‘ESC’s plan rooted in social manipulation’

Her ideas largely resonated with my own, formed not only through my experience as a secondary school teacher, but also through personal experience.

I grew up in the suburbs of London and went to a three-form entry, streamed primary school. I was considered bright, but it was also recognised that I lacked confidence and needed support and encouragement to reach my full potential. I passed my 11-plus well, but at this point my parents moved from the suburbs to outer Essex. Understandably, getting my name down for a school was not high on their list of priorities during the move, and so when September came the only place in a state school available was in a very large, 1,000 pupil-plus comprehensive school. I hated the experience from day one. I had difficulty finding my way around, in functioning socially and coming to terms with a style of education which did not support pupils as individuals. In short I felt lost. The consequence was that I began to perform educationally far less well than I had done before.

After a year, my parents decided that the great experiment of living in the countryside had not met their expectation, they relocated back to the suburbs and began looking for a school place for me. The school, which I would have attended had we not moved away in the first place, also a state school, initially said it would not offer me a place. After some discussion, they changed their position on the understanding that I repeat the whole of my first year secondary education. Their reason was that I had been failed by the comprehensive, large-school system and I would not cope going into the correct year group. My parents, very wisely, accepted this offer, and in a smaller school of about 500 pupils, where excellence and fulfilling your potential was encouraged and where staff knowledge of their pupils enabled them to find appropriate strategies to support the learning of every individual pupil, I flourished once again.

Whilst I would acknowledge that the previous system of selection in Guernsey may very well have not been the best, I can see no reason why this could not have been addressed without taking the risk by getting rid of a system which was very obviously working well, where the brightest, regardless of social background, were given real opportunities of enjoying an appropriate academic education and where those gifted in other ways could also fulfil their potential.

It feels to me that the education plan currently on the table and favoured by some of our politicians is one rooted in social manipulation.

My former career in education enabled me to understand at first hand that every human being is valuable, that every person has something to give to the community in which they live, but we are not all the same and that is why the education factory system that some of our politicians seem to want to implement will not work.

THE REV. LINDA LE VASSEUR

Coin des Arquets,

Les Arquets,

Rue de Catillon,

St Pierre du Bois,

Guernsey.