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A stark warning has been made that if the States Assembly doesn’t prioritise the Education Programme over the completion of the Hospital Modernisation Project, the entire programme will simply come to a grinding halt.
The President of the Committee for Education, Sport and Culture made the blunt assessment during a discussion with Express about her committee’s mandate and the future of education in the island.
Due to increased pressure on the public purse Policy & Resources has proposed that the island focus on completing the Education Programme instead of the Hospital Modernisation Programme. The controversial proposal has garnered split public and political opinion, a situation which Deputy Andrea Dudley-Owen thinks is lamentable, if not unavoidable.
“It’s not the position islanders want us to be in either,” she said. “We should not be in a position of pitting one project against each other, especially in two vital areas of public service. [What is] absolutely vital to the success of our island is to have a really excellent education system and a really good functioning healthcare system. Those two things - as well as law and order - are the three pillars of government. So, it's really disappointing and it's a real challenge that we’ve found ourselves in this situation.”
Despite sympathising with the Committee for Health & Social Care, Deputy Dudley-Owen says completing the second phase of the Hospital Modernisation Project first simply isn’t feasible.
“Under the current plans, the Hospital Modernisation Project, Phase Two, requires the movement of the Institute of Health from inside the hospital building to a new home.
“The new home is planned to be at the Les Ozouets campus... because the Institute of Health is going to train [staff].
"So not only do the plans physically require us to take the Institute of Health and to free up space for the hospital for their strategic usage, we also need to train staff as well, for them to be able to resource their aspirations in delivering health care provider provision.
“So, it's really important that we work together to achieve wider aims of the states.”
While Deputy Dudley-Owen says she and the presidents of P&R and HSC – Deputies Peter Ferbrache and Al Brouard – are speaking regularly and would like to work together to find a solution that benefits everyone, the upcoming July debate on capital expenditure is going to be difficult.
“The tripartite of the Health and Social Care Committee, the Education, Sport and Culture Committee, and the Policy and Resources Committee need to work together very hard to be constructive about this.
“To ensure that states members are presented with something that they can work with, as opposed to something that splits the states in two or cleaves the island in two, because everybody has different approaches and opinions on which is more important.”
The Education Programme is a multi-faceted programme that includes updating the Education Law, developing the Guernsey Institute and building a new sixth form centre at Les Ozouets. ESC has gone to great lengths to try and move the discussion about the programme away from the ‘false narrative’ that it’s simply just “moving a sixth form centre up the road”.
“It's really important that the community at large and also states members are actually considering facts as opposed to rhetoric that has materialised out of opposition," said Deputy Dudley-Owen.
“It's no coincidence that people who are opposed to the model because ideologically they want a different type of education system... are the ones who are picking up the false narrative and pushing it out as if it's fact.
“We've got to be able to trust our media, we've got to be able to trust our politicians to give us facts, and so when I hear people diminishing the huge work that has been done, diminishing the Les Ozouets campus redevelopment and the secondary school partnership work down to merely ‘picking up a sixth form and moving it 500 metres down the road’ for, you know, a huge amount of money – that's just wrong.”
The capital projects debate will take place in July and unsurprisingly it looks like to be a fractious and difficult decision for the Assembly to make. Worryingly, when asked what would happen if the States once again fails to make a meaningful decision a la the tax debate, Deputy Dudley-Owen didn’t mince her words.
“The Education Programme halts, so the component parts within that stop,” she said.
“We have gone a considerable distance down the road of restructuring staff. Our plans for the Les Ozouets Campus redevelopment for the Guernsey Institute - which includes obviously the College of Further Education and the Guernsey Training Agency for the Institute of Health - the apprentices and for all those students that study within that environment, as well as the sixth form centre that is planned there... that stops, and we're left in a holding pattern, which at this stage, because of the progression of the project, because we are so far in, is really difficult to imagine what it looks like.”
You can listen to the full interview below:
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