Latest Scottish Parliament magazine features Argyll and Bute school closures

The 30th May 2011 edition of Holyrood, the Scottish Parliament’s magazine, has a major feature on school closures and the need for revision of the Schools Act 2010.

The piece features in large measure Argyll and Bute Council’s persistent and comprehensive efforts to subvert that law.

The article covers the main topics at heated issue here in Argyll:

• the fudging of school capacity figures to make it look as if the region’s rural schools are running half empty and should be closed;
• the misinformation;
• the refusals to provide legitimately requested  information to those who have asked for it;
• the failure of the main safeguard in the Act to be used consistently – the ability for ministers to call-in closure papers, where appropriate, once a council has decided to close a school.

On this last point the article carries very interesting evidence from Karen Eunson, a parent from Scalloway secondary school in Shetland, This school was confirmed for closure, the case was called-in and then the closure decision was allowed to stand.

Ms Eunson says that once call-in was actioned, the parent council and school supporters were left off the map of the process. No reference was made to them not were they consulted in any way. Her call for this to be remedied seems eminently reasonable for an Act with a legislative presumption against closure.

False arguments and the cry for continuing local authority control – and more money

John Stodter, from the Association of Directors of Education (ADES), argues that keeping rural schools open prejudices the interests of other schools – and he gives the example of ‘affording them fewer teachers’.

Has he looked at Argyll and Bute Council’s proposals for the closure of North Bute School and the absorption of its pupils into Rothesay Primary?

Here, in this, as Sandy Longmuir of the Scottish Rural Schools Network (SRSN) has demonstrates in detail and in public, is the closure of a rural school which results n the receiving school (Rothesay Primary) becoming the worst staffed school for its size in all of Scotland.

How does that stack up with the self-interested argument of ADES, the local authorities’ insider body?

It is also fully plain from what Mr Stodter has to say, that ADES has absolutely no understanding of the impact of the closure of rural schools on the economic sustainability of their host communities, nor any interest or care for such consequences.

He is wholly concerned with two things:

• the COSLA power game – keeping education in local authority control. Argyll and Bute cannot be helping the ADES/COSLA cause in the manipulative incompetence of their performance in this matter.
• screwing the Scottish Government for money to compensate local councils for keeping rural schools open; when, in the case of Argyll and Bute at least, we are sharply aware of the extent to which they are fiscally profligate in no small degree.

We can evidence here – a few examples:

• the negligence that has led to Argyll and Bute suffering bya  greater number of £millions from cuts to its annual revenue grant than any other local authority in Scotland;
• the high cost incurred in no fewer than two successive series of profoundly flawed school closure processes;
• the lavish commissioning of consultants across the spectrum of its operations – a great expense which to date has showed little evidence of utility – in fact, in most cases, a large scale waste of money (the CHORD project);
• an end-of-empire attitude to the increase rather than reduction of staffing in the face of cuts inflicted on core services like education and  social care. The small school population of Argyll and Bute is already catered to by no fewer than 11 Quality Improvement Officers (@ around £57,000 per annum each) who cannot demonstrate educational improvement achieved by their efforts. They are  now to be monitored by the recruitment of even more expensive Quality Improvement Managers. Good management would simply get rid of these redundant and parasitic posts altogether. It is agreed by educationalists that the key to the best education provision is in the calibre of the frontline teachers.
• persistent wastage of vast sums of money on incompetently contracted and managed major infrastructural projects too numerous to list yet again;
• the widescale use of the indefensibly expensive PPI and PPP funding schemes for infrastructural projects.These schemes together see something around £5,000 a year paid to private sector investors in respect of every single man, woman and child in Scotland – for decades into the future.

The argument of an imperative to close rural schools to save money does not hold up for a second in the case of so ill-managed a council as Argyll and Bute. What they will save if they close all of the threatened schools is a pittance, compared to what they perpetually and annually waste through complacency, incompetence and unable management.

The heart of the issue – the law and the penalties for breaching it

The heart of the issue in the piece is that the legislation in question – the Act that governs the process of attempted school closures and carries a legislative presumption against the closure of a rural school – was written without conceiving of a council so determinedly underhand as Argyll and Bute.

The Holyrood article quotes Dr Douglas Mackenzie, Vice Chair of Barcaldine Primary School’s parent council, on this. He attributes the obvious and complete breakdown of trust between parents and communities and Argyll and Bute Council to the council’s continual efforts to get around the law rather than embrace it.

SRSN’s Sandy Longmuir, who was part of the team who wrote the School’s act 2010, acknowledges that no one involved had reason to imagine a council whose subversive behaviour would be of the order of Argyll and Bute’s.

He identifies what he sees as the core weakness of the Act – the lack of penalties for those who do not observe the obligations this law imposes upon them. He points to Argyll and Bute Council”s persistent – indeed, insistent – flouting of it and asks where is the legal leverage to bring them into line.

We agree with Mr Longmuir that it would be helpful in truncating the process of legally unable closure proposals – as Argyll and Bute’s have now been on successive occasions – if the Schools Act 2010 included early and severe penalities for such inability.

Such clear action would protect children, parents and communities from what has been a cruel and prolonged process inflicted on them by an authority able to give a two-fingered salute to the law with impunity- for the tine being.

However, the law is not without penalty of a profound and appropriate kind – even it it comes into play at a later stage than is careful of the potentially abused.

Ministers may call-in closure decision if the evidence is there to suggest that there is legal reason to do so.

If those who wrote the law remain content that it says what it means and means what it says, we see no need to waste time in revising the law.

It is the job and function of government ministers, above all people, to uphold the laws they pilot to the statute book.

If any council has failed to observe the wonderfully unequivocal Schools Act 2010 in the case it has put forward to close a school and / or in the process by which it has conducted the statutory consultation on its proposal, the law requires Ministers to call-in and reverse closure decisions made on such contaminated grounds.

If a case or a consultation process has run counter to the law, it is hardly going to be hard to discern. It is up to Ministers who presumably understand the law, to enforce the law.

That is the most serious penalty that can be exacted against councils frothing at the mouth to close rural schools and unconcerned about the need to meet the statutory requirements of the Schools Act 2010.

All Ministers have to do is to call in closure decisions arising from legally unable closure proposals or consultation processes and boot them into touch on those properly legal grounds.

When the going gets tough…