This Is Guernsey

AT ABOUT £4,000 a page the Education Department review was bound to attract some challenging scrutiny, particularly from those who had a vested interest in its conclusions.

While the value of any review should not be considered purely in terms of paper output (just 11 pages), it is a brave consultant who dares not try to cultivate some form of gravitas with the sheer weight of his or her investigations and depth of analysis.

The success of Trevor Robinson’s minimalist approach depends on whether you were hoping to be given the question or answer paper for the exam.

If it was the latter, then the report is deeply disappointing. There are no quick (or slow) answers here, only questions.

It could be argued that there is, in fact, only one concrete recommendation in the whole report: that the abandoned idea of employing two deputy directors should be revisited. And even that is couched in terms of ‘encouraging all concerned to think further’ on the subject. (It is a very polite paper, full of praise for the amiable nature of its client and ‘the enormous goodwill and unfailing courtesy of all concerned’.)

Outside that, the report represents a perfect agenda for the first meeting of the Education Department after April’s election.

Indeed, it is to be hoped that the present incumbents treat it as a gift for their successors and leave it untouched with a red ribbon bow on the desk as they speedily vacate the building.

The new political team – and radical post-election change is both inevitable and highly desirable – will then have free rein to put in place a fresh structure for the management of education that should change its culture forever.

Whether the Policy Council needed to spend more than £40,000 getting a UK consultant to set a quiz for a meeting in two months’ time is questionable.

But it may be that there is less madness than first appears in Mr Robinson’s methods.