Serial incompetence failing our students
ALMOST every day, Nicola Sturgeon expresses sorrow and regret over the nightmare of Covid.
Yesterday she apologised to students, many of whom are effectively imprisoned in their halls of residence.
Forbidden by law from leaving their ‘households’ to visit their families, they are in a state of limbo.
U-turns abound: this week top government medic Jason Leitch changed tack on whether students could go home. Higher education minister Richard Lochhead then suggested it may be possible in some circumstances.
The Government is tying itself in knots, but while confusion reigns public compliance with Covid rules may diminish rapidly.
In another embarrassing development yesterday, a legal expert at Glasgow University intervened with a withering critique.
On social media he accused Scottish ministers of shirking their responsibility by leaving it to principals to announce the new student clampdown.
Professor James Chalmers said it was wrong for the Government to pass the buck to Universities Scotland, an umbrella body.
He suspects that the Scottish Government ‘was quite happy to have outsourced rulemaking, responsibility and punishment in the way it did’.
And he warned many young people were ‘genuinely worried about being punished’ for flouting the ultra-strict rules and laws that now govern their lives.
When a Regius Professor of Law speaks out in this way, ministers had better listen.
It’s an egregious assault on personal freedom and family life to continue a policy that has turned university accommodation into the equivalent of prison camps.
Indeed, even some prisoners at the height of the pandemic earlier this year were sent home to alleviate pressure on crowded jails.
Psychologists now fear mental health will deteriorate among the young adults corralled into halls of residence where social distancing is impossible.
Miss Sturgeon has also failed to prioritise mass testing of students, meaning many with Covid may have moved in to their rooms, or flats, unwittingly helping to spread the virus.
Why was it such a surprise for ministers, and indeed principals, that universities would be plunged into chaos, causing stress and anxiety for thousands of students and their parents?
Education has been the Achilles’ heel of this floundering administration for more than a decade.
Now young people are the victims of another avoidable fiasco – caused by a serially incompetent government that has failed them at every turn.