(Updated below) We understand that Carol Walker, Head of Education at Argyll and Bute Council, has now gone on holiday.
If this is so – and if it is, it is very hard to believe – it indicates a willingness to be away from her post during the short time which is available to her and her department between now and 25th November 2010, to repair its profoundly damaged reputation.
In the school closures proposal papers she presented, she had declared in print, well in advance of the date, that the Council meeting on 2nd November had agreed to proceed to the statutory consultation period on the proposals.
Had this actually come about, a holiday planned for now would have come neatly between the proposal preparation period and the start of the public meetings which must be conducted in respect of each proposal paper.
As we all know, things did not work out that way. For Argyll, the Scottish Rural Schools Network and Councillors identified a series of faults in the proposals, from the major statistical and financial arguments supporting the closure proposals, to the detail of children’s journey times, distances, school roll figures and title deeds.
These disclosures and discoveries meant that on 2nd November the Council had no choice but to defer the decision on whether or not to proceed to statutory consultation on the basis of these papers; and send them back to the education department to get its act together. The gloss here was ‘to provide additional information’ before submission to another meeting on 25th November.
In this context, it is surprising if the Head of Education felt able to go on holiday at this moment.
If she has indeed done this, she will have left her post in the aftermath of the Council having to retreat in some embarrassment from her shambolic set of flawed and discredited proposals.
She will also have left her Head Teachers to do what they can without access to the Head of Service who decreed by email that each of them should now take over the incompetent proposal to close their individual school – and make it work. And then put their name to the document.
A more sadistic abuse would be hard to imagine, as would a more self-serving one.
This was the clearest possible admission of conscious inability to do the job she is very well paid to do. It is also a job at the top of a vastly expensive empire she has assembled with no control from her immediate superior who should never have approved it.
She has the support of an unnecessarily large company of ‘quality improvement officers’ (QIOs) – peripheral staff paid around £56,000 each per annum.
This should have been questioned by any able superior before recruitment was sanctioned. That it was not is particularly indefensible when, as now, cuts are unavoidable, jobs lost and compulsory redundancies a real possibility.
Given their title, we imagine that these ‘quality improvement officers’ will have contributed to the preparation of the school closure proposals, documents that hardly attest to the calibre one would expect to pay £56,000 a year to acquire.
We have asked the Council tonight if the Head of Education has indeed gone on holiday and, if so, when she is expected to return.
Update 9.40 10th November: It has been confirmed by the Council that Carol Walker, Head of Education, has been on annual leave this week and will return to her post on Monday 15th November.
Why has Isobel Strong SNP councillor and education spokesperson for Argyll & Bute Council made no comment ? Aren’t the council employees answerable to the Councillors ?
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One hopes they are able to organise their secret santa with a little more fore thought and intelligence… somehow I feel that even this would be flawed
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ForArgyll; you are doing the cause more harm than good by publishing this stuff. It is unsubstantiated, spiteful and in no way constructive.
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For Jim: This is not spiteful, Jim, It is angry and it is targeted where it needs to be.
This mess is not the Councillors’ fault. It is not the teachers’ fault. It is the education departments fault and the failure could not be more serious.
We are talking about one of the most serious possible situations for the future of Argyll, the education of it youngest, the sustainability of several of its remote rural and island communities, the balance of its population and the reputation for competence of the Council responsible for the region.
We are talking about clearly casual and underinformed decisions made to close no fewer than 26 primary schools – ‘donor schools’ indeed, as we have said – the vital organs of their communities.
We are talking about proposals of this magnitude in economic, social and cultural impact being presented on false premises.
Do not expect quarter to be given to the principal architect of this damage.
The Head of Education is not someone who gives quarter and she will not – or should not – expect it.
We pay for competence and we have not found it.
And would you call the proposals at the heart of this matter ‘constructive’ – or competent?
They lack knowledge, research, evidence, accuracy, judgment and impact assessments – and they lack the single key criterion the Scottish Government identifies as critical to the final decision to close or not to close – and that is the educational argument.
If you haven’t got the stomach to identify the source of this mess, Jim, we respect that but someone must – and the public sector tends to shy away from this.
