A welcome U-turn

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I’m not sure that I’ve entirely understood what Leighton Andrews was saying yesterday about reducing the range of A level subjects, but it certainly sounded like a total U-turn.  The insistence, to date, of the Welsh Government that schools had to offer a minimum of 30 subjects in years 12 and 13 seemed to me from the outset to be pulling an arbitrary number out of the air.

If the Minister is now proposing to scrap that requirement, and adopt a more flexible stance, then it would be a victory for common sense.  It may not be quite that straightforward though – as I recall, the Government actually took a Measure through the Assembly making the number of 30 a statutory requirement.

There is another little issue arising as well.  Just where does that leave county councils such as Carmarthenshire which have developed and pushed through unpopular and unnecessary school reorganisation schemes justified entirely or largely on the basis that they had to close any schools which were ‘too small’ to offer the full 30 subjects?  Will the Minister at last call a halt to them?

Update:  I see that Len Gibbs (aka VoteNoDay) has tweeted a link to this post with the message "WAG passes a law, causes a load of damage now wants to undo it.".   The implicit message is, presumably, that that justifies abolition.  On that basis, we should have abolished the Westminster Parliament after the poll tax debacle.  (Mind you, perhaps that suggestion is not entirely without its merits...)