Licence refusals leave furious bilingual school entrepreneur £50k down

Thursday 07 March 2019

A local education entrepreneur says she is “pulling her hair out” after being refused employment licences for teachers to start a bilingual school, which has left her £50,000 out of pocket and unable to open in September.

Dawn McLachlan, who has operated childcare establishments for over 20 years, had been planning to open the Bilingual Montessori School of Jersey at the beginning of the 2019/20 academic year.

Using a specialist teaching method favoured by the founders of Facebook, Amazon and the Royal family, the establishment would have been Jersey’s first ever bilingual school.

But Ms McLachlan says that the government’s Business Licensing Department have stopped that plan from being made a reality – disappointing her, and the 250 parents that had registered their interest in the school.

Pictured: The Montessori teaching method places emphasis on a well-rounded education including exploration through play to develop their natural interests and language-learning.

She had applied for five licences for teachers specialised in the Montessori method – a group that had been specially selected by celebrated French teacher Laurent Lavollay-Porter, who runs a Paris-based Montessori school and was due to become a director of the Jersey school.

Those teachers would have then been accommodated in apartments offered by the school as part of their employment “package”, she explained.

Despite Ms McLachlan noting to the department that the government had previously noted the need to “enhance” their education options – and, in particular, consider a bilingual school – they were not swayed by this argument.

The decision means that Ms McLachlan only has permission to employ local people, which she says makes it impossible to get her idea off the ground.

She told Express: “If I can’t get the licences for the staff, it won’t move forward. It seems to me that Jersey does not want to look forward. I understand that they want to look after our local people. We weren’t just going to bring these people in and not look after them.

“We were going to train local people as it went on, but there were no qualified people here. And at the same time, we’d employ local people for other roles – administrative roles, social media… It’s all the people like that, who are already local people, will lose out. And all the people that we’d be bringing in are going to be paying tax. They’d be contributing to society, not taking away from it.”

Video: A presentation explaining the school's ethos.

The decision has also come at an “enormous” personal cost - £50,000.

This has included £6,000 in legal advice to support her employment licence application.

She had also been due to buy a property worth over £1million, which would be refurbished in order to be used for the school, but Ms McLachlan said that she stopped progressing the purchase when she got an “inkling” she might face a struggle with her application, given that, although it usually takes 10 to 14 days for an answer, she had been left waiting “for months”.

In the end, she decided to rent a premises with support from a local charity, who she said will also suffer as a result of the licence refusal.

“I’m not going to spend that sort of money [over £1million] on a property when I can’t be assured of these teachers. We’ve found somewhere else that we were renting on a long-term basis that is actually better. Those people that we’re renting from, who are a charity, they were reliant on our rent coming in and obviously it was a big boost for them. Now they’re losing out on it.

“It’s got wide-ranging effects on various people – it’s not just me,” Ms McLachlan said. “If they don’t value what we’re trying to do here, it’s going to be the children and the parents that are going to lose out at the end of the day.”

Pictured: The government has in recent years been clamping down on non-local staff in order to control population levels.

A Government spokesperson said: “It would be inappropriate for the department to openly comment on specific claims made by an applicant or, indeed, to disclose information that is confidential to the applicant.

“We can, however, confirm that the applicant in this case was refused five Licensed permissions. The reasons for the decision are set out in a letter that was sent in January to the applicant, who has options to challenge the decision, including both Ministerial and statutory appeals. The appeals process is there for any business wishing to dispute a decision.”

Ms McLachlan isn't the first to express displeasure with the Business Licensing system. Last year, the head chef of Ruby's Lounge and Bistro told Express that his workforce were experiencing serious pressures because they couldn't recruit qualified non-local staff. 

However, the government has argued that this is in order to manage the island's rapidly rising population.