Students let down by 'awful mistake'
HAVING now read the review report on LMDC, I get a sense of deja vu. I think if Dr Christopher Nicholls was shown a copy of the Education Department's green paper from 2000/2001, 'A New Direction for Local Education', he would laugh out loud. He would surely ask: 'Why, when you had the answers back then, did you not implement them?'
The main thrust of those proposals, 14 years ago, was to have three new high schools of around 850 pupils and to combine the Grammar School Sixth Form and the College of Further Education into a new purpose-built tertiary college.
Twenty-three head teachers from local primary and secondary schools wrote an open letter, asking all deputies to support Education's proposals.
Unfortunately, their pleas fell on deaf ears in the States of Deliberation.
Why did those deputies at the time, including Lyndon Trott, Mary Lowe, Dave Jones and John Gollop, vote for the Berry/Torode amendment, which killed the 'New Direction' proposals? A very good question, which remains unanswered even today.
The cost of that decision, over the years, has been enormous, not just in monetary terms but in the incalculable damage it has done to our students, still caught up in a ridiculously old-fashioned and inept selective system that has its roots in Sir Cyril Burt's, now discredited, theories of intelligence from the 1940s.
It was clearly an awful mistake, made on 10 May 2001, and has got us into the mess we are in now, but it is not good enough to simply say 'we are where we are'. We have got to make sure we don't repeat the same mistakes we made then.
To do that we must be really wary of the pro-selection lobby. Their guile and cunning cannot be underestimated. Their motives can only be guessed at.
Finally, I am extremely concerned about the LMDC rebuild programme. It has been knocked sideways by the review and T&R still have it in their sights.
It is obvious they want to water the whole thing down, and in doing so weaken the integrity of the project, on the grounds of saving pennies, much like a previous T&R did to St Sampson's High.
TIM LANGLOIS,
L'Ecluse.
Rue des Marchez,
St Peter's, GY7 9AF.
