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19-21 Broad Street | St Helier Jersey | JE2 3RR
Deputy Catherine Curtis
Chair – Children, Education and Home Affairs Scrutiny Panel Scrutiny Office
States Greffe
Morier House
St Helier
JE1 1DD
Sent by email only 17 May 2024
Dear Chair,
Follow-up matters from the Public Hearing on 2nd May 2024
Thank you for your letter of 10th May with some follow up questions from the recent Public Hearing. Please see the answers below and do not hesitate to contact me if you require any further information.
Please can you summarise your top priorities for the remainder of this electoral term and, also advise if there are any other areas not already discussed with the Panel that you intend to focus on during your term of office?
My top 4 priorities for the remainder of this electoral term are:
• Purchase of the Gas Place site for a new town school and submission of a planning application
• Extending nursery and childcare provision
• Achieving the full roll out of nutritious school meals in every government provided primary school
• Increasing the provision of lifelong learning and skills development
During the hearing the Panel also heard that:
updates could be made to the public information available on the keeping your child safe online' page on the Government's website. Please could the Panel be updated about any changes to that publicly shared information?
The Panel were advised by the Group Director for Education that the Keeping Children Safe in Education policy was updated annually. The policy was last updated in September 2023 and the next update is due by September 2024.
work is underway to develop workstreams around' lifelong learning' for benefit in the short term. We'd be grateful if you could provide further details on this, for the Panel's interest.
This will include promoting apprenticeships, a series of targeted skills development schemes, and implementing sustainable Higher Education Student Finance.
The Panel will be aware of P12/2024 and my commitments made in my amendment to review many aspects with changes to be implemented by September 2025. Any positive changes we can make to funding for online learning will enable more mature students to retrain.
I am also keen to review the coordination and alignment of Skills Jersey with Highlands and further build on the work done previously to streamline apprenticeship applications.
in relation to the changes made to student finance for four-year courses, it was confirmed that affected students were being contacted about the change. Please could you confirm how the affected students and families have been contacted about this.
A small number of students have already pro-actively contacted the Student Finance team to enquire if the changes have any effect for them. Other 4-year students will be contacted as and when their annual applications are received and processed based on their own unique circumstances.
I would like to reiterate as advised at the hearing; no student will suffer any financial detriment. For the vast majority there will be no change at all and for some their grant / allowance entitlement may even increase.
Yours sincerely,
Deputy Rob Ward
Minister for Education and Lifelong Learning
D +44 (0)1534 440152 E R. Ward 2@gov.je