DEFRA: Bureaucrat wanted, education essential, no skills or experience required.
Explaining how people get into public service and why the type of people who work for DEFRA is a big story.
But at its most reductive, it's the defecits of people who don't have any experience outside of the civil service that undermine all institutions.
The only requirement to get into a university is to be born into riches or be willing to go into debt.
Which is why universities are churning out brain-dead robots who passed an exam instead of people who can understand what responsibility, decision-making and leadership mean.
In my day there was a meritocracy, where only those who had an aptitude for learning went to university.
Since then I’ve met way too many people with a university degree who go into public service without any critical thinking skills, no ability to think outside the box and insufficient experience to resolve issues.
DEFRA now requires cattery owners to possess the minimum educational requirement of a level 3 animal management qualification to work in or buy a cattery. But in our opinion, the qualification is insufficient to run a cattery, and in many cases wouldn't even get you into an interview.
That's because running a cattery isn't a qualification. Running a cattery means dealing with customers, taking bookings, working 7 days a week, being on call 24 hours a day, being permanently responsible, washing half a dozen loads a day, completing DEFRA’s ludicrous paperwork and making enough time in a day to run a boarding establishment - The absolute opposite of anything a bureaucrat has to contend with.
- The only way to run a cattery is to have had relevant experience. For example a veterinary nurse, voluntary experience in the sector, been a hotelier or worked as a front line employee of the NHS.
- No qualification can replace experience and no qualification can make up for inexperience and most of the knowledge to run a cattery can’t be taught in a class.
- And to put it bluntly, if someone from DEFRA arrived here brandishing a level three animal management certificate it would not indicate that they had the experience to work in this environment, understand our sector or write our regulations … and DEFRA have the temerity to demand that we have a higher and more relevant level of education than they had when they wrote our regulations!