In the 2024/2025 academic year we prepared the letter below to send to councillors with respect to the future of rural schools. This was signed by 17 primary schools. We also had an online petition which gained 1381 signatures..
Again in the 2025/2026 academic year we find proposals which will lead to rural school closure in the budget consultation (for 2026/2027). We are currently in the process of trying to find out more information about these proposals and to formulate a considered response.
Please bear in mind we are a group of concerned parents with other commitments, we are doing our best and will update here as soon as we can.
Online petition 2024/2025
https://www.change.org/p/wee-schools-still-matter-in-dumfries-and-galloway
Our 2024/2025 open letter to our elected representatives
We write as a group of parents concerned about the future of our rural primary schools.
We have chosen to educate our children in such schools and believe their ongoing survival to be important for our rural communities. We are concerned by the current philosophy in the local department of education in relation to rural school sustainability, and how the sustainability criteria have been calculated. We are further concerned by the budget consultation which includes specific questions in relation to the mothballing of our small rural schools without, we feel, sufficient information as to the nature of the projected savings to allow respondents without experience of rural schools to make an informed judgement. We are concerned that changing the mothballing threshold to schools with roll =<25 will not only lead to loss of education provision in rural communities, but also destabilise remaining small and rural schools by creating uncertainty regarding their future survival.
Specifically in relation to the School Model work,we would be grateful if you could note our strong objection to the sustainability criteria that have been developed and approved by the education committee, on the following grounds:
- We do not feel there is an evidence base to designate a school unsustainable on the basis of it having < 3 classrooms. We do not believe there to be a robust evidence base to suggest that multi-year classrooms, or single/two-class schools present an adverse learning environment relative to larger schools/single-year classrooms. Rather the opposite; we are aware, based on individual school data, that our schools often perform better in terms of attainment than other schools in their clusters. Prior to COVID, this performance was demonstrated by many of our rural and small schools having excellent inspection reports.
- A school with <3 classrooms will not be able, by design, to support =>3 FTE teachers on site. These are separate criteria in the sustainability assessments. This means smaller schools are penalised twice, essentially for the same reason.
- The reason given for the criteria >=3 FTE teachers is to ensure the benefits of a professional educational community. There is no consideration within the sustainability framework to the models of partnership working in our rural schools; in fact, this is specifically excluded. Two rural schools in partnership with a shared headteacher will more often than not support a professional community >= 3 FTE teachers. This is not reflected in the sustainability criteria documents, which present assessments at individual school level without consideration for partnership working.
- Compared to other Scottish Local Authorities, Dumfries and Galloway does not lead in terms of academic attainment in schools. Whilst we recognise academic success is only one limited measure of a school’s performance; our individual local data suggests children from our small and rural schools perform well academically across the board and often comparatively better than larger schools, with larger class sizes. We note the body of evidence suggesting class size does directly correlate with academic outcomes in the early years especially. We are dismayed that this is not recognised, and more is not being done to increase utilisation of our rural school estate and collaborative working at cluster level to ensure we really do ‘get it right for every child’.
We would be grateful if you, as our elected representatives, would consider our views and the way in which information is being presented to the education committee as you make decisions going forward. We believe that true cost-effectiveness across the school estate would come, not from pursuing a campus education model, but instead recognising the value and experience in our rural schools, and working to encourage better utilisation of the rural school estate.
Dumfries and Galloway has a strong rural identity and character; it is one of the things that makes our region special, a place we want to live and raise our families. We, as parents, are concerned that we now face an urban-centric approach to education policy that undermines the heritage of the region and forgets that many of our schools were designed to be small, integrated into their local communities, and central to rural life.
We would ask you to what is in your power to
- place a halt on mothballing of primary schools
- place a halt on changes to school size through reduction in number of classes; which destabilises schools and threatens their future sustainability
- encourage and facilitate engagement between the school model team and rural and small school communities
- in relation to our concerns with regard to the school model
- to look at innovative ways in which we could practically support the ongoing sustainability of our schools
- consider what we feel our schools offer to our communities, in terms of pupil experience and academic attainment
- to encourage work at cluster and regional level to increase rural and small school utilisation