In many respects it is not unusual anymore to see senior figures in Plaid Cymru publicly contradicting their own government. It is becoming such a frequent occurrence that it is difficult not to draw the conclusion that the party is in terminal chaos. OK, that maybe wishful thinking, but it does not look good.
What is significant about Party Chair, John Dixon’s latest criticism however is not that he has aired it but the terms in which he has couched it.
Mr. Dixon writes about the disastrous funding system that is currently operated by the Welsh Government to support post-16 education and in particular the impact it has on sixth forms:
Moving from the specific to the general, does school funding need to be this complex – so complex that even the governing bodies aren’t always clear who has decided what? Why on earth is the Assembly Government directly setting sixth form budgets rather than leaving that to county councils to decide in the same way that they set the rest of the schools’ budgets?
It looks like an unnecessary degree of centralisation to me, and almost guarantees a lack of clarity and accountability from the point of view of schools, governors, and parents. It may be convenient for those in authority to be able to blame someone else, but I don’t think it makes sense.
I suspect that it’s just another part of the less than entirely open agenda of the Education Department in the Assembly Government. There seems to be a desire to move away from sixth forms towards tertiary colleges, which are funded (and therefore controlled) directly from the centre. That’s actually a valid policy to espouse (although not one with which I agree), but it’s being promoted in a dishonest fashion, through manipulation of funding allocations, rather than through open and honest debate.
Creating financial crises for schools and making sixth forms financially less viable may achieve the ends of those taking the decisions; but it hardly counts as democratic and open decision-making.
We have been arguing for a long time that the One Wales Government is over-centralising and does not allow for local initiative or innovation. In general government should empower not dictate. It is nice to see that key members of Plaid Cymru agree with us. It is a shame that their AMs and Ministers do not take note.
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