ESC plans fail its own stress test
WITH the Education Committee now reflecting on the ‘car crash’ that was the debate on its plans to revamp the island’s 1970s Education Law, it may wish to pay heed to colleague Deputy Andy Cameron, who said after the proposals collapsed that his committee should have done so much better.
He even voted in favour of an amendment which effectively ended the committee’s planned approach to introducing new governance boards in the schools, and ultimately led to the derailment of ESC’s policy letter.
The proposals outlined that the legislation, once drawn up, would detail the duties and expectations of a governance board. The report itself indicated 12 likely responsibilities they would undertake. Whether it was this uncertainty of what they might be signing up to, or something altogether more sinister, or, indeed, lacklustre, this seemed to grip deputies’ imagination.
They would have also been aware that some – but most definitely not all – members of the current school committees were very much against the proposals.
But if, as Education has gone on to outline, these proposals were a key part of the law review, and of a suite of work taking place to ‘transform education’, it surely had a duty to take greater care in formulating proposals that were not simply going to fail the first stress test they encountered in the face of the Assembly.