Meeting of the Parliament 06 February 2024
I add my congratulations to Donald Cameron on securing the debate. I also congratulate Dunoon grammar school, its headteacher, staff and pupils on their huge achievement of winning the award for best school in the world for community collaboration, and I recognise the role of Argyll and Bute Council in supporting the school.
The school has taken part in a number of projects, one of which involved streaming bingo and other games to local care homes during the Covid pandemic. That must have been a lifeline for the people in the care homes, and it will have strengthened the intergenerational bonds in the community.
The school has also launched an app to help its neighbours to reduce food waste. Perhaps most importantly of all, it has a student advisory board for the Dunoon project. The Dunoon project is looking at an awful lot of things that will help to put Dunoon on the map and make it a centre for excellence for outdoor activities and other things.
Being on the advisory board allows students to work closely with the project. That will help Dunoon not only here and now, but in the future. In fact, it is providing a future for those very pupils, because it will provide them with job opportunities in years to come, in addition to the skills that they are learning every day as part of that experience.
Learning in different ways benefits all young people, because they can learn in a way that suits them best. We all learn differently, and take on information in a very different way, but seeing different ways of learning motivates everybody, and means that everyone can take part. If someone is not very good at book learning, they may be very practical instead, and all those skills come into play when there is a rich diversity of ways in which people can learn.
The headteacher says that that sort of approach is about allowing the students
“to take part in activities that actually are real learning experiences.”
They may not feel, or seem, like that, but they are, and they add to people’s knowledge. I congratulate the school on enabling that—everyone wins from that approach.
One issue that I have taken up over a long period of time is rural depopulation. We know that young people are pushed out of their communities because of depopulation; Argyll and Bute has seen a fall in population of 2.4 per cent. It is so important that those young people are part of the future of those communities, and that they build the future for themselves and create opportunities that will allow them to stay at home.
Last week, The Herald ran a major week-long series on the population crisis in the Highlands and Islands. The series was looking at the situation a bit further north than Dunoon—the journalists were based in Fort William, but they saw for themselves what is required to retain young people in such communities. First and foremost, what young people need is a home, but they also need to feel part of their community, and have the same opportunities in that community as they would have if they moved elsewhere.
That is why the work of Dunoon grammar school is so important. Those young people are not only being furnished with the imagination to create opportunities themselves; they are actually being a part of the community as they learn. Other schools could learn from what Dunoon grammar is doing.