Des McNulty MSP

Labour did very well to come such a close second in the East Dunbartonshire constituency. Labour’s hard working local team of helpers and our very capable candidate Mary Galbraith made it a close contest.

St Mary's Primary School, Duntocher and Milngavie Primary Schools did very well in the Euroquiz final. St Mary's, Duntocher won the top prize and Milngavie came fifth.

The Scottish government stands accused of ‘papering over the cracks’ over their mismanagement of Curriculum for Excellence after it was announced that all secondary school inspections were to be suspended later this year to allow school inspectors to work on the reforms.

Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board have not treated the St Margaret of Scotland Hospice fairly. They carried out a consultation in 2000 over the closure of Blawarthill Hospital in which they were seeking to have the site of Blawarthill released for housing in order to obtain a capital receipt. In response to a local [...]

There is a crisis pending over the implementation of the Curriculum for Excellence. Teachers have every right to be angry that they are being asked to implement a major curricular reform without the resources or guidance promised while Mike Russell goes off junketing to the United States and Canada.

SNP cuts are causing local authorities to abandon key class size targets that have proven to be effective in tackling literacy and numeracy difficulties. At least four of Scotland’s 32 councils are no longer following guidelines introduced by Labour of capping pupil numbers at 20 in English and Maths in the first two years of secondary school.

I am not opposed in principle to the introduction of school clusters which has been proposed in East Lothian. There have been school clusters in my own constituency for many years under Local Authority management and they work very well. Bringing schools within a cluster under a single school management structure could well deliver benefits, as could new ways of extending parental involvement in that management structure – but it doesn’t require removing education from Councils. So far I have seen nothing from East Lothian’s director Don Ledingham or from Councillor Dave Berry that leads me to think that schools need to be taken out of the control of an education authority in order to make it possible to change the way they are currently managed.

The Curriculum for Excellence was supposed to promote intellectual enquiry, focusing on ‘deep learning’ and higher order skills. Similar initiatives are taking place in many countries so CfE is the Scottish version of a broader based pedagogical change which has the support of most, although not all, education professionals.

Des debates the merits of structural reform in Scottish education.

Why do Tesco need to double the size of their store in Milngavie, with most of the additional space being given over to non-food items, when they are building a massive new store a few miles away in Maryhill?