ICAC lays down guidelines for the ESF

From today's Education Post, ICAC lays down guidelines for the ESF:

The Independent Commission Against Corruption has made more than 80 recommendations to ensure the English Schools Foundation avoids the type of conflict of interest that sparked uproar three years ago.

Carmel Chow Jun-lung, group head of the corruption prevention department, said the ICAC had not uncovered corruption but had identified many loose practices. These included inadequate guidelines for staff in their day-to-day work, existing guidelines occasionally not being followed and conflict of interest situations. The ESF had accepted all 84 recommendations and already implemented 60 per cent of them, he said. The remainder should be in place by the middle of next year.

Recommendations on conflicts of interest should prevent a member of a staff selection panel seeking the appointment himself half way through the process, Mr Chow said. This happened when former parent-teacher association chairman Mike Haynes applied for the post of chief executive.

"Everyone was aware that was not quite proper," Mr Chan said. He would not comment on how this could happen when John Shanahan, an ICAC chief investigator, was on the selection panel as the ESF's vice-chairman at the time.

For anyone who has forgotten, Mike Haynes was a member of the committee that was set up to find a new ESF Chief Executive. Then he decided to apply for the job himself, and he was chosen by the committee of which he had previously been a member. This was put to a vote of the full Foundation and defeated, following which the ESF chairman (Jal Shroff), vice-chairman (John Shanahan) and treasurer (Simon Glass) all resigned.

Comment: This sad episode is probably a prime example of what used to be wrong with the ESF. As I recall, at one stage it seemed that Mike Haynes's appointment was a "done deal", but a group of parents led by Christine Houston created a big fuss about it and persuaded enough members of the Foundation to vote against it. What I found hard to understand was why the ESF executive didn't realize that appointing someone in that way - especially someone without any relevant experience - could possibly be acceptable.

Thankfully, things have changed a great deal in the last few years.