Lurching from one crisis to another in education

I FEEL so sorry for the teenagers who found themselves left high and dry by the withdrawal of A-level courses at Salisbury College, or Wiltshire College Salisbury - a ridiculously unwieldy title that I’ve never got used to using.

Why was the decision so last-minute, announced just a couple of weeks before the start of term?

I can see that it doesn’t make financial sense to run AS-level courses in a range of 16 subjects for a new intake of only 30 or so students.

The disappointment for these still-very-young people is equally understandable. It must have been horribly worrying for them to have to scramble about to find a place at another institution.

Presumably, some of them will have been away on holiday when the announcement was made, and will have had to take whatever they could get on their return.

But those who had already completed their AS-levels and were about to embark on their A-levels were in an even worse plight, seeking to transfer to institutions following the same syllabus set by the same exam board and having to hope that their new classmates would have covered exactly the same ground.

Surely the college authorities must have known how many students had just taken their AS-levels and would be expecting to continue for another year? It cannot have come as a surprise to them? Were there factors other than class sizes affecting their decision?

With the city’s proposed University Technical College facing a year’s delay due to a lack of proper planning to relocate the police, and a new Salisbury Sixth Form College due to open in a year’s time although nobody knows where yet – it might be to the east of the city or it might be in the city centre, according to its website - it all feels like a bit of a muddle, to put it mildly.

Once the Sixth Form College is up and running it will offer everything that Wiltshire College did and more in terms of A-level provision. With luck and a couple of years of good exam results, students will no longer feel forced to travel out of the county to get the education they deserve.

It’s going to focus on science, technology, engineering and maths – just like the UTC, funnily enough – while offering other subjects, too.

So do we need both? And which would our scientifically-minded young people prefer to attend?