Report to the People
16th May 2005
Furthering Education
Isn’t May a great month?
Some of the year’s best weather, a sprinkling of long weekends and
plenty of top sport on the box.
Great, that is, unless you’ve got exams.
Across
the country, Standard Grade, Higher and Sixth Year Studies students are locked
away in bedrooms and libraries, hitting the books and being taunted by the
carefree sounds of spring floating in from the uncaring world outside.
But,
while many young people use their study leave to prepare for what is the most
important month of their lives so far, those who have already disengaged with
education now start to drift off completely – spelling disaster for their
future prospects.
As
well as supporting the students who stick in with their studies, we also have a
duty to those who, to be frank, hate school and just want out of the place.
One
solution may lie with the school-college partnership, debated in Holyrood last
Thursday.
Backed
by an extra £41.5 million investment, the idea is to give pupils the chance to
study different subjects in which they may have a real interest or ability.
Thanks
to local arrangements, for example with our own James Watt College, some of this
already happens. But, under this
new, comprehensive strategy, every secondary school will be partnered with a
college by 2007 – giving expanded opportunities to even more young people and
helping them avoid being thrown on the scrapheap because they were made to
believe that education was “not for them.”
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