Lenzie Academy fiasco shows how Scotland’s school-building system isn't working |
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According to official figures, there are nearly 2,500 schools in Scotland, and almost all of them are controlled by one of the country’s 32 local authorities.
As the Scottish Government often reminds us, education in Scotland is actually the responsibility of councils. This isn’t limited to hiring teachers, organising school buses, and sorting out data collection – they also have to manage the buildings and overall school environments made available for educating young people.
There is, as ever, a bit of wiggle room here. Because as is so often the case, central government also (for both practical and political purposes) wants to be involved.
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That’s why the SNP is so keen to make claims about the number of school building improvement projects they’ve funded. It’s also why the government in Edinburgh set up the Learning Estate Improvement Programme (LEIP), through which councils have rebuilt, or are planning to rebuild, dozens of schools all across the country.
LEIP was set up to replace the distinctly expensive PFI system put in place under the Labour government, which is costing councils more than half a billion pounds per year for buildings worth a fraction of that total.
Many of the funded projects have progressed well, but there have been problems, the most obvious of which is on the Isle of Mull. There, overly rigid national funding rules and questionable........