Deputy Rob Ward accused the government of using ‘smoke and mirrors’ and said members of the Children, Education and Home Affairs Panel had been left bewildered following a hearing with Children’s and Education Minister Scott Wickenden yesterday.
Criticism has been levelled at the government over its commitment to putting children first. Philip Le Claire, chairman of the governors at Haute Vallée School, recently handed back a poster with the slogan during an explosive Scrutiny hearing last week and said that the school had no faith that the government was keeping its pledge and that the school had had no choice but to run up an overspend.
Deputy Wickenden appeared before the panel yesterday and was asked to respond to the points raised by Mr Le Claire.
He said that the ‘putting children first’ approach involved other government departments besides Education, and added: ‘More money for education would mean I would have to have a conversation with other ministers about decreasing their funds.
‘It would mean less money for health, less money for the environment.’
He has promised to hold a meeting with governors at Haute Vallée School and said he hoped they would feel able to display the poster again.
The minister, and senior civil servants within his department, referred to £11.2m of recurrent funding by 2024 and said that a new ‘schools funding formula’ was to be introduced at the end of the year.
During the 90-minute hearing, Deputy Ward asked several times how much of the money would actually go directly to schools. Afterwards he said that – as far as he understood – most of the total would be spent outside the classroom on training and on the overspend that schools had run up, with only £1.6 million extra left for direct funding. Also during the hearing Deputy Ward asked about teachers’ workloads, stating that ‘weeks of 60 or 70 hours are not uncommon’.
He added: ‘Will we commit to looking again at the pressures we are putting teachers under?’
Deputy Wickenden replied: ‘Covid has had an impact to a significant extent. Ongoing work about extra workload preceded Covid and continues.’
The minister also said that ‘more children are being funded to go to university, which I think is a great success story for us’, and added that ‘nobody is being prevented from going to university because of a shortage of funds’.
