On School Rolls and the Roll of Gaelic in Edinburgh

[danieldwilliam]

Schools in south Edinburgh are pretty much full. Some combination of immigration, a spike in birth rates and the general good quality of the schools attracting people to the area means that most of the primary schools and all of the secondary schools are expected to be over-subscribed over the next ten years.

Various people are trying to find various ways of addressing - basically building a new primary school and a new annexe for the secondary schools.

One of the factors that is driving increased rolls is that my local secondary school picks up the Gaelic Medium teaching for Edinburgh and the Lothians.

I've been very sceptical about the promotion of the Gaelic language in southern and eastern Scotland for years now. Now the implications of the policy are begining to impact my own children's education I'm now more personally sceptical.

Comments

[andrewducker]

Was there not also a dip in child numbers, at which point they closed some schools, only for the numbers to sharply rise again?

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I think the two fundamental city-wide drivers behind the problem are a) the impact of the Great Recession means that slightly fewer kids are going to private school in Edinburgh and b) wrong planning assumptions - the planning assumption was that the many Accession Eight nationals who were living and working in Edinburgh would go "home" before they started having a family and for a variety of reasons many of them have decided that home is Edinburgh. This seems to have affected the maternity hospital too.

Locally, for me, this is being exacerbated by a trend of moving into my suburb in order to get your kids in to the local schools and the way the Gaelic Medium education stream is located and funnelled in to the local high school (whch isn't their fault, but I'm going to blame them anyway.)