The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Education Secretary John Swinney meets school campaigners.
Parents take battle to save Butterstone school for children with additional support needs to Education Secretary John Swinney
The fight to reopen the New School at Butterstone intensified as parents and pupils handed a petition with more 8,500 signatures to the education secretary.
A group of around 20 parents and pupils met John Swinney in Birnam yesterday to deliver the petition and put a list of questions to him concerning official investigations prior to the school’s closure last month.
Most of the parents at the meeting are yet to find suitable arrangements for their children after the school’s board of governors announced it was to close with only four days’ notice last month. They met for more than 90 minutes. They called on the Scottish Government to reinstate the school and called for a public inquiry into the role statutory bodies had played in investigating complaints there.
The group also raised concerns about the way the closure itself was carried out, with pupils prevented from saying goodbye to their friends and escorted from the school by strangers rather than trained school staff.
Speaking directly after the meeting, parent Lee Archibald, 37, from Dundee, said: “He’s listened to the points concerned. For me, he now needs to go away and think about the information we have given him. What we need is an independent inquiry and I hope that is going to happen.
“But even that is not going to help the kids in the short term. They still don’t have a school to go to on Monday.”
Kevin Briggs, 46, from Stanley, whose son attended the school, said he felt that Mr Swinney was going to do all that he could “to get the school back up and running”.
“They cannot meet the needs of our pupils any other way. So we really need to sit and wait.
“But we need to bear in mind that every day our kids are sat at home, their mental health is suffering.
“Already there are some children that won’t make it back to the school. So all that good work – all the taxpayers’ money – has all been wasted because of the way the school shut.”
Jacqueline McCallum, 50, from Perth, said she was “terribly frustrated” the school closed before these issues were given proper scrutiny.
She said: “These kids have got things wrong with them and they need help. That school was giving them the help. It’s all gone now. There’s nothing left for them. There are no provisions for these kids. They’re allowed to break the law. Why is this allowed to happen?”
A spokesperson from the school’s board said: “The decision to bring an end to the school’s existence, and the experience it brought to caring for and educating the fragile children who came through its doors, was not an easy one.
“Against a precarious financial backdrop, the judgment was made by governors that, without significant additional investment, the school could not provide the level of resource required to guarantee the safety of the children in its care and that, based on the advice they had received, immediate closure was the only option.”
The decision to bring an end to the school’s existence, and the experience it brought to caring for and educating the fragile children who came through its doors was not easy