By Paula Speirs, Keep St Joseph’s in Milngavie Campaign

IT all began for us when East Dunbartonshire Council (EDC) set out plans to merge St Joseph’s Primary in Milngavie (est. 1873) with a primary in Bearsden meaning that, for the first time in more than a century, the umbilical cord that had connected the school to its local community was in danger of being broken. This was despite the fact that other schools had fewer pupils than St Joseph’s and that its school building was deemed to be robust and fit for purpose for many years to come.

We have evolved from half a dozen parents fighting to save a school from closure into a campaign that has brought our wider community together, focused on developing an alternative solution to enable our children to continue to be educated in their local community.

At the heart of our proposal is that St Joseph’s would continue to operate within the state system; we wouldn’t want it any other way. But parents deserve a bigger say. What we are asking from the Scottish Government is that they use our school as a pilot scheme and give this very willing community a chance to show that we can make it work.

The journey we have been on over the past three or so years has revealed a diverse group of people with enormous enthusiasm and talent. Couldn’t that energy, and those talents, be harnessed to make our school run even better, we asked ourselves?

Now, three years on, the optimism from our parents, and wider community, has begun to turn to disappointment and frustration at the lack of any real response to our proposal. We were told in the first instance that the delay was because our case cuts across a number of policy areas. The small matter of elections and new ministers has also impacted.

To summarise: over the past few years we have met twice with the First Minister, two education ministers and a team of senior civil servants and Government advisers. Crucially, we have also provided detailed responses to specific questions. We do appreciate, of course, that the wheels of government move slower than we might like; however, surely Scottish Government needs to balance the pace of change with the impact locally of no decision making. We were given reassurances by John Swinney in June that we wouldn’t need to wait “anywhere near another six months”. He also spent time at the meeting outlining the scope and timeline for both the governance review and upcoming funding review and yet made the promise to come back to us with its views within that timescale. We have then heard little of note until last week we read in the media that any further action was to be delayed until after the local government elections.

Since it looked like we were getting some level of interest from the Scottish Government, our school has had a number of parents expressing interest in transferring their children into St Joseph’s. Meanwhile, EDC has taken away the lease for the Tuesday Club (adults with learning disabilities), who have been using our school for almost 40 years. This has further fuelled the voices from our community keen to move towards our goal of running our school, in collaboration with our community, and away from local authority control. Our partnership nursery and wrap around out of school care is also at increasing risk of closure. We couldn’t agree more with the chief executive of the Day Nurseries Association Scotland who called for third (and private) sector nurseries to be a part of childcare provision in our communities. Nursery provision is extremely limited in Milngavie and our council has put our partnership nursery at risk; we want to incorporate it into our model.

In the early days of our engagement with Scottish Government, some within our group expressed cynicism that the SNP was seriously considering our proposal. For many of us though, we took the interest at face value and responded comprehensively to the requests for further information. Not only were we given meetings at highest level but we were encouraged by requests for further detail. Not only did we invest our own time in working up our proposal but we also worked to engage with other partners.

We have been extremely patient – and indeed compliant – during our engagement over the past few years. However,we will soon have no other option but to look for other options to keep St Joseph’s (and the nursery and out of school club) open in Milngavie.

For us, this is not about approval or not of a business case; it’s hope for a community. Whatever happens, we can look each other in the eye and comfort ourselves that, whatever the outcome, we couldn’t have fought any harder to keep our children from the opportunity, indeed their right, to be taught in their local community.