A debate mired in 'failure'
IT’S rather tempting simply to repost Tony Gallienne’s searingly honest and somewhat brutal takedown of our education system, in our centre pages, in full, as education, and specifically, the funding of the grant-aided colleges, comes under the microscope for the next fortnight.
He writes: ‘Education has been Guernsey’s worst political, policy, management, delivery, social, cultural and moral failure of the last 25 years. Every society includes education as a central part of its social contract. That part of our social contract has been broken.
'We effectively have two mutually exclusive educational systems divided by the ability to pay, with all the social and cultural implications that entails.’
This week we’ll be asking both sides of the college funding debate to explain themselves in detail.
The arguments so far, on both sides, seem to be engineered to fit the desired audience. Would the colleges collapse without c. £1m each of States backing? Can parents who can afford to pay £15,000 a year not afford to pay a couple of thousand pounds more?
But overall, when it was decided to end the 11-plus, when we couldn’t decide if we wanted two or three high schools, when we seemed to be more bothered about the volume of cars on the road at peak times than educational attainment, is this where we wanted our education system to be in 2025?