Report to the People
Improving Learning Environments
If you're neither a school student nor the parent of one, then voting in June's General Election was probably the first time you had set foot in a school in years.
What, though, was the first thing you noticed when you walked in? The students' work on the walls? The glowing HMI report pinned to the notice board? Or the buckets on the floor under where the roof was leaking?
While the quality of education in our schools continues to rise, our young people would, I believe, achieve even better results if their learning environment was improved. At the risk of stating the obvious, warm, comfortable classrooms with more books to read and better computers to use can only be conducive to learning.
Back in June, I mentioned in this column that it will cost £60 million just to keep Inverclyde's schools wind and watertight for the next 15 years. I raised this with Henry McLeish at First Minister's Question Time, where he assured me that, while there has already been significant investment in improving the fabric of our schools, this is an issue the Executive takes seriously and there is more money to come.
This commitment was reflected last week when the Scottish Executive announced £10 million of new investment for buildings and equipment.
The money, being distributed immediately to every primary and secondary school across the country, will be spent by the schools themselves to meet their own particular needs - such as buying more books, educational materials and computers, or carrying out repairs and redecoration.
The amount each school will receive depends on its size: between £1000 and £8000 for primary schools and between £8,000 and £12,000 for secondary schools. Under the scheme, Inverclyde's schools are getting an extra £170,000 to spend where they need it most.
This is, of course, a fraction of the total education budget and, while welcome, is not intended to meet the longer term challenge of what we do about outdated schools.
Rather, this will be dealt with by the Scottish Parliament's school building programme. And earlier this year, as the first step along this road, Inverclyde Council received £150,000 to carry out a feasibility study into building brand new schools using Public Private Partnership money.
If we are to give our children the education they need in the environment they deserve, we need schools which reflect the changing face of Inverclyde and the changing face of education.
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