Future students wanting to study the International Baccalaureate may be in luck – if there are enough of them.
Education, Sport, and Culture recently confirmed that only 14 students had signed up for the programme starting this September.
The decision was made to pause it because there wasn’t enough interest.
Deputy Lindsay de Sausmarez recently used the ‘Rule 14’ mechanism to ask ESC what level of interest there would need to be to bring the IB back.
ESC President, Deputy Andrea Dudley-Owen confirmed that more students would be needed but she couldn’t give an exact number.
There are currently 12 IB students in Year 12 at the Sixth Form Centre, (which is just 6% of the student year group), and 17 in the current Year 13 cohort (9% of that year group). ESC said the average number of applications over the last five years has been 22, indicating a clear decline in interest for the upcoming year.
Deputy de Sausmarez asked what would ESC see as a minimum viable number to bring the IB back, but ESC said it’s not just about the numbers, but also what range of subjects those students choose to study.
“The optimal number of students varies from one subject to another, but it is educationally suboptimal and inefficient to run what would have been 18 teaching groups with three or fewer students in each.
“This is especially so when the specialist teachers involved could potentially be used to benefit a greater number of students across the Sixth Form and the 11-16 schools in the Secondary School Partnership and, potentially, primary aged children to support the delivery of French.
“It is interesting to note that Jersey stopped the IBDP in 2024 – in oral questions at the time of that decision, its Minister for Education & Lifelong Learning suggested 50-75 students were needed to make the programme viable.”
ESC said that if interest in the IB grows again it will consider re-instating it, but the committee warned that might be at the risk of some A-level courses.
“It has to be kept in mind that an increase in take up of the IB Diploma Programme could risk some A Level programmes dropping below viability thresholds.”
A-Level drama has already been dropped for sixth form study from this September, and no new subjects have been added to the roster, but ESC has said no staff will lose their jobs although they might be deployed to work elsewhere.
Sixth form numbers
208 students have been offered places at the Sixth Form Centre starting this September.
Combined with the current year 12 cohort who will be moving up a year, that gives an estimated 394 pupils at the Sixth Form Centre when it reopens at the La Mare de Carteret campus after the summer break.
Projections for the next ten years suggest the total number of students at the Sixth Form Centre could fluctuate between 319 and 394 students.
ESC said a small percentage of States school students move to one of the independent colleges for Year 12 (0% to 2.0%), but a larger percentage of students from the independent colleges move to the Sixth Form Centre (22.0% to 37.0%).