The Alliance Administration is going to address the state of education on the Island.

A paper on School Place Planning was considered at our cabinet meeting last night, but the cabinet report arises from within the context of our new Draft Education Strategy, which was published on July 8.

The strategy has been created as the basis of an overarching, holistic drive to tackle the key issue, which are our educational standards on the Island.

Overall, educational attainment on the Island is not satisfactory for our children and it is time to put that right.

There are many examples of fantastic achievements by individual students, of course, and of improvements in particular areas, but there has been a tendency to highlight those examples of success while neglecting the bigger, overall, picture.

Our overall educational standards must be addressed if we are to do the best for our children and it is with this as our goal that we must act decisively in the coming months.

A key to this is ensuring that our schools are properly resourced. However, schools are funded at a government set rate per pupil, so if you have fewer pupils spread across too many schools none end up with enough money.

If we address the issue of surplus school places then individual schools can be funded better, which will enable them to concentrate on standards rather than on day-to-day financial survival resulting from underfunding and lack of pupils now and going into the future.

By 2027, we forecast that the Island will have around 3,000 pupils less which amounts to a whopping £14m less money each year.

It is also key that we now have control of our Children’s Services department, and we are no longer in a partnership with another authority.

This means we now have an Island based team whose sole focus is the Island and Island children, rather than us being a small percentage of the workload for a local authority on the mainland.

So, things have changed. We have a new honesty about where our educational standards really sit and the fact we must do something about them.

Further, through the engagement we have been undertaking, with decision makers, and, I hope, parents, the wider public now have a better understanding of the issues.

We can properly address Island education standards.

It is not a process about numbers or money but a whole Island approach, being led on the Island, to create a sustainable basis upon which to improve standards and achieve the best possible outcomes for our children and young people.

A new dawn is just around the corner.