Plowden but it was hidden away in secondary moderns.

The Adult Literacy campaign of the early 1970s revealed that!

Tom MacFarlane, Thornton, UK

You ask "Without measurement, how can we tell whether things are getting better?", yet using targets and measurements out politicians are telling us that our schools are better than ever.

I ask "With measurement, how can we tell whether things are getting better?"

David, brighton,

The point is, Matthew, that SATS were meant to be a snapshot of progress at any one time. Not a goal; not fodder for league-tables. They have turned into an end in themselves with teachers aiming only to get kids the best marks possible rather giving the best education possible.

Rick Worth, Rochester, UK

"the focus is on top-down measures through national targets"
David Miliband

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted" Einstein

No prizes for guessing who I agree with!

jessica, Milton Keynes,

My objection to SATs is that a child's whole educational experience and by default the quality of a school's provision is whittled down to one exam. A child in my class this year, more than capable of being a level 5, only attained a level 4in writing. The reason: he said the writing task was boring

Rob, Northolt,

Interesting perspective. Perhaps Mathew would dare to suggest a suitable target to measure the performance of individual MP's, the ultimate public servants?

andy, belfast,

Of course performance needs some form of assessment. What people mean by 'target culture' is the " oversimplification, misdirection, and political posturing " that takes the place of proper measurement, and is a typical part of a shallow, 'PC' system that has dropped standards through the floor.

L Stewart, Spalding, England

Obviously providers of public services must be held accountable, somehow, somewhere, someday. But the extreme difficulty of doing so, as evidenced by the mess of the "target culture," is telling us something.

It is telling us that government-delivered public services should be a last resort.

Christopher Chantrill, Seattle, USA

"Targets" may be OK to help achieve overall aims but can go wrong at the front-line eg "Sticks and carrots" mentality sometimes feels like "workers rewarded for treating the one they're paid to serve like ass" in my experience. Regulatory sticks must be used protect citizens, not systems, first.

Mrs.Josephine Hyde-Hartley, Bacup, UK

Colin, shrewsbury seems to be completely deluded. Does he really think that English education lagged for "one hundred years"?

Anyone educated in the UK no later than the sixties received a superior education. Only since Plowden has the rot set in.

jon livesey, Sunnyvale, CA/USA

Sorry, Matthew, but you're wrong. I teach at a 16+ college; the schools have tried so desperately to get enough year 11s through GCSE, by any means necessary, that students arrive with a clutch of meaningless passes, know almost nothing, have no idea how to learn, and M&D think they're brilliant!

Gill, Southampton, UK

The teaching profession is especially prone to special pleading. For about 100 years their work was not measured at all, with the result that England fell miles behind Europe. Their squawks of self-interested protest can still be heard in every union meeting and BBC interview.

Colin, shrewsbury,

Auditing outcomes is necessaary. Targets that cause perverse conequences because they are ill thought out are a bad idea, but that is what we have at present.

Adam, Oxford, UK