A series of reports on Scottish Education came under the title ‘Building the Curriculum”. For all their importance, I couldn’t help wondering if we also needed a series entitled ‘Building our schools’.
When I started teaching in the mid seventies, it was in a school based in a terrace of Victorian townhouses. From the moment I began, folk ‘in the know’ would mutter mysteriously about ‘plans for a new school’. They had ‘seen the blueprint’ for a site ‘in the south of the city’. It was, they assured me, ‘only a matter of time’.
The time involved was around three decades, and a new school only became a reality after the old one started falling down. It was rebuilt on the same site, while the ‘mysterious plans’ moved on to become gossip at a neighbouring school, also in need of replacement.
Meanwhile, many of the city schools built in the late sixties have already been replaced owing to shoddy construction, and there is an ongoing battle over the potential site for yet another replacement school building.
Building schools appears to be a minefield – not a happy metaphor for colleagues who worked in a school where old mine workings opened up a sinkhole in the corridor.
As in many areas of education, time is of the essence. Each pupil has a maximum of 13 years ‘in the system’. The time it takes to propose, plan, and construct new buildings can easily outstrip a generation of pupils; in some cases the period outlasts a generation of teachers!
Whilst understanding the importance of ‘getting it right’ and the plethora of red tape and political considerations surrounding such projects, we all have experience of the speed with which even ‘public’ works can be completed where it is in the interests of profit or gain. Is education provision less urgent? Should schools for our young people not be a fast tracked priority? This is not to decry the many positive projects that have been completed in all sectors of education, merely the time from proposal to completion.
Pupils and staff from St Margaret’s Academy in Livingston have just returned from ten days of working in the community in Malawi. In that time, they refurbished a clinic and built a new classroom. Viewers of the television documentary on Holyrood Secondary in Glasgow will have seen a similar project in action. Both schools, along with many others across the country, having raised funds for the building of facilities in Malawi, felt they would like to make a practical contribution themselves, raised the funds for the trip, took gifts for the schoolchildren, and committed two weeks of their lives to the hard physical work of building and refurbishing. Their reward was the joy of the teachers and children in the local communities and a feeling of accomplishment.
Young people, despite an occasional bad press, generally want to make a practical difference; they are impatient and want change to come now. Frequently, they are prepared to do what it takes to effect that change.
Scotland is not Malawi and everyone understands that things have to be done differently here – but, still, there is a big difference between ten days and ten years!
Not for the first time, I find myself saying, when it comes to the building and replacement of schools: listen to the pupils!
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