THE MERGERS of further education colleges will naturally create some noisy protests within the colleges which merge with a neighbour, and even greater will be the rumpus when a campus is closed, writes Clive Betts from the Assembly press gallery.
But the changes are often linked with something far more contentious. That is the closure of school sixth forms, usually through linking them into a further education college.
Over the closure of sixth forms, entire communities can rise up. And the protests can become so great that a council can be forced to change its mind, undo what has been done, and re-create what has been destroyed.
Civil servants revealed to the press in a briefing that between four and five councils in Wales are considering switching to a college model for delivering sixth-form education, usually for the council’s entire area.
Councils looking in this direction include RCT, Merthyr, Blaenau Gwent, Torfaen and Swansea. Consideration is at very different stages in each of these authorities, and some of them will no doubt not get beyond the blue-skies stage.
To areas which have not been affected by proposals to close a sixth form, people will no doubt say, What’s the importance ?
But to those who have been concerned, the issue can be seen as vital to the entire community. The centre is seen as decapitating the educational centre of a major town, perhaps the town which is seen as the centre of an entire district.
In one county, the council closed the local sixth form, and then had after a couple of years to reopen it, so strong were the protests. The town was Bala. The sixth-form college was located on the other side of the county – much too far away.
Now the Assembly is trying to force the same sort of policy on every part of Wales. When the issue was debated last week in the Assembly, the proposals went through by party block vote – Labour and Plaid voted solidly together, and the Lib Dems and Tories voted solidly against.
In some ways the debate was a bit of a farce. The policy document on which AMs were voting had been published in September … but there were not any references to its title during the debate.
Without a title, it is almost impossible to find the document on the Assembly government web-site.
The most we were given was a brief how-far-we’ve-got report. As far as it went, it was useful.
The only people who would have known what was happening were the handful of journalists were attended the briefing by civil servants. What they told us was certainly not replicated during the Assembly debate.
Indeed, the debate merely showed up the failure of the current cabinet- and party-dominated procedures adopted for plenaries.
Far superior was the old-style committee system, when issues were raised point by point, with all sides having their say, and with the minister replying to each point, sometimes adapting policy in response to points raised, with the expectation that the listening civil servants would remember what was said, and respond accordingly in how policies were developed.
As it was last week, the block vote won. The block vote is a thick vote. The result is that the Tories and Lib Dems may as well not have turned up. The minister got his policy through. And that’s all that is important.
