Lovely send off for dear Hector last night and the school did well saying goodbye to a teacher who was there at the birth of the school.
Now we need a swift send off for the kleptonic cambian ceo, saleem asaria. There was a spike in the blog’s viewings this week and I discovered why last night. On Wednesday ITV did an ‘exposure’ programme about the poor treatment of very vulnerable young people in cambian so-called care homes and schools.
Now one could easily have a go at the staff for their poor practice but they’re not the culpable ones. What does one expect when they’re paid so badly, get inadequate training, little meaningful support and are put in the position of having to somehow manage very challenging and vulnerable young people. Only this morning I spoke with a wonderfully experienced and caring care worker from Purbeck View about the programme and they told me that when on a bus yesterday they overheard someone saying they earn 10 pounds an hour as a cleaner, 1.50 more than care workers earn with cambian. No disrespect to cleaners, who do a far more worthwhile job than kleptasaria, but this simple comparison highlights the inadequate pay for those caring for vulnerable young folk.
I could easily have a go at senior management in the schools and carehomes overseen by kleptasaria but I’ve already written about them at length. They are also beholden to those above them in the managerial pecking order and are merely obeying their orders and paid rather more than poor careworkers to ‘manage’ and maintain the cambian image.
No there is only one person who should be held accountable for the exposure exposures and that’s mr saleem asaria. The mantra ceos and their ilk espouse is that their obscene pay packets and other looting (asaria trousered a fair few million shares when cambian thrust itself on the stock market a few years ago) is justified by their ultimate accountability. Except they are extremely rarely actually accountable, the people that are usually made accountable are the poor bloody workers, including the occasional senior manager (heads heads sometimes roll)..
Cambian charges supposedly public accounts hundreds of thousands of pounds annually for each of the young people entrusted to their care. Very little is actually spent on the young people and their carers wages. A great deal goes to kleptasaria.
This is the modern, privatised capitalist state.
The answers are quite simple and begin with the ridding of financial leeches.
Keep on keeping on, love Duncan.
duncancer 
I agree care workers should be paid and trained more. You want to blame the CEO but If a CEO decided to pay more they’d be replaced by the investors for failing to increase profits. And you can’t blame the investors because the fund managers would be fired if they invested your and my pensions in unprofitable businesses.
So how to square the circle? Any workable ideas??
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A whole new business model with ‘businesses’ such as cambian run as a not for profit affair, more equitable distribution of monies, an improved and more integrated care and education system, workers on boards, and a whole new financial system that rewards everyone. And should a ceo be accountable for systemic failings? Up the workers.
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“Now one could easily have a go at the staff for their poor practice but they’re not the culpable ones.”
Its easy to absolve the carers of their role, but dangerous to do so. The Holocaust was mechanically run by people who went along with things and perpetuated the system. Carers are all the things you say, poorly paid etc. but they are culpable. They don’t have to work at these places and if you look at the comments on any large job board – many choose not to.
Cambian is so desperate for staff that they will hire anybody and that is a problem. Many that are put in positions of care are not suited to these roles and hence the behaviour of the carers seen on #exposure. The homes shown are representative of Carer behaviour from my experience of a Cambian school/residential home and judging by former employee reviews I would say this is widespread.
I do agree and agree with Tanya Byron from the programme that it is a top down problem. It comes from the Head Office and is enforced by Senior Management who you rightly say maintain the Cabman image. Children should not be traded and used for money. You only have to look at share analysts this weekend hovering like vultures on the lower stock price as a buying opportunity to see where this comes from.
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I have some sympathy with your comment and we all bear differing degrees of responsibility and staff abuse should be dealt with. But I’ll stick with my judgmental beliefs with regard to those who should bear ultimate responsibility. They use an increasingly discredited business model with an underpinning profit drive that keeps workers underpaid, under trained and under supported. Which is why I often feel uncomfortable watching programmes like exposure because the mostly culpable ones are very rarely exposed. Thanks for commenting and keep on keeping on.
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Yes, I went straight to the same place. We must all obey our consciences over and above orders given by those who arrogate to themselves the fake authority to give us orders. Otherwise we are no better than the death camp operatives whose excuse of ‘obeying orders’ was rightly condemned at the Nuremberg Trials.
Martin’s point about the circularity of the argument may have some merit in principle. But the facts are that things are not going well by any standards. Far from assisting the smooth and profitable operation of the services they provide, these CEO financial leeches actually ruin these services. They leech their hosts to death and, in doing so, they infect the host organisations with their own values until everyone starts behaving the same way. We see this from the ‘top’ down in public and private organisations across the country, in government and in business.
In similar vein, on the AM show today, a certain David Gauke was explaining the efficacy of the welfare reforms and how these would help people get back into work and gain the self-esteem that results therefrom. He seemed a very nice and reasonable man. I was reminded of the slogan ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ – a delightful piece of masquerading propaganda.
But until we choose the people we ask to help organise things for us (yes, they are the servants not us) on the basis of whether they have a conscience which includes caring about others above themselves we will be stuck with this same shit. Until we the 99% are prepared to risk our own skin to remove the vile 1% from their positions of authority, we can truly blame no-one but ourselves for this shameful state of affairs.
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We all know the truth about cambian. One of your TAs, was the one told me about the 5 pound dinner vs 5 grand a week scam. Amazing when you think about it, all that money in the hands of the money grabbing SOBS.
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