The Roy Bridge west highland line for hope against Argyll’s shambolic school closure proposals

A successful West Highland line on proposed local authority school closures emerged from the community of Roy Bridge in Lochaber, from the end of December in 2006.

At that time – and following the consultation process – Highland Council took the decision to close Roy Bridge primary school, with a roll of 27 pupils and merge it with the recently built Spean Bridge Primary school, three miles away. This, however, needed a new extension to be added to it to accommodate the swell in the roll with the anticipated arrival of the pupils from Roy Bridge.

The need to build this extension meant that the date set for the closure of Roy Bridge school was 21 months after the closure decision – scheduled for August 2008 and seeing Roy Bridge pupils start that academic year at school in Spean Bridge.

Spean Bridge is on the A82 trunk road from Glasgow to Inverness. Roy Bridge is up the valley of the River Roy, at the point where the legendary West Highland Line rail route swings sharply westwards after crawling along the edge of the Monessie Gorge and before going through Spean Bridge to drop back south into Fort William.

This is big mountain country, with the presence of the Nevis range dictating the West Highland Line’s circuitous approach to Fort William.

As with the 25 communities in Argyll, currently threatened with losing their lifeline schools, remote rural communities like Roy Bridge are no push over. They are resourceful, resilient and tough. They have to be. The phrase ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going.’ could have been coined to describe communities like these.

The successful Roy Bridge campaign

This took 18 months, winning a reversal of the decision in May 2008 from a new council administration voted in after the May 2007 local authority elections

So what did Roy Bridge do?

The community committed itself to fight and the Community Council – Spean Bridge, Roy Bridge and Achnacarry – formed a sub group to front the campaign.

They called in the Scottish Rural Schools Network (SRSN) and together they set about interrogating the details of the financial case that had made the proposal appear to be viable to the councillors who finally approved it.

Then they called in – or SRSN did – independent expert mathematicians who checked both the Highland Council figures and the SRSN figures – and pronounced in emphatic verification of the accuracy of the SRSN figures.

Finally they were supported by their MSP, Fergus Ewing and their local Councillors.

In Argyll and Bute’s case, the only councillors who can legitimately fulfil this role are those who voted AGAINST sending the discredited closure proposals to formal consultation.

What they discovered

In the matter of the costs of the extension to Spean Bridge school, the campaigners found and were able to demonstrate that:

• The capital cost for the two-classroom extension needed there was based on a one-line joiner’s estimate with no cost breakdown. Moreover, the Council itself had not added any architects’ fees, legal fees, due diligence or project management costs to this back-of-an-envelope ‘tender’.
• These omissions from the cost total given in the closure proposal amounted to £114,000
• 12 months later – and just before a showdown meeting between the education department, the campaign group, Sandy Longmuir of SRSN and MSP Fergus Ewing – the cost of the extension itself had gone up from £183,000 to £399,000 – a rise of 218% since councillors voted to close the school in December 2006.

In the matter of the proposals’ revenue projections over a 20 year period, the campaign team found:

• errors in the omission from the proposal documents of loan charges of around £15,223 per year. Highland Council was to admit these errors and that they amounted to over £300,000 of their projected savings of £425,809.

In the matter of additional overheads to be incurred at Spean Bridge, the campaingers found that:

• the additional overhead costs at Spean Bridge  – of maintaining more classrooms and pupils – was shown in the consultation document as £3,000 per year – but had not been added to the cost totals for the combined school.
• under pressure, the council was also forced to admit that these costs had already been reassessed and doubled to £6,000. This knocked a further hole in the projected savings.

The come back attempt

Hugh Fraser, Education Director at Highland Council, questioned the campaigners’ figures, claiming  them to be ‘irrelevant and not based on fact’ – a curious echo of the tactic attempted by Argyll and Bute’s Education Director Cleland Sneddon at the Council meeting on 25th November.

There Sneddon tried to brush off the factual, mathematical and statistical analyses that had been placed in the public domain to prove the fundamental flaws in the proposals, as ‘matters of opinion, not of fact’.

At Roy Bridge, the campaigning parents were able to show that their figures were based on Highland Council’s own documents.

At this stage, and before a critical meeting in Inverness on 2nd December 2007 between the education department under its Director and the campaign team with Sandy Longmuir from the Scottish Rural Schools Network and Fergus Ewing, MSP – Roy Bridge parent campaigner, Marie Claire Russell was quoted as saying:

‘We have presented well-researched information throughout and received criticism for it, while council officials have been able to put forward incomplete and inaccurate figures and the future of our school has rested on this’.

Sound familiar?

The own goal – ‘the consultant paid to review her own work’

Hugh Fraser, Highland’s Education Director, attempted to beat back the campaigners’ financial forensics by producing a report on their claims based on the scrutiny of someone he described as ‘an independent expert’.

It was soon revealed that this ‘independent expert’ was a recent former employee of Highland Council and had actually contributed to the original financial assessment.

So, having verified errors in the first place – and presumably incapable of seeing them – she was brought back as, by then, an external consultant to pronounce on the validity of work she had contributed internally to finalising.

After the long battle was over – with the result  noted below, the Inverness Courier had a field day with this one. On 25th September 2009 it ran an article headed : ‘The consultant paid to review her own work’.

As a member of staff in Highland Council’s finance department, Catherine Hessett had contributed to and verified areas of the calculations on which the council case to close Roy Bridge school was based.

