Simona, at least you're asking the right questions.
I can only speak for myself, but here is the answer in my experience.
New CMs are pushed by their LA to hook up with their DO and local CM group. Being new, isolated, working alone and self-employed, probably for th first time, and possibly quite bewildered by it all, new CMs will do exactly what they're told. Why not? They've found a peer group with hot coffee, chocolate biscuits and an experienced mentor who
seems to have all the answers. No more worries. (I think religious cults work along the same lines, but that's another matter...)
The DO who was doing the rounds when I started had my local CM group eating out of her hand, and the CMs were either too lazy or too despondent to challenge her and find things out for themselves. Even the better ones were too weary of her domination to go against the crowd.
My response to her constant edicts of "you
must do this" or "you
cannot do that" etc. was to ask "says who?" and "show me where it says so". Naturally, I was instantly branded a 'troublemaker' with no right to question her. She'd been doing this for donkey's years: no matter that she'd been doing it exceptionally
badly - she had experience, qualifications, and absolute control, so who was I to trouble her with mere facts, regulations, legislation, the truth, and so on....?
Well of
course I'm a troublemaker.
It's my job. If I don't question everything, then the lo's will never learn to question everything, and their 'education' will be reduced to sitting nicely whilst being dictated to by some teacher who probably still thinks "text" is a verb.
Btw, if my experience is reflected elsewhere, then the implication is that CMs (at least the new ones) may be too overworked, overwhelmed, lazy, call it what you will, to find stuff out for themselves. The likelihood is that agencies, with their "let us take all that nasty regulatory pressure off you: you just play with the kids while we take all the money" approach will step into the shoes of DOs and take on the role of spoon-feeding their newly-registered CMs with the same old BS.
Bookmarks