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The Committee for Education, Sport, and Culture has tried to explain why it's come up with a plan to temporarily move the Sixth Form Centre to La Mare de Carteret when its High School pupils relocate to Les Varendes.
That move is due to take place in September 2025.
The new Post-16 Campus at Les Ozouets was also due to open that term but the building work has been delayed, since ESC dropped RG Falla as its contractor.
Pictured: Last week ESC dropped RG Falla from its planned rebuild of the Les Ozouets Campus, now it has announced the next stage of its plans for secondary and Post-16 education.
The plans to temporarily relocate the Sixth Form Centre to La Mare de Carteret High are "being developed". ESC said it hopes that will be for just one year only and it is "considered the best option at this stage" for many reasons.
These include ensuring the transition of pupils to Les Varendes, while offering stability to the community and parents.
The planned temporary La Mare Sixth Form Centre is also expected to assure teachers and school staff of the timescales for the 11-16 re-organisation.
Moving the Sixth Form Centre to La Mare when the High School students move to Les Varendes will avoid the prospect of around 1,300 11-18 pupils being on one site all together.
Despite having been subject of numerous debates over the past two decades about it needing rebuilding or closing down, ESC now says that La Mare de Carteret High School "has been maintained and has sufficient classrooms and specialist spaces to accommodate the Sixth Form Centre temporarily".
ESC also said yesterday that further detailed work is "ongoing to finalise plans".
Pictured: The above reasons have been given as exampled for the planned temporary Sixth Form Centre at the site of the current La Mare de Carteret High School.
The Committee said that as it had promised to update the community as soon as possible after it dropped RG Falla from the planned rebuild at Les Ozouets, it wanted to share its current intentions.
ESC President, Deputy Andrea Dudley-Owen said yesterday that: "...it remains incredibly disappointing that we have been forced into a situation where there will almost certainly be a delay to the full opening of the new Post-16 campus..." and she confirmed that it will have a knock-on impact on the secondary school transition plans too.
She said by temporarily putting the Sixth Form Centre at La Mare de Carteret High when the secondary pupils vacate it, they will be able to maintain the recently-changed primary school feeder model, which she says will offer parents and pupils some certainty.
"Moving the Sixth Form Centre to a temporary home at La Mare de Carteret High School is clearly something we would have rather avoided, but we believe at this stage it is the best option to ensure momentum is maintained in other important parts of the re-organisation of Secondary and Post-16 education," she said.
"We considered whether it would be possible to transition students from La Mare de Carteret High to Les Varendes in September 2025 as planned, while retaining the Sixth Form Centre on the same site. While technically possible, this would require substantial reconfiguration of the site to make room for the additional students transitioning from La Mare. More than 60% of Sixth Form lessons are taught in the main school rather than the Sixth Form Centre, so there simply isn’t the room to accommodate what would be approximately 1,300 students in total on the site as it is now."
Deputy Dudley Owen said part of the reason for not locating all secondary pupils at Les Varendes along with the Sixth Form Centre was to avoid creating too big a school.
She said: "The community has made its feelings about such a large school very clear in recent years, which was another consideration of the Committee before determining that moving the Sixth Form Centre to a temporary home, for what we hope will be one year only, is currently the best option."
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