After the parents had delivered the bombshell results of the interrogation of the financial case, Highland Council employed an Edinburgh-based consultancy – Catherine Hessett Consulting Limited – seeking its specialist advice in checking and confirming the figures presented in the report.

This was a pretty safe bet and so it proved. This manifestly objective external consultant obligingly confirmed the figures she had checked and verified while an employee of the council. And all was well for Fraser – until a genuinely objective eye interrogated both the council’s and the campaigners figures.

The respected economic analysts brought in – and who had no axe to grind on rural schools – scrutiinised both sets of papers and found unequivocally for those prepared by the Scottish Rural Schools Network team, saying that the answers should have been obvious to anyone.

The win

By May 2008, the battle was won.

The campaigners forced a review of the information provided during the 2006 consultation process to the community and to the previous Highland Council (ousted in 2007)  – which led to the council’s December 2006 decision to close the school.

The review found that the council’s case for closure was based on seriously flawed financial projections. The parent campaigners were proved right.

And the nail in the coffin was a series of other errors in financial calculations which, when corrected, negated the savings left in the pot once the amounts of the other financial mistakes noted above had been subtracted.

A blizzard of variously incriminating material was discovered through Freedom of Information requests and circulated to Councillors. These – detailed in the section below – included attempts to smear Sandy Longmuir, Chair of the Scottish Rural Schools Network, whose forensic financial investigations had been central to the campaign.

In the end there was no possible defence left.

In early May 2008, a year after the local authority elections saw the previous regime ousted and a new one installed,  the council voted unanimously to reverse the December 2006 decision. Three of the councillors who had supported the initial decision to close the school were known to want to oppose this but bit down hard and voted YES.

The end of the story

Highland Council had to pay £44,590 to the Public Private Partnership (the discredited PPP cash cow) company – Community Schools (Highland) Ltd – in compensation for costs incurred in the preparatory stages of preparation for the extension to Spean Bridge school. (And for the eye-opening intentions on this – see below.)

They committed to upgrading works at Roy Bridge school, estimated then at £160,000.

Audit Scotland, on its cyclical scrutiny of Highland Council, gave it a serious drubbing over its handling of the Roy Bridge school episode. The matter could not be ignored because it had become the subject of sustained media attention. When Audit Scotland investigated the council’s documentary files, a spectrum of information was found to be false.

The conclusion of its findings on this incident were: ‘The council should review and revise procedures to ensure accurate, reliable information is available when taking decisions on future school amalgamations’.

While the findings were expressed with the usual diplomacy in the public report, Audit Scotland nevertheless, in the section on Governance, classed the evidence of management in this matter as a ‘Key Risk area’.

A “key risk” is where Audit Scotland identify a problem likely to impinge on efficient financial practice within a council. If they identify such a risk they expect reports to be prepared as to how the failure is to be corrected.

In this case the Director of Education had to prepare a report, showing he had learned lessons from the matter and demonstrating how he would ensure that anything like it would not happen again. He had a rough time internally with loss of credibility but doggedly remained in his job, pulling the salary but no longer carrying unquestioned professional authority.

A welter of information received by the campaigners and SRSN under freedom of Information legislation, showed an astonishing picture of subterfuge and untruths used to obfuscate the situation.

The Catherine Hessett story came out.

Emails showed that the Council had actually intended to close Roy Bridge school without even building the extension to Spean Bridge. Disclosed material showed they had done nothing about this matter other than get the ‘back of an envelope’ estimate from the joiner.

The intention was simply to squeeze all the pupils into Spean Bridge as it was, immediately after the vote to close was secured.

Unfortunately for them -  and a precedent to note – the roll at both schools had risen since the beginning of the consultation and they could not hope to get away with the capacity issues and the class sizes involved in packing in all the pupils.

There is what is described as ‘an anguished email’ from the local area officer saying another family had arrived with 3 children so they could not merge the schools. To this day a local family claim to have saved Roy Bridge. And they did. It was their three children.

And a footnote: Catherine Hessett had to repay her ‘consultancy’ fees of £600 per day and her ‘retainer’  contract was barely used after this.

In Argyll and Bute, Keir Bloomer is paid around £1,000 a day and the vote to move the discredited proposals to formal public consultation included a clause giving Executive Director Cleland Sneddon (anagram: Old Ned Lends Can) permission to carry on employing him.

It’s Christmas, in gift-giving terms, for some – if not for the communities cruelly left to spend the festive season defending themselves against a case for closure that has no substance in its own terms.

The lesson of Roy Bridge though is inspirational.

Leave nothing to chance. Respect nothing or no one until you have good reason to do so. Investigate. Get expert help. Get first class independent verification of results. If your case is right on the facts, do not give up until you win.

And Vote

A no-brainer – vote out every one of the Councillors who voted FOR the motion to send these admittedly flawed proposals to consultation.

Roy Bridge’s local councillor decamped to another ward where he was still sharply defeated. And their new councillor, Allan Henderson, who became Provost, was first class.

He noted afterwards: ‘Knowing communities such as Kinlocheil and Glenfinnan which lost their primary school many years ago and to this day do not even have a village hall, I know only too well the consequences of closure.’

It was the new council administration, elected in May 2007, that reasserted reason and justice in the Roy Bridge school situation.

The photograph at the top is of The Lord of the Isles approaching Banavie on the West Highland Line in June 2010. It is by copyright holder Rudhach and is reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence