It was the first question at my constituency election hustings. “What’s gone wrong with our schools ?” The lady was referring to the building scandal which has overtaken Edinburgh. Seventeen of the city’s schools have had to be closed suddenly when it was discovered that some metal rods which are supposed to hold the inner and outer walls together were missing. One wall has already blown down in a storm. All of the schools were built in the last ten years and all of them under the controversial PPP (public/private partnership) scheme.
The discovery has sent council officials up and down the country scurrying out to their schools to check on their walls. So far, the problem seems to be confined to Edinburgh (except that there may have been a problem with Lourdes PS in Glasgow). But it’s big enough here, with over 7,500 pupils affected, including senior pupils about to sit important exams.
So what has gone wrong? Was it the fault of the seven building firms involved? Or was it the fault of the nine professional advising and design companies? Or was it the fault of the private finance scheme run by a consortium of companies, many of which are apparently registered in tax-havens such as Jersey and Guernsey? Or was the fault of the politicians – Tory and Labour – who brought in the private sector to build, maintain and own the schools under a long-term rental contract?
No doubt there will be an official inquiry and “lessons will be learned”. Already though, the affair has added to the impression that the Scottish education system is creaking, is no longer in the top 20 in the world and is about to fall even further. The politicians are all running to the rescue, with promises that education is their top priority. They actually mean it is one of their top priorities because they are also keen to spend more money on the health service and housing.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats want to spend the bulk of their 1p rise in income tax on education, around £700m. The SNP have promised £100m for schools in deprived areas. The Greens want to employ another 4,000 teachers. And the Conservatives believe the education problem can be solved by transferring power from education authorities to individual head teachers.
So far, we have had three election manifestos launched. First on the stage were UKIP who want to cut income tax to 30 per cent for middle earners and rely on Britain leaving the EU to boost the economy. Then came the Greens with the exact opposite…to increase tax on middle and high earners and spend the money on education and the transition to a low-carbon economy, creating, they say, 200,000 new jobs. Finally the Conservative manifesto claims they can become the largest opposition party by promising to keep taxes as they are but still find the money to increase spending on the health service by 2 per cent and inject another £300m into mental health.
This is certainly turning out to be an election about taxation. I wonder if that is why it is a low-key affair out on the streets. It’s not a subject we want to think about, let alone shout about. But as we grind towards May 5th, I guess the mood will become more tensile.
All this is being played out against a stuttering economy. This week we got several warning that things are not going well. A Bank of Scotland survey found a sharp decline in manufacturing. This was backed up by a Fraser of Allander study which also discovered a dip in the financial services sector, a lot of it accounted for by the slump in the oil industry. Then the Chamber of Commerce came out with the frightening conclusion that Scotland was standing on a “knife-edge” between growth and another recession.
Tragedy hit the Western Isles this week with the loss of three fishermen when their boat sank off the island of Mingulay. Their trawler, the “Louisa” from Stornoway, was at anchor when it began taking in water. It seems its life-raft failed to open properly and the four crewmen were left clinging to it in freezing cold water. Only one of them managed to swim to the shore.
But if this April brings tragedy and its fair share of showers – even snow on the hills of the central Highlands – it also brings signs of new life. Every year we await news from the Scottish Wildlife Trust reserve at Loch of Lowes in Perthshire that its pair of ospreys have successfully returned and re-established their nest.
And in the early hours of Tuesday came news of the first egg of the season. Now, as one nation, we all metaphorically sit on this egg and hope it hatches out into new life as the days get warmer.
