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After a States decision to throw out the 11+, Guernsey has struggled for seven consecutive years to implement an alternative form of education in the island.
Several models have been proposed, none have crossed the finish line. During an interview with Express, the current President of Education, Sport and Culture, Deputy Andrea Dudley-Owen, explained the convoluted route so far:
"In 2016 the States made a decision... to remove selection from the education system in Guernsey, which effectively meant that there would be no more grammar school, and that there would be no more selected places or scholarships for the grant aided colleges.
"That was challenged later in the same year, because there was a change of government, and the same outcome manifested itself. So, we entered into a phase of comprehensive education without really understanding or having a clear agreement about what model of education we would be delivering within that comprehensive system.
“It was the reason that I voted to retain the selective system, with the model that we were using, because I wasn't convinced that there was sufficient coalition around what model of education there should be afterwards.
"Unless we had a strongly agreed model of education to deliver immediately, then it was always going to be extremely high risk to let go of a system that had been tried and tested - though was far from perfect - and I think that we needed to do more groundwork on what the model would be before the system was removed.
“There was the Le Pelley model -and I sat on that committee - and that was a model to rebuild La Mare de Carteret, and there was the Fallaize model, which was the two school model. Now the model that's been put forward by my committee, which I suppose in time will become, possibly, the Dudley-Owen model, but it isn't, it's the island model.
“It's what has been accepted by the States and approved by the States, and is now very much it, we're moving down the road of implementation of that model.
“The programme is called the Transforming Education Programme and there are a number of component parts to that. The merger of the La Mare de Carteret school with what's known as the current grammar school, and that will become Les Varendes High School. The digitisation of our system in terms of improving infrastructure, connectivity; device and hardware upgrades for students and for staff; updating the Education Law, which we've just published, and obviously the Les Ozouets Campus redevelopment project as well.
"The reason for doing all of that is to improve education in Guernsey, it's that simple. We are now under a mandate to deliver comprehensive education in Guernsey, which we're doing, and we need to be continually improving our offer.
“There's a whole myriad of reasons why we need to put our shoulders to the wheel of continual improvement and that's exactly what we're doing through this Transforming Education Programme.”
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