Outdoors and a real hard place

Tuesday 31 december 2013 classroom environment”. Despite its success, it has not all been plain sailing. In 2012, cuts to local authority budgets almost meant the death knell for the partnership. North Lanarkshire Council, needed to save £73 million and this annual programme looked set to be cut. But The Trust evaluated the programme, and launched a successful campaign to save it, securing funding until 2016.

Given the longevity of the programme and the numbers of students who have been through it, the programme now has a strong foothold, with local benefits in evidence. This is a programme worth supporting for the future benefit of all. l MartinDavidsonisScottish directorfortheOutwardBound Trustwww.outwardbound.org. uk Good article. Not emphasised was the fact that what he proposes would more often than not lead to coalition governments. What is wrong with that? Most European countries operate for most of the time with coalitions with Germany being the one that stands out as being far from a failure. The UK media and political commentators in general have yet to accept our current coalition – continually sniping at its existence and attacking The Liberals in particular. What they refuse to accept is the fact that to enter a coalition one has to compromise to an extent some of ones political principles and electoral promises and that applies to both Liberals and Tories. At least with the Liberals in the government they have managed to rein in some of the more extreme Tory ideas.

Picture: Outward Bound Trust School pupils are offered a series of challenging experiences on visits to the wild outdoors, which stretch them in ways classroom learning cannot