We are not talking about a shrinking violet. We are talking about an aggressive and less than adequately competent officer who has inflicted serious reputational damage on the Council and potentially enduring damage on the fabric of Argyll.
Spiteful? Never. Hard? In this issue? You bet.
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With 11% of Argyll & Bute’s housing ‘Holiday Houses’ via demand from all over the world, thank GOD we have the £8,000,000 spare change to fix HMS Astute & have billions more so Argyll’s Soldiers can come home in body bags helping close primary schools like my old Keills school as our country goes to the dogs i.e. the State.
Argyll & Bute Council, SNP & ConDems are inept… from a former Keills primary school pupil who says Islay would be far better of going independent, cut out those inept ‘high paid’ middle men/women who have turned Argyll into a holiday ‘camp’ and sold-us-out.
I was talking to a young mother the other day who said she has been waiting to be housed in Port Charlotte needing a house with 3 bedrooms as her and her husband are sleeping in the livingroom in a 2 bedroom house. When Keills school closes that area’s children will be bussed to Port Charlotte where we have loads of Holiday Houses, time the Holiday Houses were banned – they are costing us our children!
Community Councillor Islay MacEachern (from Keills) has a former 3 bedroom Council house for rent (in Keills), but not for the community – for holiday/contractor lucrative rents only, young families can’t pay the £800 a week rent for a former (Council house) and young families can not compete with the demand for Islay’s houses (for the holidays) either – time Argyll’s Army took over the running of Argyll, democracy is inept as the old baby boomers do all the voting… ironically we have a baby faced Prime Minister with a Jura Holiday House where George Orwell wrote the Big Brother book ’1984′… David Cameron will do nothing for us, closing schools = more Holiday Houses coming soon!
Old people smothering our young, our society has become parasitic – checkout my YouTube channel ‘helpsupportprotect’ and video ‘Islay’s Ethnic Cleansing’ for more information…
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Re-head of service on holiday…..
Timely indeed. Rat and sinking ship springs to mind, as the crew are left to steer the ship through an ever increasing storm. Perhaps it’s time for mutiny! Or perhaps it’s time for the local authority to do the right thing and make this ‘holiday’ permanent!
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…..and where is Mike Russell in all this, his silence is deafening!…..but then he does have a slight problem doesn’t he? His wife works for this Authority!! …..but then maybe her future has already been secured if not her school’s.
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I think one of the main reasons behind all this mayhem is that the Education department has never had an in-depth scrutiny at how they operate compared with what other departments have gone through (with the exception of social work) in A&B and are now feeling the heat. Looking after themselves now is a lot harder!!!
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Maybe we’ll get a post card from Mrs Walker, telling us of the next move.
Re James Welsh; lets hope that all departments will be treated equally in weilding the axe. Social work dept is arguably the home of the biggest and costliest empire buliders. Nanny state gone mad.
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@Jim: I agree with you on this one. Resorting to name-calling and spite helps no-one. The issue may be education but this is not the time to behave like children.
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This article IS spiteful and serves as little more than a distraction. You have decided to change the tone of the debate to a very personal attack on a particular persons character and reputation, things which have very little to do with the key issue at hand – the sustainability of ABC’s school estate.
Personalising the argument to the extent where it becomes us versus them is a common ploy in politics and you have fallen face first into this trap. Attempting to ridicule and discredit the opposition will not win the argument. I would rather you got back on topic and avoided these tabloid style smear tactics.
If you are looking at dispensing blame then you should probably go a few more rungs up the ladder. Last time I checked the Head of Education or the Executive Directors are not responsible for the collapse of our banking system or the careless public spending of the past decade or so. These are the driving force behind school closures and staff redundancies, not the Machiavellian scheming of the “principal architect of this damage”.
In broad terms I would call the proposals constructive. They have raised awareness of ABC’s dilema when it comes to the budget cuts due to take effect next year and the decisions which have to be taken to get through these times. There are now lots of people talking about this issue and a lots of gasps were heard when folk read about the cost of educating ABC’s kids at our smaller schools.
Those protesting school closures are understandably very vocal in there opposition but what you haven’t acknowledged is a large but silent part of the populous who don’t have an ideological opposition to these school closures.
