Michael Marra is a Dundee city councillor and a former senior adviser to the Scottish Labour leader.
Parents are receiving emails from councils and schools across Scotland with ideas of what education might be on offer for their children from August.
Here in Dundee, some parents have been told that primary-aged children could be in school as little as two days one week and only one day the next week. In other councils, the idea is one week on, one week off. It is difficult to see how any of this could possibly meet the right of children to a proper education that is guaranteed in Scottish law.
Apart from being illegal, it is difficult to see what any of this will actually achieve. Families are bewildered.
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This is not proper school education and it does not let people get back to work. Nobody expects things to be as they were before. That simply is not possible in this crisis. We must keep our children and our school staff safe. We must suppress the virus and avoid a second surge. Yet it is clear that in this next stage of the crisis there is no plan, no money and no leadership coming from the SNP in Edinburgh.
I hear daily stories of teachers doing an extraordinary job in extraordinary circumstances. Like all of us they are home schooling kids and caring for relatives while also setting work online, running hubs for children of key workers and preparing for a whole new way of working in the months to come. They deserve our thanks, but more than that they deserve real support.
We know that online learning is only reaching a fraction of children. Teachers tell me that 20% of kids engaging with learning in some classes is the norm. One secondary teacher told me just last week that she has a single pupil completing any work at all. So John Swinney is saying that 50% school time in August is his aim. Yet in Dundee many families are looking at a third or less. This is because we have entered the current crisis in dreadful shape with a decade of SNP cuts slashing the number of teachers dramatically. They have closed many buildings and have squeezed more pupils into fewer and smaller classes.
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Now is the time for vision and ambition. We should be raising an army of volunteers to assist in this mission.
Why not commandeer the Caird Hall, Marryat, McManus, V&A, Camperdown House, the old Barrack Street museum, our libraries and church halls for now? It’s not as if we’ll be rubbing shoulders at exhibitions or concerts any time soon. Our council started centralising advanced higher courses across the city to make up for the 200 teaching posts they took out of schools. Why not now take the city campus idea to a whole new level striving for excellence rather than being a cover for cuts?
A local head teacher lumped with the job of sorting out the mess was writing to parents this week and made it clear – using additional spaces nearby is a good idea but we don’t have the people or the money.
Well that’s not good enough. The SNP government needs to step up and pay up.
We risk a lost generation and an economic disaster if they do not.
