Council not guilty of manipulating Catholic primary school’s roll

I DEPLORE any suggestion that East Dunbartonshire Council would deliberately manipulate the places given to pupils at St Joseph’s Primary School in order to achieve a political goal (“Council accused of denying places at threatened school”, The Herald, April 7). The council always grants placing requests where it can and has a clear policy describing the limited number of circumstances in which we would not grant a family’s request. We understand how important the choice of school is to parents.

Unfortunately, across all our 44 schools we sometimes need to refuse requests – although we granted 821 requests last year, 126 requests were refused. The most common reason to refuse a request is that the school would be required to employ an additional teacher to accommodate the additional pupil, which is exactly what happened at St Joseph’s last year.

The same criteria are applied to all schools across East Dunbartonshire. We do not attempt to hide this and report these figures publicly each year .

hen talkingW about the new school, it is important to be clear about the facts. The decision to build a new £9 million school to serve both Bearsden and Milngavie will save the council £265,000 per year and will provide a dramatically improved educational environment. It will also ensure the sustainability of Catholic education provision in Bearsden and Milngavie against a backdrop of a falling school role at St Joseph’s, which has dropped from more than 200 in 1997 to 121 pupils in 2015 – a drop of 40 per cent.

While we appreciate and understand the concerns of some parents of St Joseph’s Primary School and have worked with them over the past three years to discuss them, we have gone through a very detailed consultation process.

This was then reviewed for six months by the Scottish Government, which found that we had robustly dealt with all the educational benefit concerns raised in the consultation and that the financial information we had provided was accurate.

The council has a legal duty to ensure efficient and effective use of resources and to improve our children’s education. This is exactly what we are going to achieve through this project. Councillor Rhondda Geekie, Leader of East Dunbartonshire Council, Southbank Marina, 12 Strathkelvin Place, Kirkintilloch.