WHEN he stood up to condemn the GCSE results that were published for the high schools for the first time, the president of the Guernsey Society of Chartered and Certified Accountants said they were ‘simply unacceptable’.

For an international financial services centre they were too poor and change was needed to ensure that results like that were never seen again.

To some extent, of course, the island won’t see their like again.

The reason is that they are out in the open and head teachers and, particularly, their English and maths teachers know that they will be judged on how they perform in this critical – but not only – area of achievement.

Now that it is being measured, examination performance will be managed.

And it is at management level that the biggest changes need to be made.

In a roundabout way, the question that the GCSE affair really poses is what level of responsibility and accountability the high school heads have, or should have.

A Politburo-style approach by the Education Department that is outside accepted best practice in England plus its marked reluctance to update local legislation based on a 1944 UK law and which underpins its activities, has effectively neutered the head teachers.

Instead of answering to children, parents and employers – in other words, the community at large – the schools had only to satisfy central committee at La Couperderie, which in any event controlled what information was allowed to be seen by taxpaying parents and, it has been claimed, by the Education politicians themselves.

That model is now, thankfully, broken, at least as far as exams are concerned, and the schools find themselves being held to account for how well they teach core skills.

Because pupils are regularly tested and monitored, heads knew well in advance what their GCSE results were likely to be. Since those results have been in relative decline, the obvious conclusion is that no one really cared.

Now that the secret is out, there will be significant interest in future GCSEs – and a steady

improvement from where the High Schools are currently.