Guernsey Press

ESC determined to ‘eat the whole elephant’

IT IS pleasing to be given a right of reply by the Guernsey Press to Mr Mulkerrin’s letter [Local education structure was kicked out in England more than 30 years ago, Guernsey Press Wednesday 3 March] and an opportunity to be able to repeat once more, for the absolute avoidance of doubt, that the workstream to update the Education Law has not been halted.

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The committee has already stated publicly its commitment to bringing our policy proposals to the States within the next 18 months. These proposals will include recommendations to support a range of governance options for our schools and local management is certainly not off the table.

We have looked at the substantial pieces of work we inherited from the previous committee and prioritised them for delivery to the States in this first year of the new States term. The future direction of secondary education and the Guernsey Institute are both long awaited by all the community and key to Guernsey’s recovery and future success.

This second, shock lockdown has required us to divert significant resources into managing our emergency response to Covid-19 and this, along with progressing our policy recommendations for the future of secondary and post-16 education, has rightly been the focus of our attention.

The previous committee took office part-way through a political term and undertook to deliver some very large projects in a tight time frame and were arguably under-resourced to do so. They were unable to complete all their policy commitments before the end of the term. As such, when we took office we picked up a sense of initiative overload and a profession that could not keep up with the proposed pace of change, particularly given the demands Covid-19 has continued to place on our school staff and the educationalists who support them. We have had – and have listened to – those representations in our discussions with union colleagues.

Our committee wants to take a measured approach and to prioritise the most significant work so that there is sufficient bandwidth to do it all and do it well. I’ll repeat a phrase I’ve used recently, we’re working at pace not haste.

We are also not waiting for a new Education Law to bring about change. We are committed to the continual improvement of educational outcomes and taking a macro view of the skills needs of the island.

We are implementing external inspections using Ofsted, a decision of the previous committee’s that we fully support, and this will provide the evidence base from which to make informed decisions and recommendations in the Guernsey context.

Our committee is determined to ‘eat the whole elephant’ during the course of this term, but knows it can only be done one bite at a time. It has seen the indigestion caused by biting off more than can be chewed.

DEPUTY ANDREA DUDLEY-OWEN

President of the Committee for Education, Sport & Culture