Highland Council accepts Education Secretary’s moratorium – in judgment of Solomon

Highland Council was known to have been split between offering token support to Argyll and Bute’s vaunted but stillborn resistance to the Education Secretary’s call for a moratorium on school closures – and agreeing to that moratorium.

Highland’s administration has now met and has decided that it will indeed agree to Michael Russell’s requested moratorium.

However, the compromise between the factions has produced a ridiculous and damaging contradiction where, to save face, it will continue with its closure process in Caithness.

The results of this are to be  published next month and will affect some rural schools – specifically Canisbay  Crossroads, Keiss and Thrumster with 43, 35, 41 and 37 pupils respectively – all healthy schools with committed communities and decent school buildings.

However, in a move that indefensibly wastes public money, inflicts needless stress on parent councils and sets up the schools in question to fail, apparently at parent volition, the teuchters will not go to consultation on these proposals, even if the recommendation of the officers is closure.

All that this deeply macchiavellian judgment of Solomon can possibly achieve is to condemn the threatened schools to decline under the cloud of a judgment made public but not to be enacted – yet.

This leaves them vulnerable to placement decisions made in the meantime by parents anxious to ensure that their children’s education can be stable and continuous. Rolls then fall and in due time the council will close the schools anyway on the basis of underoccupancy or, as with Achaleven in Argyll, no occupancy at all.

Also facing the May 2012 Scottish Local Authority Elections, Highland councillors will no doubt do as Argyll’s adminsistration representatives are doing – offer vague promises of support later on.

With Audit Scotland – which does not seem able to understand the financial arithmetic of rural school closure any better than the local authorities it subjects to scrutiny – urging councils to close schools or face its displeasure, it is naive in the extreme to imagine that any school whose roll falls for this unjust reason will be saved from closure later.

We would again urge the Education Secretary to make Audit Scotland a full member of the new commission on the delivery of rural education – in the interests of joined up government policy-making and for Audit Scotland’s own education on the financial detail of the issue.

At then moment we have a ridiculous stalling.

On the one hand the government has enacted  – with energetic cross party support at the Scottish Parliament – and is proposing to strengthen the legislation which has a presumption against the closure of rural schools.

On the other, Audit Scotland is threatening local authorities with critical audit reports if they do not press on smartly with closing schools.

And in the now smoke-free back rooms, the Sir Humphreys of the Scottish senior civil service subvert the legislation by making secret – but documented – agreements with local authority Directors of Education that ministerial call in will rarely happen.

(Ministerial call-in is the single point in the entire  legislative process governing school closures where the strength and integrity of evidence may – and even then only possibly,  not certainly – be interrogated.)

This entire situation is worthy of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. It is not serious politics and it is dangerously damaging public trust in governmental integrity of purpose.