Sir,
In tonight's edition of the BBC Wales current affairs programme 'Week In Week Out' there is a discussion of the chronic levels of under-funding faced by schools in Wales when compared with the rest of the UK. Hopefully, this will refocus the debate surrounding Ysgol Greenhill School's provision of music tuition and triple sciences at GCSE.
Several letters, at best bemoaning the threat to music tuition and the loss of triple science and at worst engaging in vitriolic and vituperative personal attacks on the head teacher have appeared in recent months. As a member of the teaching staff, I have an obvious vested interest in my own position, but I would like to think that I, too, have an equal interest in the future of our school and its students.
To this end, I have found the perspective of many of the letters myopic if not plain nimbyistic. Everyone wants the best for their child, but everyone engaging in a tunnelled vision fight for their own interests has degenerated into a banal version of a Hobbesian state of nature. We desperately need to widen our perspective of the issues involved, otherwise such debates will be repeated ad infinitum.
Why are we forced to choose between music and science, or science and vocational courses, when in England all students who achieve a certain standard at Key Stage 3 have an entitlement to study triple science at GCSE? Essentially, schools in England have an average of £500 more per student paid to them than schools in Wales. For a school of our size that would equate to over £500,000 more in revenue. That is an enormous sum. In Scotland and Northern Ireland, the sums are even higher, embarrassingly so.
The current debacle surrounding MPs allowances - I hope AMs expenses are published soon - has caused a degree of public engagement in politics I've not witnessed in my lifetime. Hopefully, parents, students and members of the educational establishment can themselves question the Welsh Assembly Government's spending priorities.
Is educational money being diverted to pay for free prescriptions? If so, is that a worthwhile sacrifice? We need to influence policy and not respond with shocked indignance at its consequences.
Moreover, the end game for WAG would appear to be the wholesale dismantling of secondary education - this would result in all students going to tertiary colleges, like Pembrokeshire College, when they are 14. The Assembly believes this would avoid duplication of courses in different schools and colleges and would, inevitably, cut costs even further. However, the drop out rate in tertiary providers is in excess of 40 per cent and the human cost to our children is incalculable in terms of alienation and disaffection. Indeed haven't we cut education funding enough to Wales?
The vision is seriously flawed, but realising this vision and continuing to squeeze school's funding will result in the crisis management in Greenhill that we have had to face this year occurring every year unless the Assembly are properly challenged. We need to fight together to achieve a good education for all of our children.
Julian Dessent,
Ysgol Greenhill School,
Tenby.