Thought

[nineveh_uk]

An awful lot of the idiosyncrecies (to put it nicely) of Hogwarts can be put down to the fact that it doesn't have a school secretary. I thought it was a law of nature that a school cannot run without a cardiganed middle-aged woman in the office doing everything to keep the place on an even keel.

I blame Dumbledore. There probably was a secretary, but she resigned because he was impossible to work for and he said that there was no need to replace her. So the heads of house have to do all her work, which takes them a lot longer than it took her, which is why they have no time to check that their pupils haven't vanished/had all their stuff stolen/been lured into looking for werewolves/ been beaten to a pulp. It comes back to haunt him when the lack of that sort of knowledge leaves a gap for people like Malfoy (as a governor) and Umbridge to exploit.

Comments

[el_staplador]

That... makes perfect sense. I wonder if we have met the secretary in canon?

[legionseagle]

I was talking over at my place about drug education at my school and I'd forgotten that the two policemen who'd given the talk (and shown exhibits with lines like, "There's enough LSD in this bottle to turn on half Lancaster" et al) went off to have tea with the school secretary afterwards - cardiganed, middle-aged as aforementioned - and they said, "What polite girls they were, so attentive, so many questions," and she said, "Have you counted all your sample bottles?"

Quite apart from anything else, a school secretary like that would have been suspicious of the Quirrell turban right away.

[castiron]

This would indeed explain a great deal.

This makes SO MUCH sense.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

'Professor Dumbledore, a sherbet lemon is not an acceptable substitute for a filing system'.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I fear that Dumbledore knows only the round filing cabinet, or occasionally the pile it in heaps method.

[white_hart]

Alas, rather like some other academic institutions I could think of, Hogwarts clearly doesn't appreciate that the value of a good administrator is beyond rubies.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Obviously there's nothing that needs doing that the teachers can't do in their copious spare time!

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, oh yes! Because the filing gets done by magic. Only, you know, not.

I have a great deal of respect for organizational type people, because I have no skill at it myself. Unfortunately, this appears to put me in a rare category since most people without these sorts of skills seem to think that they're unnecessary and/or easy.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I have no skill at organization and I get paid to administer things!

[bookwormsarah.livejournal.com]

A cardigan, a cat calender, power of the registers, and instant recall of the contents of the lost property box...

A few years ago I wrote An Interview at Hogwarts (http://bookwormsarah.livejournal.com/107750.html) which featured a school secretary called Leselia Frost (although now I read it back it isn't clear what her job is). I always thought there should be a proper secretary. Then again, I thought there should be a wider range of PE lessons (Quidditch available to all, not just the team) and Hermione should have missed her parents just a little when she didn't go home for Christmas.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I rather liked the the total lack of PE lessons at Hogwarts! Though I assume that there are voluntary clubs, but we never hear about them because of Harry's tendency to ignore anything that he's not involved with.

Hermione's apparent swtich-off of family life doesn't make sense though - outside Stockholm syndrome.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I completely agree.

[jennyrad.livejournal.com]

This makes So. Much. Sense. It's not locked at all, is it, so, I can cite you to all and sundry?

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Cite away!

[leni-jess.livejournal.com]

If there was a school secretary, someone might run the place when Dumbledore's away on one of his many vigilante errands - because Minerva doesn't seem to be doing much beyond managing new students.

It would be good if the school had better staff selection procedures, too, but that's probably the result of more wilfully individualistic DIY admin than Dumbledore's.

So many gaps in the curriculum! Though with all those stairs, perhaps they don't need PE. I'd settle for the stairs, for sure.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's not the DADA post that is cursed, but the staff selection procedure. Everyone apppointed aftter McGonagall and Flitwick is in some way inadequate.

