What is the purpose of deputies?
ONE of the consequences of the problems at Education has been to pose the question: what's the point of deputies?
ONE of the consequences of the problems at Education has been to pose the question: what's the point of deputies?
That's not meant to be as offensive to States members as it possibly sounds but what has happened at Education highlights the lack of clarity over the role of deputies.
As we now know, the development of child-focused, performance-based teaching has been held back here for more than a decade.
The board under the now resigned minister had complete confidence in the also now resigning director of education. So are they or he
responsible for keeping the tuition of island youngsters in the dark ages?
As has also emerged, there was a lack of meaningful information going to the political members and either they or their director were certainly not letting the data out into the public domain.
Yet if the professional staff of any department are not responding adequately to changes in best practice, how do politicians effect change, particularly when their civil servants warn them off anything operational?
Deputies have no researchers, no access to a party machine taking a different look at policy. Come to that, where was the parliamentary scrutiny process? With the second biggest budget and the most significant influence on islanders' education – including health and behavioural – it should have been a prime target for the Scrutiny and Public Accounts Committees.
Yet Grange House escaped all meaningful questioning until Mulkerrin came along.
How on earth, islanders and taxpayers want to know, can that be?
It won't happen because it would be too embarrassing, but there is a very strong argument for an airport firefighters-type tribunal to establish the many failures of policy, scrutiny and accountability that led to the current crisis.
At the heart of it is a lack of distinction between the executive and the legislature, the absence of a robust and effective scrutiny process – and confusion over what deputies are supposed to do.
As they consider their own pay this week, the review body has told States members that they do not have a defined role and the electorate has no 'standard' by which to evaluate them.
What the Education debacle shows us is that this has to change.
