Argyll News: Commission on the Delivery of Rural Education a dead ...

Yesterday?s [18th January] edition of The Herald saw its Education Correspondent, Andy Denholm, reporting on confidential papers showing that the COSLA [Convention of Scottish Local Authorities] executive, in November 2012, agreed to work to see an end to the 2010 Schools Act?s provision for ministerial call-in of council decisions to close rural schools.

The text quoted said that the purpose: ?should be to remove it entirely within the longer term and not replace it with any other appeals process?. [Ed: our emphasis.]

The route to that endgame was to: ??consider a framework which would set the ground rules for the call-in process.?

The remainder of the article was, with tedious predictability, set up as a game of tennis between COSLA Education Spokesperson, Douglas Chapman and Sandy Longmuir, Chair of the Scottish Rural Schools Network, which so effectively campaigned across Scotland and, prominently, here in Argyll, against the closures of rural schools proposed in 2010-11 as quick-fix responses to the imperative to cut local authority costs.

The Ministerial call-in is the last hope of shelter from predation by communities fighting to save their schools. COSLA had never wanted it but, in the work leading up to the framing of the 2010 Schools Act, had been duped into accepting the call-in provision on verbal assurances privately given by senior civil servants that, in practice it would not be used.

In practice it was used with what COSLA must have seen as profligacy ? and in a manner divorced from evidence and statute but fuelled by the political pragmatism of the moment, to the point where both school campaigners and COSLA were, variously, bitterly disappointed and angered.

So this COSLA determination is no surprise.

What, however, is quite extraordinary is that, throughout yesterday?s entire Herald article and a follow up today on the Scottish Conservatives? opposition to COSLA?s intent to remove this right of appeal, no one has referred even to the existence of the Commission on the Delivery of Rural Education. Yet the Commission is supposed to be in the driving seat of revising the failed statute that provides the call-in, the 2012 Schools Consultation [Scotland] Act.

The Commission is jointly ?owned? by COSLA and Education Secretary, Michael Russell, who mooted it in the middle of the cage fighting that was the 2010-11 war of the threatened schools.

It was set up in June 2011, accompanied by a [disputed] moratorium on school closures and with a reporting date a year ahead.

It had the task of revising the 2010 Schools Act added to its brief not long afterwards, with its reporting date extended to August 2012 to allow for the additional work.

For Argyll has, from the outset, been opposed to the Commission, seeing its establishing as feebly opportunist political escapism. Our view was that the commission itself was constitutionally incapable of achieving anything beyond its immediate humane impact in giving embattled parents and community campaigners a breathing space.

In November 2011, Sandy Longmuir of SRSN, a member of the commission to whom we had privately assigned the role of the proverbial canary in the mine, resigned from it in what we described as: ?a decision agonised over for some time but driven finally by a complex of profound concerns?.

In June 2012 The Education Secretary lost a Judicial Review actioned by Western Isles Council over his call-in decision rejecting their decision to close four schools, while sanctioning other of their proposed closures in the same call-in.

Within the due period the Scottish Government decided to appeal Judge Lord Brailsford?s robust opinion.

By July 2012, For Argyll was publicly anticipating the forthcoming report from the Commission on the Delivery of Rural Education, due in August.

After this flagging up of the timescale, it was made known that it was considered improper for the commission to report until the High Court had pronounced on the Education Secretary?s appeal against the Judicial Review opinion in favour of Western Isles Council.

The intimation was that the work of the commission? was in good order but a stay on the finalisation of its report would have to await the outcome of the legal appeal.

Given that Judge Lord Brailsford?s opinion was centred on issues of serial incompetence in the Schools Act?s prescription for the call-in and in the minister?s implementation of it, it is not hard to see why the commission felt that it should wait for the final legal decision.

Whatever work it had done by July 2012 might well have come under immediate question in the nature of the judgment of the Judicial Review; and only the appeal would show what, if any, remedial work the commission might have to do before completing its work and reporting.

COSLA appear to be under no such self-imposed constraint in the strategy agreed at its November executive; nor do they appear to be waiting for the commission ? in which they are an equal partner ? to resume the finalisation of its recommendations and of its critical revision of the Act.

Very tellingly, the single reference to the commission in yesterday?s Herald article was so nameless and oblique that it seemed to turf over its private burial.

In his penultimate paragraph, Andy Denholm said, of COSLA: ?In a submission to a Scottish Government-backed commission [Ed: our emphasis], Cosla said the ?vibrancy? of communities depended on a range of social and economic factors and argued a school ?will at best only have a limited contribution to make to community life?.?

At a stroke, the commission has been severed from its [rather relevant] name and from one of its [rather relevant] parents.

Neither of the tennis players orchestrated by Denholm ? Chapman of COSLA and the SRSN?s Longmuir ? referred at all to the commission; nor was it mentioned today in the Scottish Conservatives opposition to the COSLA move against call-in.

Yet it was the commission?s given task to revise this troubled Act and the call-in issue was always going to be a major point of tension within the commission.

It is impossible to read the combined evidence from this episode as other than that the commission is the discredited turkey we always felt it was destined to become.

The likelihood is a lame report slid into public on a day to bury bad news, long after everyone has forgotten all about it.

The commission has, though, served its political purpose of taking the momentum away from the schools campaigners who were, at the time of its inception, high in the ascendancy of what was a pretty cataclysmic confrontation.

How much will this dodge have cost?

Source: http://forargyll.com/2013/01/herald-article-today-reveals-where-rural-education-commission/

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