Face to Face: Laura Battles, principal at Donaldson's School

ONE year ago, Laura Battles was in the loneliest place she had ever been.

She had just started work as principal at Donaldson's School in Linlithgow. To say that the school - Scotland's national school for children who are deaf or hearing impaired, or who have communication difficulties - had been enduring a rough spell is an understatement.

In December 2013 it was ordered to improve its leadership after Education Scotland inspectors found important weaknesses in the way it was being run.

Battles herself had only been in post for a few weeks when a joint Education Scotland/Care Inspectorate report said the school lacked effective leadership, and cited tension between employees, senior managers and the governing board.

At an employment tribunal that same month - December 2014 - Donaldson’s settled with a former principal, Janice MacNeill. She had been removed from her post after criticism of the school's handling of complaints in the wake of an earlier sex assault case.

So then Battles, now 47, took over. What were those first weeks like?

"I had a lot of periods of loneliness, in terms of having only just arrived in the school and not having developed any relationships," she says. "I was in a local authority I'd never worked for before. I was in a new house. It was the loneliest place I had ever been in my life. I knew I had to get some allies around me, people I felt I was going to be able to work with, in order to move the service on."

Among her valuable new allies were Colin Spivey, team leader with the Scottish Government's learning directorate, and Carol Kirk, the new convenor of the school's board of governors. "They helped me decide that I was going to stay. A few people asked me at the time, 'Do you want this?' I didn't think twice about saying, 'Yes, I do.' But I remember this very stark sense of loneliness.”

Aside from her daily work in Linlithgow, Battles is a respected authority on autism. She has just contributed a chapter to a new book, The Nine Degrees of Autism. She speaks highly of her two children, who are 20 and 21, and who both have autism. “They are incredibly successful young people now,” she says, and being a parent to two such children “has helped me develop a strength that I have been able to use in other situations.”

This, and her innate creativity, and her strong personality, helped her through her initial months. She remembers being “almost in a meditative place when I left here at nights” that allowed her to prepare for the next day. But it did take “everything I had” to be able to get through those months.

What kept her going was the knowledge she had done the right thing and that there was no going back. Her priority was always, she says, the security of the children under her care.

Last month, another HMIe report called for an improvement in the behaviour of pupils but also acknowledged the school had undergone a major restructuring and that all the urgent actions that had been demanded were now in place.

"I've developed a very good team of people around me, which the recent inspection report reflects," Battles says. "We're by no means there yet, in terms of ticking all the boxes. But it has been a short space of time since then, and I'm satisfied they feel we are going in the right direction.

"I have put the children at the centre of everything we do," she adds. Later, she acknowledges: "I've got an incredibly strong board of governors and the Scottish Government has been a huge supporter of the work I have been trying to do to develop the service to the standards that we all want. We're well on the way to that now. Our journey is to be a centre of excellence for children with additional support needs."

Battles is from Glasgow. She earned a degree in sculpture at art school and became a lecturer at an FE college. She began working with some adults with learning disabilities.

Her young son, who had some developmental issues, was diagnosed with autism. It was around this time Battles learned the National Autistic Society was looking for a principal teacher.

"I had a dilemma at that point," she recalls. "My son has autism - do I want to work in the field of autism, to breathe autism? That was the decision I had to make, but it was the right one." She spent a decade at the NAS before joining Paisley-based Spark of Genius as director of autism services.

Her next career move came via LinkedIn: a woman named Nof Al Mazrui was setting up a new initiative, The Developing Child Centre, in Dubai, and would she like to help them develop it? She said yes, and spent two-and-a-half happy years in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and became fascinated with the local culture.

"The clinic was a huge success and it ended up with huge waiting lists," she says. At this point she learned of the vacancy in Linlithgow. She was ready to come home to Scotland. She was interviewed for the job and was "blown away" by the modern facilities. She took up her new post last October.

"My main focus now is the future and I'm very excited about that. We have this fantastic facility here and we're looking to share it with as many partner agencies as we possibly can, we're talking to local authorities and other organisations in terms of what they could use this service for and how we can help.

"We're also looking at how we can consider the original constitution of Donaldson's, which was to create services for disadvantaged young people. We're looking at how we can open up our services to a much wider group of young people. The feedback we're getting is that that is something that is desperately needed, for a variety of reasons. I've got a lot of support from the board of governors.”

The school, which re-located from Edinburgh in 2008, has 31 pupils, aged up to 18. The nursery was shut down earlier this year, causing some disgruntlement amongst parents. It may return, she says, “but not in the form that it was”.

Rather than being guided by mainstream provision, it may be more in line with the school’s constitution: “some kind of early-intervention service,” is how Battles puts it.

She has a point: when the original school was opened in 1850, funded with money from the estate of James Donaldson, a printer, it was as a hospital for destitute and vulnerable children. The deafness specialism came later.

A Future Direction forum is now examining the school’s future. “Among the work-streams we’re looking at,” Battles says, “are developing short breaks, respite services for families, sports services for disadvantaged children - we have a fantastic pool, gym and five-a-side football pitch here.

“We’re also looking at getting Third Sector organisations to use our conference facilities, and we’re looking at partnership working with other schools and services.

“Speak to anyone here and they’ll tell you I hate waste. We have empty classrooms. One of our lodges is empty. There are families out there desperate for respite - for themselves, for young carers or for the child himself.

“The difficulty is that we have a bit of an identity crisis. People see us as the national school for the deaf but many of our children don’t have any hearing difficulty - they have a communication difficulty. Being able to speak to people about our original constitution, and our vision for the future, may help to reduce that waste. I want this place to be buzzing, full of young people and other service users, and to make Mr Donaldson proud of us.”

There’s also the possibility the Donaldson’s School of the future might have a new name. Among the broad-ranging remit of the Forum, “we’re looking at what we’re going to call ourselves,” Battles says. “All of this is being discussed this year. The next year is going to be a year of transition for us, I think.”

Her aim is to unshackle the school from its recent, troubled past and to see it looking positively to the future, to achieve the best for the children under its care. No more "weak leadership", no more "poor governance". The future starts now.