[madamedarque.livejournal.com]

I think it extends to the total lack of any educational bureaucracy in the HP universe--where are the permission slips and liability forms? Signing in or out? Community service graduation requirements? I always pleasantly identified with Harry in his struggle to get his Hogsmeade permission slip signed, because it spoke to my experience as an American middle school student. Although most of the time I accepted that Hogwarts was literally ~run by magic.~

But yes, this is a brilliant theory and you should feel brilliant.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I suppose they don't actually go outside the school grounds - that we know of - except for Hogsmeade weekends, and there are forms for that. Otherwise I just go with "Dumbledore smoothed it over for Harry" for everything else. Or Dumbledore blackmailed Petunia. It's odd, because boarding school stories are full of parents signing health forms and uniform lists and various bits of paper flying about. No-one ever has to go and sign for parchment from the Hogwarts stationary cupboard! But it never struck me before.

(Community service graduation requirements, on the other hand, isn't a UK concept at all, so it doesn't fit into the Hogwarts expectations. I'd never heard of it before your comment, though I assume that it means you have to do some sort of community service in order to graduate from high school, assuming that you have a high school graduation process, which we don't :-) And goodness knows the concept of liability isn't one the wizarding world grasps!)

[dbassassin.livejournal.com]

Not only do they mysteriously not have a secretary, they don't have an archivist, which you'd expect for a school that's supposedly ca. 1000 years old. But then, if they have no on one staff to do the filing, they wouldn't have much of an archives, would they? And a school with the largest magical library in the world has one librarian? The more you look at it, none of it makes sense.

I once calculated that Snape spends at least 36 hours per week in the classroom. Add in marking, setting exams, being a double agent, staff meetings, dealing with House issues. Not to mention all the fundraising and other non-academic stuff that goes on to keep a private school running. It's no wonder the man was cranky. So I think he'd be entirely within his rights to tell Dumbles to eff off when it comes to all the administrative faff.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

It could be rationalised (possibly the wrong choice of word there) by saying that there are other teachers for the main subjects (except DADA) and the ones we see are the senior teachers in each subject. However in view of the 'training Harry as a weapon' business, Dumbledore manages the timetable so that Harry is always taught by the senior teacher.

Re. lack of archive/librarian, that is a major plot point in my Hogwarts/Wimsey WIP...

[antisoppist.livejournal.com]

Well it is obvious that no-one at Hogwarts is doing paperwork for CRB checks.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

No-one teaching at Hogwarts actually has any convictions for harming children...

[(Anonymous)]

There's a fic I want to finish someday soon which is centered around making the Hogwarts timetable. I, um, might possibly be responsible for that every year at my day job, and it's truly a logic puzzle from hell. At Hogwarts, with House rivals to keep apart and midnight astronomy classes and not enough teachers and... I think it's the job Percy Weasley was born for, and I say that as a compliment.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

You're right! Percy Weasley would love it. (I have always stayed well away from time-tabling, observing the grey-faced wraiths who emerge.)

[nnozomi.livejournal.com]

Sorry, previous comment re timetable was me (a random passerby). Didn't sign in when I should have done.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

Marvellous! You are so right and the comments are wonderful :)

[stevie-carroll.livejournal.com]

You are utterly correct.

[naomichana.livejournal.com]

My guess on this would be that one of the easier and/or more ceremonial teaching jobs -- Muggle Studies, anyone? -- originally doubled as the Headmaster's Secretary (back in the nineteenth century, when in the Muggle world this was a reasonable junior position held exclusively by men). During most of the HP novels, this position is nominally held by Fawkes, which should tell you how much Dumbledore cares about administration.

[littlered2.livejournal.com]

Regarding people having their stuff stolen, it strikes me that Hogwarts seems to have very little in the way of pastoral care - the pupils are left to their own devices. Who, for instance, makes sure the 11 year-olds go to bed on time, are turning up to meals, are not half-killing each other, etc.? Madam Pomfrey only seems to come into play when someone's actually ill/injured enough for the hospital wing, and the Heads of Houses just seem to do general overseeing, so I can only assume all responsibility for the under-17s on a day to day basis is left to the prefects - there are no Housemasters/mistresses in evidence. (I cannot help thinking that leaving a Houseful of pupils to their own devices outside lessons would mainly lead to chaos and bullying, but apparently not - Luna's treatment seems to be an aberration.)