Baldernock: another win for a threatened rural school

This time it’s East Dunbartonshire Council on the run.

The redoubtable parent from Baldernock School, Niall Campbell, has secured a public statement from his local authority – in today’s (7th August 2011) Milngavie and Bearsden Herald, that it has ‘NO’ plans to close the school.

Mr Campbell, who made contact through For Argyll with the Scottish Rural Schools Network and the Argyll Rural Schools Network, has doggedly identified, calculated and pursued the crucial issue of the school’s status as an ‘accessible rural school’.

As he has repeatedly said, in its clear interest in closing the school, East Dunbartonshire had been keen to make the school appear more expensive to run than is remotely the case.

Tim McIntyre, a member of the Argyll Rural Schools Network showed that the Scottish Government already, in fact, picks up almost all of the tab of the cost per pupil of educating children in small rural schools.

This is paid through what amounts to a premium grant operated through a line in the Grant Aided Expenditure (GAE) block grant funding mechanism. This calculates the funding annually due to each council for an additional per capital grant for every pupil it educates in a rural school with a roll of 69 or under.

As Tim McInyre showed, when this is added to the standard per capita annual grant aid given to local authorities by the Scottish Government for every child in education, the total is very little short of the full costs involved.

This means that claimed savings from the closing of rural schools can be grossly inflated by a failure adequately to understand the workings of GAE.

East Dunbartonshire Council appeared not to understand that the description of Baldernock as an ‘accessible rural school’ qualified it for this additional per capita funding, since its roll was within the set limit.

The matter was moved beyond doubt when Mr Campbell was advised to get the constituency’s MSP, Fiona MacLeod, to ask a Parliamentary Question at Holyrood to establish authoritatively whether or not Baldernock qualified for the GAE finding for rural school pupils. Ms MacLeod did just this and the result was an unequivocal confirmation that Baldernock does indeed qualify for this funding through its inclusion within the spectrum of rural schools.

This means that it also falls within the protection of the year long moratorium on the closure of rural schools established by Education Secretary, Michael Russell, to allow the new Commission on the Delivery of Rural Education to deliberate freely.

East Dunbartonshire Council, in making its public statement following the Holyrood clarification – that it now has no interest in closing Baldernock – has clearly been sore at being backed into a corner by the determined and resourceful Niall Campbell.

The Education Convenor, Una Walker and several senior officers appear to be lining up to claim that they had told Mr Campbell that Baldernock was ‘an accessible rural school’ . This may or may not be the case, but the evidence was that they themselves either did not understand what that classification actually meant or, for reasons of convenience, disguised its financial implications from parents at the threatened school.

Highly capable parent councils across Scotland have defeated the intentions of a range of local authorities to close rural primary schools on unsound evidence – with Argyll and Bute Council way out in front in having been made to abandon two entire sets of closure proposals on the grounds of their legal inability.

Baldernock School owes a lot to its parent council and to Mr Campbell – who is working to establish a network group between Baldernock and some other schools in East Dunbartonshire which may also fall into the category of rural schools.