Challenging command and control
EDUCATION might have thought it had got away lightly. Its 44 proposals for a new Education Law seemed initially to provoke little excitement in the States.
But it now faces a barrage of late amendments at today’s meeting, after enough deputies finally woke up to the significant extension of Education’s powers envisaged in the new law.
Amendments submitted in good time challenge the powers of the committee in home education. Later amendments do the same in areas as diverse as the grant-aided colleges and parental fines. They are all valuable and will help turn what threatened to be an anaemic discussion into a proper debate.
But none of the 10 amendments published so far deals with the most disappointing section of the proposed law – school governance boards.
Education wants deputies to believe these new boards would allow less to be done at the centre and more to be done by schools. Unfortunately, this is nonsense. The boards look like a sham.
Their duties, set out in an annex to the policy letter, wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans. There is much mention of boards supporting, promoting and facilitating, and other such banalities. But no mention of decisions currently made at the centre genuinely being devolved to school boards, as they are routinely and largely successfully in much of the rest of the world.
Education still won’t let go of its command and control culture.