His right to attend every meeting was included in a draft ordinance submitted by the Education, Sport & Culture Committee. But the States backed an amendment from Policy & Resources president Lindsay de Sausmarez which will restrict his right of attendance to one meeting per year of each school board.
It was the only material amendment made to the legislation as the Assembly agreed how school boards should operate when they formally start work on a future date which will be decided by the committee.
Four of ESC’s five members abstained on the amendment and the fifth, Jayne Ozanne, was the only vote against.
The amendment would not prevent a school board from requesting the attendance of the director of education, but Deputy de Sausmarez argued that limiting his right to attend was a step towards transferring responsibilities from the Education Office to school governors and which ESC has said it wants to see when the time is right.
‘There was a concern that there was some resistance to genuine devolution and delegation of functions to governance boards,’ she said.
‘This amendment effectively rebalances the distribution of power and supports the trajectory towards genuine and meaningful devolution in due course. No-one is looking at this as an overnight seismic shift – it is gradual and iterative.
‘It just means the ordinance will be better able to support that so that we are not inadvertently putting a barrier in the way of devolution as and when the time comes.’
ESC president Deputy Paul Montague said he was comfortable that the amendment would not ‘cut off’ school boards from expertise at the Education Office and therefore he was minded not to oppose it.
Deputy Ozanne was concerned that the amendment revealed how little value the States sometimes placed on expertise and experience.
She reminded the States that the director of education and his colleagues had been employed for their ‘exceptional professional experience’ of education, including governance, and she saw no reason for the law to exclude them from meetings of school boards.
‘You must remember that these governance boards are in their very early infancy. We’ve got professionals around the table, but many of them have not worked in an educational governance setting before, they don’t know what they don’t know, and that’s why we have professionals in the room to help them,’ she said.
Deputy Tina Bury, who seconded the amendment, said it ‘slightly nudges control’ over attendance at meetings from the Education Office to school boards themselves.
Haley Camp supported the amendment but believed it was peripheral to the central problem of the ordinance.
‘Whether the director of education sits in the room once a year or every term, these boards will still have no real powers of their own,’ said Deputy Camp.
‘The real challenge is not the director’s attendance, but the authority which remains with the centre regardless of who is present, and we’re still not addressing that school boards cannot hire, set budgets or sanction, and they remain subordinate committees.’
The Assembly also approved an amendment submitted by ESC itself which inserted into the ordinance a description of the purpose of school boards and further limited the role of the Education Office in the membership of boards.
ESC vice-president Andy Cameron, who seconded the amendment, said it was developed in response to representations from other States members.
‘Some have argued that the purpose clause is irrelevant at this stage and that removing the Education Office representative is just window dressing, but I must disagree,’ said Deputy Cameron.
‘Purpose is the foundation of accountability. It sets expectations and gives governors a clear direction of travel while the detailed work on devolution is carried out by the new investigation and advisory committee.
‘Removing the Education Office seat matters because it makes clear that boards are not an extension of the Education Office but are community-led.’
The temporary States committee referred to by Deputy Cameron will develop recommendations about what role school boards should play in the future. In the meantime, they will be formally set up and operate without any devolved powers.
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