Is the whole secondary school reorganisation is being used as a cover for a land grab?
For many years Les Varrendes has successfully housed an 11-16 school and a 6th form centre taking pupils from all of our Secondaries without any obvious complaints. It is the best of the sites available with reasonable parking, good access, and custom build facilities. But none of this matters.
ESC tell us that there is widespread political, business, and public support for the new Gsy Institute. Really?
This Institute was created last year as the new hub for post 16 education. It is an amalgamation of three separate organisations being The Institute of Health and Social Studies (run by Health out of their PEH site and responsible for training working health professionals), The Gsy Training Agency (a private firm I believe training working professionals from the business community using various sites) and the College of FE, the Cinderella service ignored or underfunded by many ESC committees.
But now Cinderella will go to the ball, even if it is as a fig leaf to cover up this apparent land grab.
Powerful interests seemingly want Les Varrendes for this new organisation and to further the quest to create a Gsy university.
Does the Guernsey public want one?
Doesn’t matter. It’s true there is a lot of support for the College of FE to have better facilities but the other organisations can look after themselves. Who better to oversee health training than Health and why does the rich business sector need public assets to run its training? Both have successfully run for many years without ESC involvement so why change now? Let them look after themselves.
Even Eugene’s one eyed donkey has worked out that the best solution to the secondary school problem is to have three independent 11-16 schools )based at Les Beaucamps, St Sampsons, and Les Varrendes) with an independent 6th form centre based at Les Varrendes. Simple to organise, economic, and without major disruptions to the rest of the Island.
With that out of the way then build the College of FE something new at the St Peter Port school site to join the existing theatre facility they already run there. Yes, there will be temporary relocation problems but they are solvable if there is a will to do so.
And there’s the rub. ESC do not have this will. They seem to actively want to remove Les Varrendes as a secondary school because perhaps it garners them a lot of support from powerful interests and it also avoids the embarrassment of watching that school’s results fall back to the (relatively low) Island average. This isn’t pro-selection propaganda but just a logical conclusion. Spread the number of high performers away from Les Varrendes and of course their results will take a hit.
This can be mitigated but that would mean ESC addressing the many issues that have kept secondary results low for so long and I doubt they have the capacity or know-how to do so.
Better to let the problem be lost in the fog of a major reorganisation and the merge of everything into one school over two or maybe three sites. One school, one set of results to be published and nobody has the information to criticise the performance of the individual schools.
Will anyone stop this apparent land grab?
I doubt it. Too many influential people want to see it go through and the small matter of our children's education doesn't seem to factor too highly in the great scheme of things.
