La Mare de Carteret repairs are ‘urgent and essential’
‘ESSENTIAL and urgent’ repair work to the La Mare de Carteret High School would have been required regardless of which education model was approved by the States, the committee’s president has said.
The new committee, led by Deputy Matt Fallaize, received funding from Policy & Resources to spend £700,000 improving the school buildings.
Deputy Fallaize said the site had suffered from ‘consistent under-investment’ in the past on the premise that completely new facilities might be just a few years away.
The previous committee, which resigned in January after the States approved a one-school-on-two-sites model led by Deputy Fallaize, returned £1m. of money allocated for such repairs to P&R earlier this term.
Deputy Fallaize said yesterday that he ‘could not comprehend’ that committee’s reasons for doing so.
Then president Paul Le Pelley has responded, saying his committee should not carry sole blame for the site’s condition.
‘It wasn’t just our board from 2016 to 2018, it was the board before that and the board before that [of which Deputy Fallaize was a member, before resigning over poor GCSE grades],’ he said.
What his committee did offer, Deputy Le Pelley said, was certainty and a lasting solution.
‘What we know is that we would have had a spade in the ground by the end of June this year. We would have been building a new school that would not have required this expenditure.’
‘[Instead] The States have made a decision to go with a one-school model [over two sites], but we don’t know the timescale, what sites are going to be used or what the transitions are for students. We actually know absolutely nothing.’
Speaking at La Mare de Carteret yesterday, where repairs are taking place during the half-term break, Deputy Fallaize contested this.
‘Under the proposals they put forward, the new school wouldn’t have opened until September 2022, which is five years away from when they first published their proposals, so I don’t think the building in its present condition can be left for four or five years, and neither incidentally did P&R, who gave them the funds to spend on this school,’ he said.
‘I cannot understand why they returned that money. There is essential and urgent work that should be done at the school.’
‘We cannot bring this building up to the standards of the other secondary schools, as they are much newer, but we can provide the students and staff here with a visibly better environment.’
His committee ‘does not know’ which two sites will be used to host secondary and post-16 education in the future. A site analysis of each of the current States secondary schools was commissioned last year by Education, however Deputy Fallaize and his future committee colleagues Richard Graham, Rhian Tooley and Mark Dorey said at the time that further analysis was required before making a firm decision.
‘That is the work that has been going on. There will be two major developments that are either significant extensions of two sites, or a significant extension of one site and a completely new school,’ he said.
‘We have to put together a strong case before we go to P&R and to the States for approval.’
An announcement on this will be made no later than the October half-term, he said.
Catchment areas for Year 5, and possibly Year 4, will be announced by the end of this school year.
