Life in the lion’s den

Education, Sport & Culture

May 2016 ESC mark 1 deputies: Le Pelley, Meerveld (resigned December 2017, replaced by Gollop), Dudley-Owen, De Lisle (resigned December 2017, replaced by Lester Queripel) and Leadbeater (resigned December 2016, replaced by Inder)

February 2018 onwards ESC mark 2 deputies: Fallaize, Graham, Dorey, Tooley and Roffey. Professor Richard Conder (non-States member)

BEFORE we begin to review the record of the Committee for Education, Sport & Culture, we need to remind ourselves of two contextual factors.

The first of these was that in May 2016 the committee began its new life as an amalgamation of the previous Education Department and Culture and Leisure Department, with a question mark hanging over it as to whether this was an amalgamation too far.

Secondly, the previous States, in its dying days, had conducted a bruising debate which concluded with the seminal decision to end selection at age 11 as a means to determine a student’s future experience of secondary education. Crucially, it left unresolved what the replacement all-ability model would look like.

It was against this challenging backdrop that Deputy Paul Le Pelley assembled a diverse membership whose second unenviable task was to establish whether or not the new States supported the decision on selection made by their predecessors only five weeks before the general election, the election campaign and its outcome having in the meanwhile demonstrated that the decision remained hugely controversial and needed to be confirmed.

Why only the second task? Well, the first was to establish where the committee itself stood on the issue. The circumstances were less than ideal. Its president and one member were strongly in favour of selection at 11, whilst the vice-president and one member were just as strongly opposed to it. The fifth member appeared far from committed either way.

So it was a less-than-united membership that entered the lion’s den of the Education Office in May 2016.

For as many years as could be remembered, there resided at the heart of this bastion of the Guernsey education establishment an unwelcome truth which everybody knew about but which nobody dared say out loud, far less challenge; namely that education policies were set, and their implementation rigidly controlled, by senior civil servants – most of whom were former teachers – whilst the role of politicians elected democratically to the committee was merely to support those policies and ensure their endorsement by the States.

As for the results of those policies, such as educational outcomes, they were not the business of the elected members; indeed, it was only in very recent years that committee members had even been permitted sight of those outcomes, far less encouraged to express an opinion on them other than to say something like ‘jolly good show everybody’. Don’t take my word for it – just ask former conseiller and Education minister Carol Steere and her 2008-12 crew.

So when the new committee first tiptoed across the education threshold in the Grange in May 2016, the situation was as follows. The committee needed to secure an early answer from the States to the question: did they accept or reverse the recent decision to abandon selection at 11? Both the wider States and the committee itself were split down the middle on the issue. Ready to greet the latest batch of here-today, gone-tomorrow politicians, the education establishment waited – from deep in their well-dug trenches, bayonets fixed – to defend their institutional devotion to the cause of comprehensive secondary education. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, quite a lot actually. In fact, just about everything.

Within weeks, two of the committee members commented to me that there was open warfare between members and officers in the Education Office.

By the end of the year, one member had resigned, just as the States debated the committee’s policy letter which, via a successful late amendment by the committee’s president and vice-president, invited the States to rescind the decision of their predecessors to abandon a selective system. The States declined this invitation by 21 votes to 19, thereby consigning the 11-plus to history. The question now arose in some minds as to whether a committee that had argued against comprehensive secondary education was capable of bringing about its implementation.

The question was posed in January 2017 in the form of a motion of no confidence which the committee convincingly defended by 22 votes (mine included) to 13.

It now rested with the committee to devise the best model for States comprehensive secondary education. Within the year, the committee effectively sealed its own fate by bringing to the States a model for secondary and post-16 education which can only be described as bizarre.

The committee referred to it frequently as a ‘world-leading model’, but rather in the mould of Prime Minister Johnson’s boast of a world-beating Covid-19 test and trace system, the only ‘world-beating’ lay in the absurdity of the claim. Nowhere else in the world did the eccentric model proposed by the committee exist, let alone prosper, and even those disparate elements which could vaguely be recognised as being practised elsewhere had a well-evidenced track record of producing the worst educational outcomes.

The teachers’ and lecturers’ unions would have none of it. The inspirational principal of the College of Further Education had long since resigned over the committee’s approach and now one of the largest of those unions came out publicly with a vote of no confidence in the committee.

