Education Law reforms on hold until next States term

The Education, Sport & Culture Committee admitted yesterday that it had run out of time to bring forward proposals to replace the existing 1970 law.

A new law had been one of the committee’s flagship policies, but ESC president Andrea Dudley-Owen told a Scrutiny public hearing that the States had forced attention to be diverted onto other issues.

‘We have decided to phase the proposals for bringing back the [new] Education Law,’ said Deputy Dudley-Owen.

‘A series of other issues have taken resources away from our ability to bring back more of the law in this term ­­– obviously revisiting the funding for Les Ozouets Campus, the Herm requete, etc.

‘Imminently we are going to be releasing the proposals for the governance part of the Education Law, with remaining law proposals to be determined by the next committee, however it sees fit.’

In May last year, ESC submitted a policy letter with proposals for a new Education Law. It said legislation was ‘the foundation of the education system’ and that the language and duties of the existing law ‘no longer align with the expectations of a modern education system’.

However, it was forced to withdraw its policy letter after losing a series of amendments in a States debate described as an ‘unprecedented mauling’ by Policy & Resources president Deputy Lyndon Trott.

One of the successful amendments directed ESC to return to the States as soon as possible with proposals for far greater devolution of powers to new school governing bodies, including on issues such as staffing and finance, which was first recommended in an external review more than a decade ago.

Although Education is pressing ahead separately with fresh proposals on how schools are governed, it now looks unlikely that any additional powers or duties will be legally transferred or devolved from the committee or the director of Education to school governing bodies or head teachers.

Deputy Dudley-Owen said that many functions which States members wanted devolved to schools, including finance, human resources and facilities management, were no longer even within her committee’s mandate.

‘Some years ago, the States policy was to centralise services in a hub and spoke model. A number of enabling services were broken off from committees and centralised under the auspices of P&R,’ she said.

‘It’s not in our gift to tell P&R that it will have to reorganise what has taken a lot of resources – I’m sure many millions of pounds – to change the model specifically for education for those functions to be put down into schools.’

ESC will instead recommend a permanent role for interim governance boards which it recently set up for each school. They have a representational and advisory role, but no formal powers. It is understood that it will also propose scrapping parochial school committees, which do currently have legal powers restricted to school premises and behaviour.

Deputy Dudley-Owen said her committee had ‘an open mind’ about the possibility of devolving powers to school boards or head teachers in the future and that its imminent policy letter would ‘propose a way forward to investigate the sentiment behind the amendment’ which called for more devolution.

‘That’s what everyone wants to know – whether devolution or delegation is going to be a good thing or a bad thing or a neutral thing for students in the classroom,’ she said.

‘If it is deemed to be bad, why would you do it? If it’s neutral and there is a massive cost attached to it, why would you do it? But if it has a positive impact and can be seen as value for money, then let’s get on and do it. But we can determine that only if we’ve got the evidence.’