Hounding Education for a new plan won't help
IT SEEMS to me that Education are being barricaded into a no-win corner. A new committee faced with bringing forward plans passed in a mish-mash rush at the end of the last term, they are now being hounded for a full report on those proposals, plus any other ideas they might have (also all fully researched and costed) immediately, if you please. I thought 'The States' were supposed to be being careful with money, which surely includes the use of civil servants' time. I speculate here, but my guess is that they looked at the proposals as passed, speed-read the research from the previous committee and decided that (a) they weren't too keen on the road set out for them (b) since the selection issue had loomed large during electioneering, there was a good chance this new States would throw out the proposals as passed anyway.
So do they spend a lot of their own and civil servants' time fully defining and costing proposals they neither like nor expect to get passed, or do they try to come up with something better?
Still speculating, I reckon they went back to the old research and read it properly. Then talked among themselves, to their civil servants and probably a few others involved in the system. Then they came back together to discuss their conclusions. Unsurprisingly, these were not the same. Now here is where they actually try not to waste money. Rather than go away and bulk out each idea, cost them all up etc. etc. they decided to 'test out' the will of the new Assembly by asking for a general direction of travel.
Obviously detailed costed plans need to come back in the near future, but with a rough plan (even two 'possibles') agreed by this States, there will be good motivation and economic sense behind all the committee and their civil servants getting to work with a will.
CHRIS BROWN,
The Boat Shed,
6, Bel Air, Victoria Avenue,
St Sampson's, GY2 4AX.
P.S. To those accusing Deputy Meerveld of 'suddenly producing a sheet of paper'... the basics of his plan, as printed in the Press recently, were available at the St Sampson's hustings – mere days after the last Education debate.
He's been working on it since, as it's expanded, but it is not a sudden whim for this debate... in fact it gained him my vote, when he had been running a close seventh (of six votes).
