Meeting of the Parliament 09 January 2014
I thank the committee for its service to the issue. I live in the Edinburgh Eastern constituency, not far from Portobello high school, and members will know that the private bill process explicitly excludes members who represent the area that is affected by a bill from the bill committee process. When I discovered that, I was anxious that I would not be able to convey to the committee just how important the issue is to the community. However, the committee has done the Parliament proud, producing a comprehensive and fair report, which criticises the process in places but ultimately recommends that the Parliament accept the need for the bill. The committee has served with the utmost diligence and professionalism and deserves credit for that.
I will open and close the debate for Labour. In my opening speech I will describe the urgent need for a new school, and in closing I will seek to address, with the facts, the arguments against having a school on the park.
I welcome all the people in the gallery who have found the time to attend the debate. Their number is big, but they represent a tiny fraction of the number of people who have been actively engaged in the issue for years. In particular, I welcome my colleague Councillor Maureen Child and pay tribute to her for all the work that she has done for years in considering the issues, working with the council and shoulder to shoulder with the community, which has been waiting for a new school for far too long.
I also pay tribute to Peigi Macarthur and her team for their outstanding leadership of a wonderful school at the heart of a community that is pounding with life, culture, sport and opportunity. I worry that in the decade-long battle for a new school the considerable merits and achievements of the current school and its pupils have been almost overlooked.
I want to highlight the work of Portobello for a new school and the parent council. PFANS is a group of people who are dedicated to securing a new school. In progressing the case for the school, the group has enhanced the community itself, building a forum for regular debate about not just the school but wider issues. Its Facebook page has nearly 2,600 members—a sizeable chunk of the community is online and engaged with issues to do with the school’s future and the community, demonstrating what can be achieved when people come together to work for the common good of a community about which they care so passionately.
Why do those people care so much? It is 2,596 days since the plans to build a new Portobello high school were approved by the council. Children in the feeder primary schools were asked to give the designers and architects their vision for a new school when they were in primary 2. Those very pupils are now in their fourth year at high school.
Jessie, who was in primary 2 at Towerbank primary school when the new high school was first promised, will likely sit the new national qualifications and her highers in the current building. I asked Jessie to show me round the school, which she did brilliantly. For her, the most pressing issue is the state of the stairwells. There are 1,450 pupils in a column-stack of a school, and when the bell goes at the end of class they all have to fire into the tiny stairwells to move from one floor to another, often getting crushed under incredible pressure. The problem is so big that it drives the timetabling of classes. The timetabling ensures that pupils do not have to go from the top floor to the bottom for their next class, whatever the subject, because of the logistics of getting kids round the school. That is ridiculous.
There are temporary buildings, which have been there for years, where the kids are taught maths and technology. The assembly hall roof blew off in strong winds and the school had to be closed for a day, not because that had made the school dangerous but because it simply would not be possible to get kids from one part of the school to the other, because space is so cramped. The school had to close—that is ridiculous, frankly.
The school has special dispensation not to deliver two hours of physical education each week, because it does not have the on-site sports facilities that would enable it to do so. The school must spend £70 a lesson to get the kids to the Jack Kane sports centre—that £70 comes out of the school’s budget—and when the kids get to the centre they get only 15 minutes of sport. That cannot go on. A new school on the park will provide groundbreaking sports facilities, which will enable the school to continue to deliver sport. The school has fantastic sporting merit; it is the heart of basketball in Scotland and contributes considerably to football, rugby and other activities.
The issues that I have set out are familiar to the people in the gallery and the people who are involved, day in and day out, but I am conscious that members of the Parliament might not be aware of the strength of feeling in the community because the issue has been going on for too long.