Save Our Schools - the battle continues!
by Richie Venton - 16th March 2009
Hundreds of parents, grandparents, kids and people who simply care about
their communities - from all over Glasgow - are staging the People’s
March for Schools through council leader Steven Purcell’s constituency,
to pile the pressure on the council’s Chief Axeman.
The council has suffered a public roasting at the round of official consultation
meetings. Their case for closures has been ripped to shreds by people directly
affected.
Labour councillors have tried to hide in the crowd and let council officials – who are accountable to nobody – to take the flak. But in many meetings the councillors have been singled out, named and shamed by people who are absolutely furious at their plans to close 25 primaries and nurseries, dumping over 2,000 young children in old school buildings, further from their homes, having to cross dangerous roads – to end up in bigger classes with less teachers and nursery staff.
Making Labour listen
The crunch question now is whether the elected Labour councillors are
prepared to listen. The Glasgow Save Our Schools Campaign is determined
to make them!
If they ignore the overwhelming public opposition to this butchery of
kids’ education and safety, they have their P45s awaiting them.
The councillors don’t just rely on voters for the kudos of being councillors
any more; they also now rely on elections for their full-time wages.
Council leader Steven Purcell is nakedly ambitious, with fond hopes of
being a future Scottish First Minister. That was highlighted recently
by his challenges to Labour leader Iain Gray at the Scottish New Labour
party conference. The people of Drumchapel/Anniesland have the power
to halt him in his tracks.
The 21st March demo will appeal to those who elected Steven Purcell as a councillor to kick him out if he goes ahead with these totally unjustified school closures – to shut down his career, not our schools and nurseries.
Torn to shreds
The public consultation meetings have given vent to the anger and arguments
of people who are passionate about the chance of a decent start in
life for young children. Meetings of up to 200 at each of the schools
have demolished the council’s case.
Sharon was in tears as she described the destructive impact of the council’s
plans on her family. “I work, as does my husband. We rely on an elderly
relative to get my daughter to school and get her home. If the proposals
go through, she will have to travel far further, it will add at least
an hour to the school day, and the distance may be too great for my elderly
relative to travel with her. So it will not be possible to combine school
and help with homework with holding down a full-time job.”
Others battered council officials with facts and figures showing the
plans didn’t even cater for having enough space in the school dinner
halls.
Schools are often at the core of communities. As one mother from Queen
Mary St and St James schools in the east end put it, “If the school
is emptied, it would leave a great hole in the heart of the community.”
Class sizes
One of the central concerns across the city is that classes will be bigger,
meaning less attention for young children in their most formative years.
As Franny from Wyndford and St Gregory’s primaries put it to the council
at consultation meetings, after spelling out the facts and figures, “How
are the kids going to fit into these classrooms? Are they going to sit
on each other’s shoulders?”
At one of the meetings I persistently asked the council official to justify his claim that the closures are based primarily on educational grounds, when it is a fact that Glasgow’s primary school classes have got bigger in 2008 than in 2007, and that these proposals would make classes bigger still. He refused to answer, as did the Labour Lord Provost. But at the end of the formal meeting the official admitted to a group of us that we were right, the classes would get bigger, “But I’m not going to say that in public.” The Labour councillor took a different tack, accusing us of “a middle class agenda”, claiming that smaller class sizes do not help working class kids!
Costa del Wyndford
In trying to justify closure of one of the schools – Wyndford – the council
documents put a cost on the school swimming pool. Just one problem:
it doesn’t have one! When challenged on this the council then said
it was a typing error, that in fact it was an electricity bill. We
all know what happens if you mix water and electricity!
Parents at Wyndford decided to risk frost-bite by climbing onto the school
roof, stripping down to their bikinis, to show their contempt for the
imaginary swimming pool!
Parents are rightly suspicious of the council’s plans if they got away
with the closures. Susan of Barmulloch primary warned councillors and
housing officials,
“The rumour round our area is that the council want to use the land
for housing development. The Glasgow Housing Association has pointedly
not denied that Barmulloch is one of the areas they hope to ‘regenerate’.
Well they should be warned; they’ll have to get past me first! If it
takes occupation of the school building to stop this plan, we’ll occupy
it. And how are they going to regenerate the area if there’s not even
a local school?”
The council is clearly rattled by the scale and depth of feeling against
their closures. Days after the 1,000-strong St Valentine’s Day Unity
Demo, organised by the Glasgow SOS Campaign, the council threatened staff
with disciplinary action if they dared to talk to parents’ campaign groups
– a flagrant attack on the rights of staff to express their opinions
as part of the so-called consultation exercise.
More recently, as Cathy from Victoria Primary and Nursery told us,
“We presented our responses to the consultation to the Council en masse,
and then went to present our petitions to the City Chambers. There were 52
of us there – two of them men, a majority of the other 50 were kids. But the
Council called the police, who rolled up in four vans! But the police themselves
thought it was ridiculous, responding this way to a demo of mostly women and
kids.”
Unity is our strength
The council have badly miscalculated, totally under-estimated the fury
their proposals have provoked.
The one guarantee is that if there’d been no campaign, or even if there’d
been a patchy one here and there, divided and weakened, the 25 closures
would have been pushed through – to save the council £3.7m a year – the
same amount they handed over to a bunch of property speculators last
month!
But the eruption of opposition – and the unity forged during it, with
the help of the Glasgow Save Our Schools Campaign – is pounding away
at the councillors and means the fight is far from over.
The People’s March for Schools is a warning shot across the bows of the council leader. Campaigners are determined to keep up the pressure on every single councillor this side of the decision-making meetings in mid-April. And if the axe-wielders fail to retreat by then, occupation of school buildings will need to be considered, to wage war against Labour’s assault on kids’ education and the hearts of communities.
Kids before cash
The Scottish Socialist Party has been at the core of this movement from
day one – as parents, as community members, as socialists who passionately
believe in education as a right, not a privilege. Many campaigners
recognise our positive contribution.
As Margaret from Barmulloch said at the Glasgow Save Our Schools meeting,
“I want to thank the Scottish Socialist Party for all their help in our
campaign to save our schools.”
The rich can afford private schools with small classes. What is good enough for the rich is good enough for the rest of us. Twenty’s more than plenty in any class – as research has repeatedly proven it improves the child’s chances of development. Instead of handing over loot to property speculators, and trying to sell off public land and buildings, the council should be investing in well-equipped, well-staffed, locally accessible schools in the heart of every community. The battle to save our schools and nurseries is part of the battle for what kind of world we live in. The SSP will never hesitate to fight for a society that puts kids before cash, people before profit.