In part two of series on the Education Programme, Express learns of his dissatisfaction with a lack of investment in the island’s educational infrastructure and how teachers and students desperately need a sense of direction.
Educational estate
The Transforming Education Programme is a multi-faceted project that includes building The Guernsey Institute at Les Ozouets to support alternative post-16 education alongside A levels.
This development makes up the majority of the total estimated £100million cost of building the post-16 Les Ozouets campus, with the sixth form centre equating to a fifth of the total.
This institute will be an essential space for those students who want to begin apprenticeships and, according to Mr Hynes, has been a long time coming. 
Pictured: Director of Education, Nick Hynes.
“We’ve simply run out of the educational estate to be able to meet the needs of the community,” said Mr Hynes.
“We’re getting more and more young people who want to do apprenticeships; however, we’ve had to put a temporary marquee facility up at the Coutanchez campus so we can expand the construction part of the apprenticeship programme.
“At a time when the island is crying out for craftsmen it seems absolutely ludicrous that we don‘t have the facilities available for them.”
The debate
In October the States’ Assembly will debate the Capital Portfolio and how it’s funded. The two largest projects in that portfolio are the Hospital Modernisation Project and the Transformation Education Programme and as it stands the government can’t fund both.
Unless the government can find some way of raising more capital one will have to be de-prioritised, and while, at the moment, Policy and Resources favoured project is education, there’s always the chance that the assembly will swing towards health.
“The main thing for me is we simply cannot reach no decision,” said Mr Hynes.
“We simply must have a direction and a positive way forward for education.
“If you were to go down and have a look at some of the facilities that colleagues in our post 16 environment are using on a day-to-day basis it is absolutely unacceptable.
“We are going through a process where we are ring fencing and job matching 263 secondary school teachers into new positions, which is aligned to the model and aligned to the buildings and infrastructure that we’re delivering.
“By Q1 next year we’ll have transferred all 263 teachers into new posts. If we stop that whole process of placing people into an agreed staff structure model… [well] it’s not an easy situation to reverse out of.”
Just get on with it
In 2021 the States got behind the Committee for Education, Sport and Culture and rubber stamped the three 11-16 school model, with a new sixth form centre co-located with The Guernsey Institute.
It seemed to be the answer to years of debate after the 11+ was roundly thrown in the bin several years earlier with no plan for education in its absence.
Pictured: The States will debate the Capital Projects portfolio in October.
While a common argument against ESC’s plans has been that teachers don’t want the current school model, Mr Hynes says that’s no longer the case. They just want stability.
“Some of the detractors are saying 87% of staff voted against this and that’s simply not true. If you speak to the majority of our secondary school staff now most of them are saying, ‘we just need to get on with this’.
“To be quite frank, whatever model they believed in in the past, present or future, they now want this model delivered because they want that certainty for themselves. They want the certainty for the children and young people who have gone through years and years of waiting for something that never arrived.
“It’s absolutely ludicrous for a community like us to continually flip flop and have no firm direction, or when we’ve got the firm direction, not be able to implement what the States has decided we should be doing.”
Check back in with the Bailiwick Express tomorrow for part three in this series where the President of ESC speaks out about the Education Law, its stumble through the States and a lack of political engagement with her Committee.