‘We are in one heck of a fix, they dismantled everything’
COMING up with final plans for an 11-18 secondary school system is going to be like putting a jigsaw together, said the outgoing president of Education, Sport & Culture, adding that he hoped the proponents of the scheme would be able to ‘find the box with the picture’.
Paul Le Pelley and three of his board members announced they would be resigning from the department at Friday’s States meeting after their plans for the future of secondary education suffered a heavy defeat.
As well as Deputy Le Pelley, Deputies Andrea Dudley-Owen, John Gollop and Neil Inder are all to resign, leaving Deputy Lester Queripel as the sole member until the rest of the committee can be appointed.
Speaking at the weekend, Deputy Le Pelley said he wished the new board good luck: ‘I hold no grudges against anybody. I wish my successor and their team all the very best.’
But he said that it needed to be borne in mind by the new committee members that ESC was not just about education. ‘It’s a very, very big department – it’s the second biggest budget. It has a mandate which I would suggest is the biggest as far as wide-reaching mandates are concerned.’
He did not believe much progress would be made in the near future.
He said the new board would have a steep learning curve. It had taken him and his members about 18 months to get to the stage of taking the policy letter to the Assembly and he anticipated it could take a new board about the same amount of time.
‘Everything in the the three-school model had a timescale. Now we really are in one heck of a fix. They have dismantled everything.'
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