Many tax payers around Argyll and Bute are asking themselves why they are subsidising the education of kids in tiny schools to the tune of £10k or £20k per year. Why do these kids deserve to these sums of money spent on them when kids in our towns are only getting £3k/yr spent on them? How does the education of kids at our larger schools suffer because significant resources are being dedicated to keeping a school with 4 kids in it open? Why are we paying to maintain school buildings which are nothing more than a blackhole for money? Why do we have schools with as many members of staff as kids?
These are legitimate concerns that council tax payers have but not alot of time has been spent exploring these issues. Rather slogans like “21st century highland clearances” are bounded about to describe a situation which has very little in common with the actual highland clearances.
If campaigns to save schools are going to succeed it will take more than the support of just the parents and communities directly associated to these schools. Elected members will be acutely aware that they cannot just be considerate of their rural constituents but also of those living in our larger settlements. A decision to reject a school closure could very well come back to bite them when alternative means of saving money must be found – means which many negatively impact a much larger swathe of their constituents. Personally I do not envy their position on bit at the moment. School campaigners must find a way to engage with everyone across Argyll & Bute and may also have to accept that in the interests of the greater good their battle may be one that will have to be lost.
You have mentioned in passing the potential or perceived economic, social and cultural impacts of these decisions but I’ve yet to see anything substantive presented to defend the existence of rural schools in these contexts. Perhaps we should accept that the cost of education in the 21st century requires us to divorce ourselves from by-gone romantic notions of small rural schools which serve the inhabitants of tiny settlements. Is it the case that this way of delivering education is just no longer sustainable? Is in fact the security of local economies dependant on a rethink of public expenditure to ensure the resources are concentrated on the areas which have the greatest impact on the sustainability of rural populations? Should we have schools where people live or should people live where there are communities which have stable school rolls?
I know I would much rather debate the points above than read about the annual leave patterns of ABC staff.
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For Jim: You ask whether we should have schools where people live or whether people should live where there are schools.
This is one of the key issues and it has to be considered differently in the context of remote rural communities.
Many parents of young children want to provide for them the experience of rural life and a rural education – for reasons which you describe as romantic – and which may be so but which are based on facts like smaller class sizes; a more personal context for their learning; and the shelter of being a known person in a close community.
Then there are the communities themselves and what they contribute to the particular nature of Scottishness, itself the foundation for the promotion of our single highest national earner – tourism.
Here’s the logic.
Some schools must close but if we fail to retain those which are demonstrably viable, we will see communities die and then we will see areas die.
Last year, 2009, the percentage of Argyll and Bute’s population of pensionable age was just over 25%. At the same time the percentage of the population classed as children was 16%, with those of working age at 59%. Within those statistics is a picture of those of working age skewed to the latter end of that age spectrum, which is why the percentage of children is so small.
We are living in a region where the elderly outweigh the children by 64%. So where communities cannot attract parents with young children because there is no school, the weighting of the population will progressively skew even further to the elderly end of the scale and, inevitably, numerically reduce. And where we have whole areas without a primary school, that pattern will apply more broadly.
Then the argument you advance here – why should the wider population pay for the education of a few in a remote place – spreads to even more such issues.
Why should we pay for roads into areas where very few people live?
Why should we pay for ferries to islands with small populations – like Colonsay, like Tiree, like Coll?
Why should we pay for health and care services in areas where few people live? Mull has just managed to win a long battle to reverse the pattern of its island elderly being transported to care homes in various places on the mainland – to spend their last years largely unvisited and away from the place where they had chosen to spend their entire lives – because it is a good place and it is not a town. That battle may never be won again.
In a way, our rural primary schools are like the dykes in the low countries where, in legend, heroic children stuck their thumbs in leaks until help arrived. If the leak had not been stopped, the dyke would have broken and the lands and communities behind it flooded and lost.
We are looking at the start of a process which inevitably will lead to the depopulation of islands and of remote rural areas and to their increasing inaccessibility to other than the rich with helicopters and the walking adventurers.
In this inevitable progression, there will be no access for visitors, no services to support any who persist and no people to connect with when they get there.
And, for what will be left of Scotland as a whole, the central belt and the southern part of the east coast, why would anyone want to come there, expensively, to bad weather and midges, in a place whose accessible parts are no different from anywhere else? We would no longer be ‘Scotland’. We would be a destination with few unique attractions and a lot of negatives.
