East Lothian Council has established a 300-metre exclusion zone for cars around two primary schools in Haddington during school-run hours. The motoring lobby’s reaction has been predictable. AA president Edmund King said: “Sometimes parents need their cars to go on to work after dropping their children off.” The positive aspect is that the pressure has come from parents themselves, backed by local councillors. The parental view is that the volume of parking around the schools creates a danger to children who are not driven to school. Time will tell how the aggrieved parents, who hitherto happily acted as children’s chauffeurs, will react. Countless cars parked close to primary schools are a sign of our times. The roads adjacent to my local primary, with a roll of just over 400, to...

There might have been more eminent meetings of higher education leaders at the Scottish Parliament, but they won’t have taken place in a corridor. After the first Education and Culture Committee meeting at Stage 2 on the draft code of governance for Scottish universities, top figures representing students, staff and institutions gathered around the leaders of the steering group that produced the code, outside the lifts on the ground floor of Holyrood. It was a meeting that probably could – and many would argue should – have taken place several months earlier, and with chairs. UCU Scotland officer Mary Senior had just told MSPs that she had first written in September to Lord Smith of Kelvin, appointed by university chairs of court to lead the code-drafting process, to ask for a...

If politics is the art of the possible, Children’s Minister Aileen Campbell probably didn’t get the memo. The Scottish Government’s rhetoric on child poverty is uncompromising: it is committed to ‘Getting it Right for Every Child’ and making Scotland ‘The Best Place in the World to Grow Up’. The Children and Young Person’s Bill currently before the Scottish Parliament embodies those lofty aspirations and more. Neil Mathers, Save the Children’s new Scottish head, deals in the reality – Scotland’s sense of itself as an equitable society isn’t always borne out. “I think there is a strong sense of Scotland being a fair nation, one that wants equality for children, but the reality is that that isn’t the case,” he says. “We’re not matching at the moment...

The latest round of local authority budgets this spring brought a host of bad headlines about cuts to education spending. One money-saving idea has only just crept out of the city chambers in Glenrothes, however – Fife Council is considering introducing a half day into the school week for pupils. Council leader Alex Rowley told local media at the end of April that in order to achieve savings in education to close a further £66m budget gap, cutting two and a half hours of teaching time was the only option. An afternoon off a week, or longer lunch breaks, could save up to £6m in supply coverage, the Labour councillor claimed. “Fife Council will have to reduce its overall budget over the next four years by almost £100 million. Given that the education service makes up 42 per cent...

Leading figures in further education have warned of the “unfair” burden of extra budgetary regulation if reclassification of Scottish colleges as public sector bodies is allowed to proceed. The Scottish Government revealed last week that as a result of a 2010 decision by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), colleges would be reclassified as being in the public sector, with consequences for how they manage their finances. Tougher accounting rules and restrictions on borrowing and commercial activities could impact colleges’ ability to invest in their own infrastructure and development. Paul Little, the principal of City of Glasgow College – Scotland’s largest further education institution – told Holyrood: “If there’s a curtailing of that in a...