Every crossing of a street, I tell my four-year-old son:

“Check both sides before crossing.”

He normally looks at it for two seconds and says:

“Done.”

This is not quality assurance.

It is confidence.

A simple process.

One person does the work.

Another person verifies it.

Apparently, this governance innovation had not yet reached Edinburgh, in the “Ununited Kingdom”.

In 2001, the City entered into a 30-year PPP to deliver and maintain a group of new and refurbished schools.

Seventeen of them.

The buildings were completed between 2002 and 2005.

The children were expected to learn inside them.

The adults were expected to ensure the walls remained attached.

Only one group completed the assignment.

On 29 January 2016, part of an external wall at Oxgangs Primary School collapsed.

Approximately nine tonnes of masonry fell into an area where children could easily have been standing.

If you don’t remember the event is because, thankfully, nobody was hurt.

The official inquiry attributed that to timing and luck.

And, in my modes opinion, “Timing and luck” is not a recognised quality assurance system.

Inspections followed.

Then more inspections.

The problem was not limited to one wall.

Construction defects were found across the other sixteen schools delivered under the same PPP.

All seventeen were closed.

More than 8,300 pupils had to be relocated.

If you are a parent with children… you can imagine how you felt.

So…taxpayers pay.

Parents changed routines.

Teachers moved classes.

The city improvised alternative accommodation.

All because someone had forgotten a very basic lesson:

Check your work.

The technical defect was not particularly exotic.

This was not experimental nuclear engineering.

The metal ties connecting the external brickwork to the inner wall had not been embedded properly.

Some were inadequately positioned.

Others were missing.

The bricks looked attached.

The paperwork said they were attached.

The wall disagreed.

Then the wind conducted an independent site inspection.

The inquiry found poor workmanship.

Inadequate supervision.

Ineffective quality assurance.

Insufficient independent scrutiny.

But you know how a PPP works.

Subcontractors.

Designers.

Building-control processes.

Independent Certifiers.

Completion certificates.

And, presumably, several impressive charts showing that everything was green.

In a workshop I did for a public agency a few days ago, I said: Trust but verify.

In this case, they forgot the last word in the sentence.

The Private part and the supply chain were doing their own homework.

Not my words… but the public enquire words.

Finally, the risk transfer eventually worked.

The private side bore the cost of the remedial works.

Good.

But this exposes a distinction that PPP teams regularly forget:

Risk transfer determines who pays after something goes wrong.

Quality assurance helps stop it going wrong.

A contractual deduction does not catch falling bricks.

A liability clause does not keep a playground safe.

And a completion certificate does not magically improve whatever was covered up before it was signed.

Parents understand this instinctively.

“Did you check?”

You do this not because you distrust your child.

Because checking is how they learn.

And projects are not very different.

Trust the contractor.

Then inspect the work.

Trust the report.

Then verify the evidence.

Trust the certificate.

Then understand exactly what was, and was not, checked.

PPP Rule #54: Never confuse transferring responsibility with verifying performance.

And never let the person who did the work be the only person who checks it.

Use this information at your own risk.

We spend years teaching children answers.

But the most valuable skill may be teaching them to question, verify and think for themselves.

If you are concerned that your child is completing the homework without understanding the basics, this may interest you:

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