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Would you send your child to a school that had been described as presenting a “significant risk to life”?
That sounds absurd, right? And couldn’t possibly happen in 21st-century Scotland, where education is a top priority and we’re living in the best country in the world for children to grow up… could it?
Unfortunately, it could, and it has. In fact, this appears to be precisely the situation facing families who send their children to Lenzie Academy in East Dunbartonshire.
The issues were first revealed in November when a Fire Risk Assessment – which had been carried out in October – was leaked. That document was reported to include incredibly serious problems, including the fact that some fire doors could not be easily and immediately opened in the event of an emergency.
As failures to properly manage and maintain a school go, that’s about as big as it gets, and we should probably be grateful that this problem was not discovered under the most tragic of circumstances. Hard questions must now be asked, and resignations may be necessary.
The council claims to have taken action to deal with the issues identified, but has now admitted that it will take months to fully address them.
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Unsurprisingly, teachers at the school (who had been raising concerns about the state of the building for quite some time) say that this is not good enough. As The Herald has already reported, they are now being balloted for targeted strike action – a prospect that received 95% support in an earlier, indicative ballot.
Of course, Lenzie Academy was already in the news because of the council’s handling of plans to replace the outdated building with a brand new facility.
Officials want to build a new school on nearby Whitegates Park, a much-loved local green space that sits right on the very edge of the Lenzie Academy catchment area. The plans have provoked outrage in some quarters, and concerns have even been taken to John Swinney during a ‘travelling cabinet’ session in Kirkintilloch.
What’s more, the projected costs for the project have rocketed: the initial estimate of £85m has been revised up to an eye-watering £138m in the most recent council documents.
This is at least in part because the council is now admitting it will have to spend millions removing contaminated material from the site – material locals were already asking questions about after references to it seemed to disappear from council assessments of the land.
Locals are also critical of council officers who did not use any sort of transparent or objective scoring matrix when selecting Whitegates as the preferred site – something they have attempted to justify on the entirely spurious basis that doing so would somehow stop them from doing their jobs properly. To make matters worse, those same officials decided not to bother taking minutes at the meeting at which they decided to recommend the park as the site for the new school. It’s not just that they have failed to be transparent, but rather that they seem to have set out to be as secretive as possible.
Updates on some of this are to be provided during this week’s full council meeting. Community campaigners have now published an open letter calling for a “full independent audit of the site selection process and a transparent explanation as to why a park that was deemed ‘unviable’ for a school in 2018 was made the ‘preferred’ site for another school just 4 years later”.
So the wider questions about the council’s handling of Lenzie Academy are getting louder and more serious as time goes on, but concerns about the safety of pupils and staff are incredibly pressing for very obvious reasons.
The council is absolutely adamant that the school is safe, but doubts persist and local people are finding it difficult to get answers to their questions.
This is why I asked the council to release the Fire Risk Assessment document – a move that would clearly be in the public interest and demonstrate that they are being fully transparent about safety in one of their schools.
It’s simple: let us see exactly what problems were found, and then explain how they have been addressed.
If people (pupils, their families, and the school staff) are content with the council’s actions, then there won’t be a problem – but surely those people have the right to know the scale of the danger they were, and perhaps continue to be, exposed to?
In response, the council’s spokesperson told me that the document is not in the public domain and, in a highly unusual move, went out of their way to tell me that they wouldn’t release it under FOI even if asked, claiming that it is somehow exempt.
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I’ve been dealing with FOI for a decade and am one of the most persistent and prominent users of the legislation in the Scottish media. To be frank, I know the law around it very well, and I couldn’t immediately think of a reason why this document would simply be entirely out of reach of Scotland’s transparency laws.
I asked the council how they had come to the suspiciously convenient conclusion that they are able to keep this critical document a secret from the public.
It took them 23 hours and 57 minutes to respond, and when they finally did, it was to tell me only that they are treating my question as… you guessed it… an FOI request, adding that I will “receive a reply in due course.”
And when I asked them to comment on that decision, I got no response.
So I have submitted a formal FOI for the report itself (the one they said would not be released, but didn’t explain why) and associated communications. It will be weeks before I receive any sort of response.
Meanwhile, the truth about Lenzie Academy, and the risks it poses, remains obscured.
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