This current situation – with so many rural primaries threatened with closure – hinges on the value we attach to social and cultural diversity, to the choice they make possible and to the character conferred by place.
We are, in Argyll and in Scotland, on the brink of an opportunity – through our resources in renewable energy – to sustain and develop our remote rural and island communities.
If we let go too much of the infrastructure we have through improperly evidenced decision taking, much will be irrecoverable. We will have a country whose less accessible places will be host only to outcamps of shift workers in barrack camps, seeing to the operation of wind and tidal energy plants keeping the rest of the UK warm and lit.
That is actually the button we will press if we do not now insist on time to come up with a better way of saving money than is currently proposed – which is crude, obvious, easy and irresponsible.
We accept that in more populous places with a greater spirit of enterprise than Argyll has been manged to develop, bigger – not big – schools are indeed better. But in huge territories like Argyll and Bute, whose very character is in its far flung communities and its widely dispersed population, we have to find a better tuned solution than simply shutting small schools and turning the lights off across much of the region.
The reality is that we probably are looking at the start of just such a process because, where it counts, there is neither the imagination nor the will to seek a different solution.
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Well said Newsroom! The Education Department should NOT be working in isolation. Schools are central and crucial in small communities and the viability of those communities declines when schools are shut. The Education Department needs to be brought under a whole Council umbrella and then the whole Council needs to look at its failure to keep and attract a population which, according to the General Records Office, is projected to rise Scotland wide.
We need to consider a chicken and egg question. Are the schools closing because the population is declining or is the population declining because schools are closing?
As a parent who came to Argyll for just such a small school I’m pretty sure it’s the latter.
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For Anne Baird .
Remember when A&B council were proposing to deprive primary school children at some small Kintyre primary schools of a midday meal ? Were it not for the fantastic campaign of parents this plan would have gone through.
SNP councillors were apparently asleep on the job at the time having raised no objection .
Now the SNP in coalition with others is preparing to close 26 rural schools .
What does the education spokesperson for Argyll and Bute have to say ? (SNP councillor Isobel Strong for your information )
You , as a failed SNP candidate cannot get away with pretending to support rural schools when the facts on the SNP locally prove otherwise
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The population can go up in Argyll but still have fewer children – because it attracts rising numbers of people to retire here. This is increasing the burden on all our services, without any support to our local economy nor revitalising our communities.
When are Argyll and Bute going to understand that they need to support the small communities to make our county succeed, not keep trying to impose urban housing estates on places like Dunbeg without the infrastructure necessary to sustain them?
If ABC would help the smallest communities to attract more families to use the existing services then there would be the money to pay for them and the interest and energy to run them.
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We have had reports from some of the threatened schools that they have been unable to get responses to urgent queries because both the Head of Education and a second senior figure in the education department are on holiday until next week.
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I fully understand a parents wish for their child to attend a small school where they think they will receive the attention they deserve. But it begs the question, why should those in large settlements not receive similar teacher pupil ratios? You make the point that smaller class sizes result in a better learning experience but then are we not relegating all the kids in our large schools to a second class education? Would the money currently spent on very small schools not be better directed towards reducing class sizes in larger schools? Surely this has the potential to improve the education of a greater number of pupils than by keeping small schools open with their extortionate overheads?
I fully agree that the field of renewable energy has the potential to grow and support our communities in a sustainable way. It is so disappointing however that many in our communities cannot get behind this and open their arms to developments. Just this week we have another group coming out in opposition to the idea of a windfarm opposite Clachan Seil. They take pride in calling themselves NIMBYS, it is horrifying. But it seems that wherever you propose a windfarm it is not the right place for the local residents. These people are clearly not interested in the local economy, they care only about the view from their conservatories. They don’t appreciate their is a kind of beauty in man-made structures which can harness the power of nature.
Anne Baird raises an important question when she asks ‘We need to consider a chicken and egg question. Are the schools closing because the population is declining or is the population declining because schools are closing?’
My personal opinion is that it is probably due the changing nature of the rural economy, a shift from farming and fishing to a tourism based economy. It’s something that has been happening for the past century and these schools closures are not as newsroom suggests, the start of the process.
