Sleep walking into disaster?

There don't appear to have been any.

Am I alone in thinking we are sleep walking our way to disaster?

What is proposed is so ambitious that I cannot believe any reasonable government, let alone one with a cash-flow problem, would contemplate either being able to finance it or make it work. The thought of perambulating students being taught a myriad of subjects to cater for all abilities successfully is a pipe dream. How much training and at what cost for our present teachers to absorb the new 'system'? How many more teachers will be needed? Who will police our standards? The teachers apparently. Monitoring will be 'tough'. Yeah right.

The Mulkerrin report was a wake-up call which Education (and teachers) didn't like. Instead of dealing with the problem it highlighted, the baby is to be thrown out with the bath water. No English independent outsider will ever be able to point out our education deficiencies ever again. We will be a law unto ourselves with our 'new' system (which has already been discredited elsewhere). Donkeys unite.

The new examinations will apparently have to be 'explained' to local employers. Who is going to 'explain' the system to possible employers outside the island? What will happen when our children want to gain entrance to colleges and universities in the UK?

The colleges will continue the present system to prepare their students for further education. The educational gap will widen, as next to bite the dust is, of course, 11-plus selection. It is unfair. Not everybody has the same academic ability. God forbid that we should celebrate and nurture our academically gifted students. Your newspaper highlighted the fact that nearly half our children do not even attempt the 11-plus test. How can it be unfair to anyone if they are not even trying? There are apparently few children from social housing who are at the Grammar School and none at the colleges. Might this be because few sat the test? Or indeed because, of those few, they chose our excellent Grammar School over our excellent colleges.

I remember Stan Knight, inspiring headmaster of the Forest School and later Beaucamps. He said: 'I can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear but I can make a very fine pig skin wallet.' How sad that in the rush to ensure that everybody is taught in the same way and to the same standard in order to achieve 'fairness' we procure neither purses nor wallets.

I urge any concerned islanders to lobby their deputies. This plan for our future education is, I believe, an expensive recipe for a disastrous outcome.

It will be many years to realise such folly if this goes ahead. It will be too late for a whole generation of school children, perhaps more.

Name and address withheld.