26 educational establishments in 8 months

It's quite breathtaking - the new Lib/Nat Council Administration (which was only formed with the acquiescence of the Tories remember) - has just confirmed its proposing to close 26 educational establishments (6 Nursery Schools, 13 primary Schools, 3 Secondary Schools and 4 Community Centres) across the city ... ALL consultation on which is to be completed within eight months. Incredible.

All this from a collection of Lib-Dems, in particular, who spent every week of the last eight years criticising us for not consulting properly? Quite incredible.

We did offer an all-Party approach to this way back in mid-June ... see earlier post here ... which was rejected at that Council Executive meeting and again at the later 28th June Full Council meeting. So, several months have gone by with no cross-Party input whatsoever; and worse still, no professional or stakeholder input as we had proposed. And there's still no proposal, even at this stage, to properly involve all stakeholders.

As I've mentioned before - I'm not opposed to the 'principle' of rationalising the school estate when there is substantial, and long-term, over-capacity in the system ... but the way this is all being put forward is ill-considered and, frankly, undemocratic ...

... there's actually a few paragraphs in the report, which is going to Full Council next week, that seek to instruct the Council Secretary to 'corral' deputations from schools and organisations into an appropriate Education Committee meeting, thus not allowing deputations to make any multiple requests to be heard at different meetings of the Council - it's a breach of the principles of free speech!

... and it's gets worse, and a little farcical ...

Here's why - because the 'new' Education Committee only meets every eight weeks, the Lib/Nat Administration are inserting extra meetings to allow it to meet every four weeks, and asking the Convener to ensure that Standing Orders are relaxed to allow the 'corralled' deputations to have extra time and a two-way discussion with the Committee Members. All well-and-good in itself ...

... but now, guess what met every four weeks, had a much more informal setting than a traditional Committee, and often had dialogue between members of the public and elected Members? That's right, the Children and Young People's Scrutiny Panel which has just been unilaterally scrapped (with ZERO public consultation) by the shiny new Lib/Nat Administration.

It would be funny, if it wasn't so serious.

And worse than all of that - there is absolutely nothing new, to offset the closures ... I posted before on this here ... and I'm afraid to say that there does indeed appear to be a complete separation between the rationalisation programme being proposed and any new third-round of building programme - to me, that's unacceptable and means that we're being asked to agree 26 establishment closures with NO guarantee whatsoever of any further new school building to assist that process. A far cry from what has gone before.

And some would have you believe that local politics doesn't matter ... well, voters in Edinburgh may want to disagree at the end of this process.