Scottish Education: Save Our Rural Schools turns the corner

There is an idea in American politics called the turn.

It’s nothing official, but it marks the point in a campaign where attention shifts from the negatives to the positives. Before the turn, stump speeches focus on the other candidate or opposition party and all the ways that they are wrong. After the turn, we start to hear more about a candidate’s plans for the future – selling points about what they’ll bring to the table.

And it's after the turn that races often start to get serious. It gets easier for the general public to take candidates seriously and mudslinging gives way to making a case.

The turn is a critical stage in grassroots campaigns too. For parent groups or community groups mobilised to fight a certain issue, the turn is the chance to move away from talk of the problem or injustice they are battling and start talking more about the positives: what they’re trying to save, the good that changes will bring, and an openness to work together with the powers-that-be who, until now, have mostly stood in their way.

Lots of movements peter out before they make it to this point. But the parents behind Save Our Rural Schools feel like they’ve just made their turn.

They shouted their complaints and now they feel that they are finally being heard. Here’s how it happened.

After battling for more than a year to reverse a Highland Council policy which they say disadvantages their rural schools, Farr, Gairloch, Kinlochbervie and Ullapool High School parents launched a public campaign this year.

Progress was slow, at first.

Alongside complaints about staffing formulas that break down at smaller schools – leaving schools unable to offer a full curriculum and families forced to move away – one of the parents’ major complaints boiled down to this: We are not being taken seriously.

It’s a frustratingly common complaint from rural communities and small schools. Their circumstances are unique. Their problems need tailored solutions, not blanket policy changes. But crafting that kind of solution takes time, and for a council with more schools and landmass to manage than any other, that kind of time is hard to come by in the Highlands.

The early stages of the campaign played out as expected. When we broke the story of the parents’ campaign in The Herald, the immediate response from local and Scottish Government leaders was lukewarm at best.

But it did illustrate that sometimes the best way to make your point is to hand your opponent the microphone.

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In response to cries from parents and pupils that their schools were unsustainable, that their communities were on their knees, and that they had been overlooked for too long, the Highland Council and Scottish Government returned, in the campaigners’ words, “stock responses” that barely acknowledged their specific situation.

It all felt very much as if the parents were not being taken seriously.

In my years covering education, I have learned that this is often the point when campaigns fall away. The feeling of talking to a brick wall, after stepping so far out of your comfort zone and into the public eye, can be devastating.

But these parents hit the brick wall and kept moving.

Within a day of their first press release, they sent out a second (almost as if they were somehow able to predict what the first responses would look like). This one focused slightly less on the issues that their schools are facing and more on the state of their campaign.

Their second message was clear: Thanks for the replies, but you’ll have to do better.

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I could spend a few paragraphs rehashing the string of misunderstandings and jargon-filled throwaway lines that made up the official responses. Thankfully there’s no need.

That’s because the parents now have exactly what they were after: a letter back from Education Secretary Jenny Gilruth, speaking to their specific circumstances and setting the stage for a sit-down meeting with the parent councils and Highland Council leadership.

“I have asked the Strategic Board for Teacher Education to consider, in detail, issues around the recruitment and retention of teachers in Scotland,” Ms Gilruth wrote.

“This includes geographical and subject-specific issues. 

"I believe we must have a more bespoke approach than that which currently operates, recognizing the challenges faced in our rural communities.”

Bespoke approaches, changes to the status quo, solutions to geographic-specific issues? That’s more like it.

Ms Gilruth even mentioned Farr, Gairloch, Kinlochbervie and Ullapool High School by name, something which neither the Scottish Government nor Highland Council had managed in earlier responses.

Seoras Burnett, chair of Ullapool’s parent council, said that the letter from Ms Gilruth feels like vindication for their efforts.

“We're encouraged by Jenny Gilruth's response that the issues we have raised are being taken seriously and that our campaign – along with the support it has received from the press, public and other politicians – has been effective.”

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But now, there is another leg of the race to run. Mr Burnett said that he and his fellow campaigners are ready to make the turn.

“Our campaign necessarily started out highlighting the very real problems that our rural schools face.

“However, as the campaign continues to develop, we are keen to develop a broader narrative which also recognises the positives of a tailored education, integration with the local community and unique extracurricular activities that can be offered.

“All of these are qualities that need to be protected and supported in the context of an ongoing sustainable rural community and the Government's recent Depopulation Action Plan.”

So the parents knocked on the door and, after not getting what they needed, they knocked a little harder. That persistence has gifted them an opportunity and could give their communities a second chance.