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

[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...