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Jim is now bringing the argument to exactly where it should be. All pretence that rural schools the size of North Bute or Kilcreggan cannot deliver the new Curriculum should be abandoned. The performance of Minard and Arrochar (among others) is beyond proof that rural schools can deliver CfE. Remote rural pupils consistently top the area classification tables for attainment at age 16 and those who qualify for free school meals show the biggest advantage.
Jim’s question is not whether the education imparted is “a better learning experience” but whether the additional cost is worth it? Should rural parents not take the altruistic position that they should give up their advantage in order that a greater number of pupils can benefit? It is a laudable position and an argument that is often raised. Unfortunately this set of proposals are the classic example of why the argument is classically flawed
These proposals involve reducing the number of primary teachers in Argyll by 9%. In none of the amalgamations are the class sizes of the bigger receiving schools markedly reduced. Class sizes for the pupils at the closing schools are almost universally increased. If we look at the Garelochhead proposals, the class sizes for the receiving school increase by over 50% and one of the classes is bang on the legal limit of 33 pupils. Add in that two of the classes are oversized with “team teaching” and we can see that making the majority’s lot better is not the aim here.
Castlehill is the seventh biggest school in Argyll (and not classed as rural) and presumably exactly the type of school Jim wants to see benefit from the reorganisation. St Kieran’s is to close but it has no pupils – surely the expenditure saved must benefit class sizes in this town school at least? Well no, the proposals involve reducing the number of classes in Castlehill by two and increasing class sizes by nearly 30%.
We still await the DSM budgets but it would appear that the “extortionate overheads” including heating, cleaning and janitorial services in the rural schools are more than wiped out by additional travel costs and loss of GAE. This leaves teaching staff as the prime area where money can be saved – if their salaries are to be saved I find it highly unlikely they are going to be turning up in an urban school near you any time soon.
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here here sandy,
quote from jim,
“There are now lots of people talking about this issue and a lots of gasps were heard when folk read about the cost of educating ABC’s kids at our smaller schools.”
what about the cost of care for the elderly, i have no parents, grandparents or dependent aunts and uncles, i could gasp at the cost of caring for the old folk. but i do not, my tax is going towards supporting these people which have nothing to do with me. some care costs will be higher for some , highly dependant patients, others would be more cost effective to care for.
i ask you, should i gasp at the cost of these burdens on the tax payer ?? or with civic duty should i accept that all things are not equal and if we are to have mixed communities with all ages i will have to bear the cost ?
will i park our camper near the nearest big town so that they can go to school in a bigger class with poorer educational outcomes just so you can stop gasping with your pals ?
these per pupil costs are detracting from the real message of destruction of the communities involved. do you cost more than me, i use no hospital services(currently) i work full time, my taxes cover the cost of my child going to school easily, the council/government profit from my hard work, why shouldn’t my children benefit ?
p.s. can i have your house if its near a big school please ??? your address would do so i can park the camper, its only for a few years until the kids are up !!
and jim i will no longer comment with regard to yourself and simon and some others because you are both spinnin like wee peeries pretending to debate. when it has become obvious and clear to all that the proposals as prepared by the council have very little basis in the real world and should be thrown out at the next meeting.
broad brush division of cost of school divided by pupil number is a fast and easy way to split opinion and thats all it is doing, its not helping save US money, not employing a consultant to help with this fiasco would have. not finishing the decoration will. look first to their own house for savings, leave those kids alone.
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one more thing then i will be silent,
we have already lost local control of our hospital services due to ineffective management by the very same council we now entrust with our childrens future, that is the sad and sorry future outlined above by newsroom who would want that. tourism is not going to be enough to keep our communities alive. our children deserve better, all of our children, the proposals deliver for none of the children as sandy has identified, not even the 3k ones.
jim and simon et al would have us believe that is a future any of us would wish to be part of.
we have to take a stand before argyll and clyde becomes more of a laughing stock, but for sandy and others we are nearly there. we are the scots not a nation of tourists and townies.
there is no chicken and egg question here only egg on argylls face if we let this happen.
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Carol Walker is clearly incompetent as a manager and should resign forthwith.
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