Today’s edition of The Herald (23rd April 2011) has published a letter from Sandy Longmuir on the closure of rural schools.
Mr Longmuir is the Chair of the Scottish Rural Schools Network that has done so very much to support the rural primary schools in Argyll, under threat of closure since October 2010.
On behalf of SRSN, he had made the signal contribution to the school campaigners’ victory in seeing the failure of Argyll and Bute Council’s first mammoth list of 26 schools it proposed to close.
Mr Longmuir had prepared an analytic report on these closure proposal papers , describing them – with demonstrated reason – as the worst he had ever seen from any Scottish local authority.
It was obvious from the report that the papers, presented by Education Director, Cleland Sneddon, were so profoundly unable in legal compliance as well as in evidence and thought, that they would not survive the scrutiny of the full process. They were withdrawn at this meeting, on an administration motion.
Since then Mr Longmuir has been the target of a sustained attempt to claim that his evidence was wrong and his logic flawed, with the administration councillors preferring the greater ease found in Mr Sneddon’s lack of both.
At the council meeting earlier this week, (19th April 2011), to consider the closure list Mk 2 – this one the personal product of Education Spokesperson, Ellen Morton, Mr Longmuir was the absent target for a two hour scripted rant (he read it) by Cleland Sneddon,
Senior Labour politician, Jackie Baillie, who was in the chamber, described it as ‘a thinly veiled personal attack on Sandy Longmuir’, the like of which she had not seen before in a formal meeting.
What is most marked about the letter from Mr Longmuir, published today, is its objectivity, its absolute engagement with the issues and its avoidance of the sort of personal abuse to which he himself has been subjected by the wounded invertebrates of Argyll and Bute Council.
His key points are that the proposals to close rural schools to save money are not calibrated on property costs but on the conundrum of cutting the teaching posts the council has signed up to retain. This commitment is part of the funding deal to support councils in return for another council tax freeze. It will be interesting to see how Argyll and Bute Council propose to square this one.
Mr Longmuir shows that, with additional transport costs and the restructuring of the revenue grant in consequence of the closures, the only savings to be made in the proposed closure of 12 schools lie in the 12.45 teaching posts lost across Argyll and Bute.
He shows how flawed is the council’s key argument of falling school rolls, pointing to the fact that the falls predicted years ago have already taken place and that school rolls are now rising and will continue to do so. He quotes the council’s own figures showing that the coming August P1 intake will bring an increase to school rolls.
He concludes with his identification of the main characteristic of what is driving school closure initiatives across Scotland and not just in Argyll and Bute.
Sandy Longmuir’s thesis is that local authorities are attempting to impose a mechanistic vision of education where all children – regardless of the context of the communities in which they live – will receive exactly the same sort of education.
What he sees is the closure of the individualist and location-specific rural primaries in favour of the battery-hen approach – pile ‘em high, teach ‘em cheap and teach ‘em all the same.
He’s right of course. The intellectually challenged, the unconfident and the Stalinist – all of which are to be found in Argyll and Bute Council, are inevitably drawn to the security of the uniform and the formulaic.
They can conceive of a monolith where more complex structures elude them; and spontaneity of any kind cannot marry with the slow response times of their essential fear of life.
The essence of life is not about its underlying uniformity but about its infinite variety.
Rural schools and the children who emerge from a culture where they are known, valued, paid attention and given room to learn, grow, play, create, explore and reflect are the fuel of that variety.
Sandy Longmjir understands that and is one of its evangelists. The poor boobies in Argyll and Bute Council, administration councillors and staff, want all shoes to be brown, all lives to be the same and all pictures to be monochrome.
One genuinely feels for them in their imaginative confinement and in the thinness of their lives.