Education's inefficiencies are exposed
READING through the consultant's review of Education, Sport & Culture you are entitled to ask whether the States always knows what it is doing with your money. One of the areas PWC lays bare is that the States is doling out significant amounts of cash to the Guernsey Training Agency, which has managed to build up large reserves partly as a result, yet cannot claw any of this back and does not even make it subject to any performance measures or defined targets. That grant is worth £740,000 a year. Given its client base, the report says the agency should pursue a profit-making model and charge commercial rates for its courses.
It is also critical that the agency is directly competing with the College of Further Education in some cases and argues both could charge higher fees for their premium courses.
The report sees efficiencies and savings with a single governance structure covering these bodies and the Institute of Health and Social Care Studies.
If this all sounds pretty familiar, it is because it is.
In 2010, Frontier Economics recommended that there was an overarching skills agency set up with service level agreements with the GTA and CoFE.
The PWC report also takes aim at the apprenticeship grant, which costs £474,000 a year but takes no account of an employer's ability to pay. And because of the way it is set up, those on the scheme take three times as long to finish than their UK counterparts.
The States Accounts show that in total ESC paid out £13.2m. in grants and subsidies to third parties in 2016 – yet we know from PWC that there is no guarantee of value for money.
It is clear that Education, Sport & Culture is struggling to meet the savings that have been asked of it. But it is equally clear there are big opportunities for change should it be willing to.
The CoFE, for example, comes out as a particularly large and inefficient operation from the report's observations – the average cost per pupil is more than three-times that of the UK.
Education has a massive change agenda on its cards already with the reforms to secondary education. But it must not lose sight of addressing other shortcomings in its work.
