OPINION: Spare us the ‘tough decisions’ playbook

TING.

I glanced down at my phone at 2.30pm on Friday 14 May to see a notification that my son’s school had sent me a message ‘for and on behalf of Deputy Andrea Dudl...’

Perhaps I had been away from journalism too long, but my suspicions were not aroused. I spent a moment wondering if perhaps we parents were being warned about the evils of taking our kids out of school for a holiday, ahead of an anticipated vacation frenzy when the borders open up.

But the traffic started moving again, my hands remained on the wheel and the message was soon forgotten amid the bustle of school pick-ups. Consequently, the news came to me at 4.22pm via a WhatsApp message from one of the Guernsey Press photographers to my news editor that he had ‘filed the LMDC photos’. This sent me back to that email, which I read with trepidation.

By this time, I was at home with my 11-year-old boy, a pupil at La Mare de Carteret High School, and his seven-year-old sister, still in her La Houguette uniform. And I sat there, as they enjoyed their habitual Friday gaming session, trying to work out what to say to them. I waited until their mum had finished her laptop work meeting in the next room and had joined us and then I passed on the news.

‘Why are they doing that?’ asked my son, not unreasonably. I gave the only honest answer I could think of.

‘To save money,’ I said.

‘Where will I go instead?’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t say.’

‘Will I go to the same school as my friends?’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t say.’

‘Will I still go there?’ my daughter chimed in.

‘I don’t know.’

And then, to lighten the mood: ‘Nothing’s been decided yet. The people in charge of the island will talk about it and have a vote.’

I was trying very hard to be entirely open-minded about the announcement that the people in charge of education are so determined not to rebuild La Mare that they have decided – ahead of the publication of any evidence – not to give their fellow politicians the option of making them do it.

But I had been triggered. There, in the fourth paragraph of Deputy Dudley-Owen’s carefully compassionate missive, lay the phrase ‘tough decisions’.

TING A LING – alarm bells.

You see, I have previous with this particular phrase. Let’s go back a little.

Within a week of my son starting his school career, those in charge of the then Education Department announced they wanted to close his school – St Sampson’s Infants.

The announcement came right at the start of the school year, when the PTA had yet to meet. It came on the day the billet had to be published, containing the department’s proposals. In other words, it came with the least possible warning. I remembered a previous attempt to close the school, which had been narrowly defeated in the States. It felt like this was unfinished business for somebody.

The closure of the school, along with St Andrew’s Primary – which is where I was educated from 1975 to 1981 – was widely debated. I attended a public meeting at St Sampson’s High School in my capacity as a parent. I presented a BBC Guernsey Sunday Phone-In in my capacity as a determinedly impartial journalist. And I listened to the subsequent States debate in a state of torrid tension.

What followed was unedifying, to say the least. One might aspire to witness a parliament in which argument, persuasion and evidence were to the fore. Instead, we had emotion, rancour and irrationality.

There was some rational argument hidden away in there, to be fair. Points were made about population predictions, albeit island-wide ones rather than anything specific to St Sampson’s. Arguments came forward regarding fewer bigger schools bringing better educational outcomes, albeit the same department went on to make the opposite case just months later in considering secondary education. And there was discussion about traffic implications, class sizes and, of course, money.

But one mantra came to dominate the speeches of a majority of deputies: ‘tough decisions’.

The subtextual logic went something like this: Closing these schools is going to really upset the pupils, parents and staff associated with them.

Therefore, in deciding to go ahead and do it anyway, we are doing something deeply unpopular.

Unpopular decisions are tough.

We must be seen to be tough.

If you don’t vote to close, it’s because you’re not tough enough.

This sort of message might have had some merit, if it had come at the end of a long debate focusing on the pros and cons of the evidence supporting the case for closure (as cobbled together in the department’s policy letter) and the pros and cons of the evidence against (as cobbled together by the two hastily assembled PTAs). But it was the starter, main course and pudding of the entire feast. It was a smorgasbord of supplicatory self-flagellation passed off as strength.

Tough decisions are not intrinsically meritorious.

Closing the PEH would certainly be a tough decision. It would not necessarily be the right one purely by dint of it being tough.

My heart’s desire, ahead of the debate in July which will determine the fate of La Mare de Carteret High School, is not that a popular uprising will put a stop to the nasty deputies’ plans. Nor that pupils will be enlisted to provide a bleeding-heart narrative to guilt-trip them into a climb-down.

It is simply that the debate will focus on relevant evidence concerning educational outcomes, pastoral care considerations, traffic impact, fiscal stimulus opportunities and, of course, money and what we, as a society, choose to spend it on. And perhaps there will even be a handful of observations that nobody has yet thought of and which might sway debate, assuming there are any deputies who arrive without their speech already written.

But, most of all, please, dear deputies – and I feel I can ask this on behalf of all students as well as all parents and guardians – spare us the ‘tough decisions’ playbook.

If you choose, through logical debate or otherwise, to close La Mare de Carteret High School, nobody wants to hear how difficult you are finding it to bring the axe down. You sought this responsibility when you stood for election. This is what you wanted.

Make the decision and move on.

It isn’t a tough ask.