Some things should be best left to the history books, or stored only in the furthest reaches of the brain.
Scotland’s national footballing nightmare in Nursultan on Thursday afternoon springs to mind.
The long-running saga over a new Madras College in St Andrews is another horror story that has blotted my notebook on a regular basis since I started out as a fresh-faced hack.
So you could probably forgive me from shuddering during last week’s education and children’s services committee when the future of secondary schooling in Dunfermline and west Fife came up for discussion – and brought all the painful Madras memories flooding back.
Sites being identified and cross-checked against education criteria, looming disagreements over funding, no-one quite knowing what the next few years might actually bring…..
Let’s not do the time warp again.
I can only hope lessons from the Madras debacle have been learned by councillors and education officials, and that teachers, pupils and parents in west Fife will soon be given a clear vision of what they can expect and when.
The situation is simple: house building has put huge pressure on school capacities across the area while youngsters are being taught in buildings which have long needed replaced.
A new Inverkeithing High School appears to be top of the agenda, and there are exciting plans for a new joint learning campus at the Shepherd Offshore site in Dunfermline which would accommodate replacements for Woodmill High and St Columba’s High as well as housing a new Fife College site.
There’s also talk of expanding schools throughout the area to help cope with the influx of pupils.
Squaring these circles will not be easy and the plans will need significant additional investment from the likes of the Scottish Government, the Scottish Futures Trust and developers.
There’s been no indication of how much Fife will get from John Swinney’s recent pledge to invest £1 billion in the school estate across Scotland but following years of uncertainty, what local families crave is some clarity on where their children will go to school over the coming years
The signs that the secondary school estate in Dunfermline and west Fife will be fit enough for purpose in the not too distant future are pretty positive, but we will have to pull out all the stops to avoid another mess like we had over Madras.
