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The BBC will be a very different place at the end of November. The effect of the Government cap on pay-offs moving from £150k to £95k has seen a huge rush for the exit, with staff close to pensions calculating that they can have maybe a couple of extra 'free years' retirement before the payments kick in. 

It's a bit like a public school deliberately getting rid of all prefects. Not just taking away their position, but showing them the door.  Very few teachers have opted for the open road in this wave (though we note James Purnell may have managed to meet the November deadline).  And there have been few departures from the non-prefect sixth-form and fifth form. In News, this is because the union side sits in joint judgement with managers on agreeing departures. So the school keeps going ticking over - just with fewer people at the controls. 

PG Wodehouse would have been unhappy. In "Mike at Wrykyn", he wrote "Prefects must stand together or chaos will come". As the critic Frances Donaldson noted, in the Wodehouse world "the prefects and heads of houses are usually good at games and therefore heroes, and the masters are quite decent people, although they live on the other side of a high fence and by a totally different set of rules".