‘Strategic plan driving progress’ - director of education

The report looks at how the strategy has performed across four overarching priorities, including high-quality learning and ‘excellent outcomes and equity, safety and inclusivity’.

Each of these is broken down into a number of commitments that were identified in the first report last year and a ‘traffic light’ system has been used to show the relative progress in each.

None of these areas show a decline over the last year, while the majority show improvements, including a rise in literacy levels and positive reports from all Ofsted inspections.

‘For my part, I can be confident that we have either maintained or improved in each of the areas that we’ve shared within the report,’ said director of education Nick Hynes.

He believed improvements were being driven by the education strategy, which was making sure that the right actions were prioritised.

‘In the past, I think too many areas of government, education included, have been guilty of taking knee jerk reactions to try to improve things rather than having a strategic plan to demonstrate what they’re going to do over time,’ he said.

ESC president Andrea Dudley-Owen said the strategy was a ‘route map’ which was being used to drive improvements in all areas of education.

She felt the strategy reflected a clear vision of what she wanted the committee to achieve in the current States term. No similar report had been prepared since 2017, she said.

‘For me, that demonstrates that up until the first report there has been significant disruption within the education system in Guernsey in that intervening period.

‘But the improvements for which the changes are needed are starting to show the green shoots of recovery.'

ESC believe its reports could not easily be prepared independently because it would be difficult to access necessary data.

But Deputy Dudley-Owen said that local schools were inspected by Ofsted and eventually schools’ new governing bodies would be included in that process.

Mr Hynes said that all schools completed a self-evaluation before Ofsted inspectors arrived and, in effect, that was what ESC had done.

Deputy Dudley-Owen thought an external verification would be helpful eventually.

‘That’s the direction in which we’ll be going and in the fullness of time I would expect that Ofsted would get involved at a greater level,’ she said.

While literacy had improved over the year, the same could not be said for numeracy, and the report stated that ‘raising outcomes’ for maths would be a key challenge this year.

ESC also wants to see an improvement in school attendance.

It has been improving, but is still not yet at pre-Covid levels.

In relation to the quality of education, the committee’s aim was for all schools to receive at least a ‘good’ judgement from Ofsted inspectors.