For months now, the call has gone out for Government to cut spending and to reduce the size of the Civil Service.So when 93 jobs were cut in education last month, this should have come as no surprise.These are not easy decisions, and Dame Jennifer Smith deserves credit for going through with the cuts. Few of her colleagues, with the exception of Transport Minister Terry Lister, have shown similar fortitude.However, it is disappointing that so far the cuts all seem to have occurred to those who are actually doing the teaching, and that the cuts have primarily come on new, or fairly new entrants to the profession.This newspaper has already said that the place where cuts are needed are in the over full ranks of the Department of Education and that where teachers are cut, it should be done on the basis of performance.Instead, it looks like new teachers, expatriates and staff on one-year contracts are being cut somewhat arbitrarily. If that’s the case, and poor, but hard to move, teachers are being kept in the system at their expense, then the losers will be the children.This newspaper also believes that more substantial cost savings could be achieved if whole schools were closed.To be sure, local schools often have decades of tradition, and are among the few institutions that glue communities together. But from a fiscal point of view, it makes little sense to keep schools going, at vast expense, when they could be combined as the student population shrinks.