The committee was in disarray over its own policies; its chief secretary departed by mutual consent and a further member resigned.

Enter stage left the ‘Gang of Four’, motivated not only by the need to avert the disaster of the committee’s proposals but also by the wish to offer an alternative model for comprehensive secondary and post-16 education. P&R allocated around £90,000 to the committee (not, as routinely alleged, to the Gang of Four) to fund necessary research into the ‘alternative model’.

It then transpired that a committee officer blew the whistle, alerting the committee to the fact that its vice-president had begun a so-called ‘guerilla marketing’ campaign on social media in order clandestinely to promote the committee’s model over the alternative model, to be paid for out of what remained of the £90,000 P&R grant. Once exposed, the vice-president to his credit accepted full responsibility for ‘an administrative error’ and he too resigned.

In January 2018, the committee, in a last-minute panic, proposed amendments to its own policy letter, but the Gang of Four won the battle of the models in the States by 26 votes to 13, perhaps partly on the merits of the alternative model, partly out of the belief that any model was preferable to that offered by the committee.

To all intents and purposes the committee had been revealed as dysfunctional. After barely 20 months only two of its original members survived in the persons of deputies Le Pelley and Dudley-Owen, the latter now vice-president. Three members had resigned and the substitutes bench had been emptied in replacing them. In its brief existence the committee had been equally casualty-prone in its chief secretaries, the third having joined only a few weeks earlier, soon destined to hand in his notice. The committee had now faced defeat of its two flagship policy letters within its first few months in office. There was only one possible outcome; the committee resigned.

As vice-president of the mark 2 committee which took office in February 2018, I will take extra care to offer a neutral account of its subsequent 32 months in office.

Four years into the life of the newly-amalgamated committee, it has been demonstrated that there is a healthy synergy between the education, sport and culture elements, all capable of being handled by the one committee.

On the sporting front, the mark 2 committee secured the overwhelming support of the States for its 10-year plan for sport, ‘Active 8’. Footes Lane now boasts an eight-lane running track, delivered within budget and on time, and all of our primary schools now benefit from the regular presence of Sports Commission instructors, who give our children a much-enhanced experience of physical education.

As for its cultural remit, the committee continued the work of the previous committee to preserve the life of Guernesiais and managed to secure three years’ worth of States funding for a Guernsey Language Commission dedicated to that task.

But it will be on its educational work that the mark 2 committee will be judged. These include:

• The formation of The Guernsey Institute is now well under way, with a shadow board of governors in place. With a fair wind, the teaching and learning now being conducted on five separate sites will take place at one purpose-built centre in three to four years’ time. And not before time.

• The committee secured a States commitment to rebuild La Mare de Carteret Primary School as soon as possible after the review of primary education is complete, and found nearly £1m. to fund repairs and refurbishment of both the primary school and high school on that site.

• Almost as its last act, the committee will bequeath a draft policy letter for the replacement of the far-outdated 1970 Education Law. It will be there for the next committee to pick it up and run with it. When enacted, the new law will enable long overdue reforms.

• A comprehensive home learning package was designed quickly and delivered efficiently during the Covid-19 lockdown.

• Covid-19 caused the reviews of Send education and primary education to stall, but the plans have been made for them.

• A bespoke inspection framework has been prepared from scratch for Ofsted to begin school inspections as soon as Covid-19 regulations allow.

These successes and others are overshadowed by the failure of the committee (in both its mark 1 and mark 2 versions) to steer a model for secondary and post-16 education through the States to the point where material construction of it could begin. In 2018 and 2019, the mark 2 committee convincingly jumped two States hurdles on the track towards its alternative model but in 2020 narrowly failed to clear the crucial third. The committee did at least ensure that the first two all-ability cohorts have now entered the existing secondary schools, but its regrettable legacy is that an outdated, inefficient and expensive model producing mediocre educational outcomes will continue to be inflicted on our secondary students for a further three to four years at least. They deserve better, but their fate now rests with the unpredictable outcome of the general election and with the new ESC committee that emerges from it.

In politics, there may be reasons and explanations for failure but there can be no excuses for it, and the mark 2 ESC has to admit that its own principal raison d’etre – to transform secondary and post-16 education – was not fulfilled. On that basis, the committee’s many achievements in other fields are not enough to raise the ESC rating over the entire political term to above a modest 6/10.