Some schools may succeed in being taken off the list of those proposed for closure before the full Council meeting on 25th November.

For those that do, this is the end of the closure threat.

What alone will get a school off the list now is proving that the case for closure is wrong on the bottom line detail of travel times involved for pupils to their assigned replacement school.

The Executive Director of Customer Services, variously known as the Education Director, Cleland Sneddon, gave a public commitment at the meeting of the Council on 2nd November, that any proposal requiring a journey of more than 45 minutes would see the school in question automatically removed from the list.

It is interesting to note that Highland Council, which Mr Sneddon, publicly recognised as the benchmark for the Argyll and Bute procedure, uses a 30minute journey time – not the 45 minutes conveniently adopted by Argyll and Bute. Why?

Luing – the pioneer reconstruction

At the meeting in Luss on 12th November 2010, the audience was informed that the school on the Isle of Luing has already been taken off the list. (Mind you, it is not beyond imagining that this will be a stage managed event to sweeten the meeting on the 25th November for the public gallery.)

It has been clear from the start that Luing should never have been on the list and that it had been included to serve the purpose now contrived – that we have a listening Council.

It is an abuse that the Luing community (in company with others to come?) has been forced to muster for war just to serve the sanitising needs of a flawed process.

But why is Luing no longer formally proposed for closure? Because it conducted a real time enactment of the journey necessitated by the proposed relocation of their children to school across the Cuan Sound and on to Ellenabeich, (Easdale).

They did it door to door, getting in and out of vehicles, in and out of the boat, in and out of a minibus – recreating every exact action that would happen every morning in getting the Luing children to school off the island They timed it and they filmed every second of it to show that it was utterly realistic and they had not cheated. It took 60 minutes, not the chosen limit of 45 minutes. So Luing is off the list.

Recommendation to schools with journey times potentially over 45 minutes

We are aware of other schools already doing and planning the same test as Luing has successfully conducted – and have publiished Kilmodan’s video on the process.

Rural journeys to school, with pick up points and complex routes, are far from straightforward. We recommend that any school where it is thought that the journey time to and from school is greater than 45 minutes, should perform an exact and honest reconstruction of the actual journey to school, recording, as Luing has done, the time it will take, in reality, for their children to get to school.

At the Luss meeting on 12th November 2010, Jackie Baillie MSP advised the Luss parents to do just this, to work out the route a school bus would take – and Councillor Petrie confirmed that it would be a contract service – looking at the starting point, the glens and the pick up points.

We suggest doing it at the time of day – on a weekday – when the journeys to and from the new school would actually happen. Traffic conditions obviously affect journey times.

And here there is another conundrum. The basis for the journey times, as they are given in the existing council closure proposal papers, is not known. Is it taken from school to school? Is it taken from the starting point of the most distance-disadvantaged child on the roll? Is it taken from the starting point of the bus, taking into account the time at the pick up points, some with a few children, some with many, taking longer to get on and off the bus?

As with so many things in this dreadfully flawed process, no one knows.