Deputies give full backing to ESC’s school governance plans

Numerous deputies said they would have liked the proposals to go further and hoped they would be a springboard for responsibilities to be devolved to new school boards in the next few years.

In the meantime, each school board will become permanent, carrying out functions delegated by Education, Sport & Culture, while a temporary investigation committee, with an additional budget of up to £100,000, considers the future powers of the boards and makes recommendations to the States by September 2026.

‘The investigation committee will require action falling out of every meeting. It must not become a talking shop,’ said ESC president Andrea Dudley-Owen.

The control and oversight of States schools has been a controversial issue since an external review carried out in 2011 claimed that schools and their children were being let down by outdated centralisation and bureaucracy.

Deputy Dudley-Owen insisted that her committee was open to devolving some of its powers to schools and looked forward to the work of the investigation committee on that issue.

‘Deputy Charles Parkinson raised some comments about ESC being congenitally opposed to the concept of devolution and delegation and that is so wide of the mark,’ she said.

‘I recommend strongly that more members should chat to me and members of the committee to find out our views rather than making assumptions and spurious remarks which have no basis in fact.

‘The committee is really keen to see this work done, done well and done once and for all. It’s time that the long-running conversation with some trying to guess their way through to an outcome is given an official, impartial and resourced forum to propose an evidence-way forward.’

The States backed making ESC’s school boards permanent from September. Each one includes unknown committee members and senior officials from the Education Office and community representatives announced in recent weeks. Staff and parents’ representatives are due to be appointed in the spring. ESC plans to remove politicians from the boards in due course.

All school governance responsibilities will remain with ESC for the foreseeable future and the only partially independent bodies currently involved in the process, parochial school committees, are expected to be scrapped later this year.

Deputy Dudley-Owen said that education governance experts who had visited the island from the UK had been impressed with her committee’s approach.

‘They felt the template we had created here was very strong and if they were starting with a clean sheet in the UK this model that we’re creating is one they would be pointing at to follow,’ she said.

Deputy Gavin St Pier was sceptical that the current approach would lead to devolution to school governors and leaders, despite the Assembly backing that in principle as recently as 18 months ago.

‘I have very real concerns about the investigation committee,’ he said.

‘The system will be delighted at the prospect that this straddles political terms. There will be a new set of faces in here, many of whom will have had no experience or engagement with this issue, depending on the scale of change which the election delivers, and as we often do we’ll go back to ground zero, and that will suit the system quite nicely.’

But ESC member Deputy Andy Cameron, who has frequently clashed with his committee on other issues, backed the proposals, which he said would lead to change at a responsible pace.

‘We must ensure that new governance boards are properly inducted and understand the complexities of the education system before taking on further responsibilities,’ he said.