Dave Miller, a committed and stalwart public scrutineer at Isle of Wight council meetings posed a question on post-16 capacity at Tuesday night’s Executive meeting.
He referenced a paper on School Improvement from October 2013, which stated:
There is considerable over-capacity and duplication in post 16 education on the island and the planned new provision will make this worse. There is a direct correlation between inefficiency and ineffectiveness.
In many settings there are too few post 16 students to make a broad curriculum offer possible, too few students to make group sizes viable without funding them from the resource that should be used for pre 16 students and settings that are too small, in most cases, to produce the level of challenge that the students require.
At last night’s meeting, Mr Miller asked,
As the providers’ Open Days are about to commence for next year, could the responsible member provide an update regarding discussions held and progress made, recognising that the IWC cannot impose solutions, but is a stakeholder (including the short-term lease of Nodehill to a trust), such that there is clarity over when changes may occur, and recognition that the current arrangements may preclude students’ choice of subjects.
Member’s response
Cllr Priest – the Executive member for Children’s Services – confirmed the authority’s duties relating to supporting participation post-16 and ensuring there is “sufficient high-quality provision across all curriculum pathways”.
He said,
“Participation by young people on the Isle of Wight 16-18 is strong and the number of young people not in education, employment or training (NEETS) is below the regional national averages. However outcomes vary between curriculum pathways and providers.
“As part of our pending consultation on school places, the local authority will be consulting upon the current configuration of post-16 provision and presenting options for consideration.”
“Fewer, higher performing providers”
He went on to add,
“Our published position states that we believe there should be fewer, higher performing providers of level 3 academic programmes.”
Cllr Priest wasn’t able to give a precise date for the consultation, but said he hoped it would be carried out around October/November 2014.
Image: cilesuns92 under CC BY 2.0
