SOME time ago, I was talking to some minister or other about the problems of his/her work.

The minister in question didn’t so much mind the fact that he/she was getting a tough time in the States or in the paper, or the fairly long hours they were putting in, or even the fact that the scales of fortune seemed to be against them.

The problem was different. The problem was – and here you see the reason for the soft cloak of anonymity – that he/she had come to an awful realisation about the limits of ministerial power.

You get a BlackBerry, you get a parking space, you get people shuffling out of rooms backwards calling you ‘Minister’ and you get a nice warm office in which to shelter from the rain, but you can’t sack anyone, no matter how rubbish they are at their job.

Ministers don’t employ the staff in their departments – a sub-board of the Council of Ministers does. And as a result, this minister (or any minister at all) was no better placed to get rid of failing staff in his/her department than me or you.

But it was worse. The minister told me that not only could he/she not get rid of failing staff, but that he/she couldn’t do much about them at all. They won’t be moved sideways because there’s nothing in it for them, and they’re obviously on to a pretty good thing where they are.

The only thing you could do, (s)he said morosely, is promote them up, up and away (and preferably out of your department and into someone else’s) – but that wasn’t something that (s)he would consider.

None of this is to say that there are more failing staff in the States of Jersey than, say, Microsoft, Chelsea Football Club or even the Jersey Evening Post. But there are always going to be some in every organisation of more than a handful of people. That’s just life.

But the conversation came back to me last week when I was following up a story about the Policy Council in Guernsey (their version of the Council of Ministers) setting up a new package of cuts aimed at trimming their spending in gloomy anticipation of a whopping deficit on almost the scale of ours.

Most of the ideas were nothing new – in fact, in all but one case they were a couple of years behind us. There was a look at energy efficiencies (check), a programme of office rationalisation (check), a review of procurement policy (check, twice) and . . .

something new: an end to job security for failing staff, the death of the ‘job for life’ culture in the public sector.

They put it like this: if you’re not doing your job properly, then your colleagues will (a) have to pick up the slack for you, and (b) inevitably get hacked off and demotivated because you’re getting the same money for doing less. And so, the Policy Council reasoned, failing staff have to go. They were a bit short on the details of exactly how this was all going to work, but they sounded pretty confident.

And there’s irony for you: last week saw leading politicians from the UK, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man all visit Jersey for the British-Irish Council meeting to talk, share ideas and trade notes on which projects were working and which were not – all of which is an absolutely excellent idea. But it turns out that just across the water in Guernsey they had come up with a bit of a brainwave themselves. On this occasion, a little inter-island note-sharing and co-operation might be a good idea.

The fact that the Education department got their sums wrong when totting up primary school children’s maths results was an amusing little interlude in a surprisingly bleak story.

For a long time we’ve been told that the education offered in Jersey is first class, a service that we can all be proud of – and in most respects it genuinely is. School results are (apparently) good, a very high proportion of pupils go to university and get a strong level of support to do so, and in most cases the school facilities are of a very high standard.

But the news that a third of primary school children move on to secondary school without the expected standards in English or Maths (and 193 in 1,038 leave without either) is unsettling. And it does little to dispel concern that all is not as it should be at the department.

Education Minister James Reed has not been in the job for a year, but he has already shown that he is willing to play the team game with the Council of Ministers when it’s appropriate, and that he’ll fight them when it’s necessary – as he was prepared to do over threatened funding cuts in the Business Plan until an eleventh hour reprieve. But the job he has taken on looks like it may be bigger than he expected.