BREAKING: Castlebrae High School recommended for closure

A letter sent home with children at Castlebrae High School today as follows, giving no assurance that the school will be open for the next academic year. I hope that the intention to create a new school goes ahead, but this is nonetheless a sad day:

“Dear Parent or Guardian

Castlebrae Community High School

You may be aware of recent speculation about the future of Castlebrae Community High School. I realise this is very unsettling for everyone connected with the school and I am writing to you directly to explain what is actually happening just now.

We are very concerned about the very low number of pupils attending Castlebrae Community High School. The roll has been falling for a number of years and it is clear that most parents living in the catchment area now choose to send their children to other schools. This year we have seen our lowest S1 intake ever at the school with only 21 pupils starting in August and a school roll of just 200.

It is now nearing a position at Castlebrae where the school cannot keep operating in the same way as it will not be able to offer pupils a full curriculum which can meet their needs.

Every young person in Edinburgh should have the chance to do as well as they can at school. This means that they need to be given the right opportunities; ones that will suit them as individuals and will help them reach their potential. It is the Council’s duty to make sure that every child gets the education and support that they need to do this.

The situation at Castlebrae has now reached a critical point and I believe the current position is unsustainable. There is significant spare capacity in other schools in the local area which could accommodate Castlebrae’s pupils and I intend to take a report to the Education, Children and Families Committee on 9 October requesting permission to consult on the possible closure of Castlebrae Community High School.

However I must assure you that the school will remain open for the whole of the 2012/13 school year. No decision has been taken to close the school, the proposals would be subject to full public consultation and no closure could take place until summer 2013 at the earliest.

There is no doubt that the Craigmillar area will need a new high school in the longer term. As the regeneration continues, more new housing will bring more new pupils to the area which will mean that secondary school capacity in the area (were Castlebrae to close) would be insufficient to cope with demand. We still need to fully understand what the timing for this would be as it will be very dependent on when new housing development happens; at present it would appear to be around 2020 when this need would arise.

A new school will be central to the regeneration of the Craigmillar area and would be built to reflect up to date approaches to education and seek to combine technology with top class facilities to offer superb and creative spaces for learning, teaching and community use.

Crucially, we would want the new school to be one to which local parents will want to send their children. The local community will be very important to the success of a new school and we will ensure there are real opportunities for everyone to have a say in how plans take shape and to build a shared ‘vision’ for it.

I do appreciate that there can be no good time to hear this sort of news but I do believe that is important for you to be told directly what is being considered rather than having to rely on rumour and conjecture. I am sure that you will understand the importance of providing children with the best possible education and why we need to consider better options for the short to medium term.
I will take a report to the Education, Children and Families Committee on 9 October outlining all of the issues in a lot more detail. My report will be available from

3 October on the Council website. Copies will also be available from that date in the school or you can phone 0131 529 4214 to request a copy. I will write to you after the committee meeting to confirm their decision and, if the committee agrees, I would aim to consult on our proposals between late October and Christmas during which period you would receive more detailed information.

Following the completion of the consultation period, I would then take a further report and final recommendations to a Council meeting in March 2013 which means the earliest any closure would go ahead would be at the end of the school year in July 2013.

Yours sincerely

Gillian Tee
Director of Children and Families”

Edinburgh Council tries to ban “Reclaim the Night” march to keep women safe

Edinburgh City Council has tried to ban a Reclaim the Night march. It claims that a march promoting safer streets is too dangerous, and must be stopped to keep women safe. This bizarre, outdated and offensive decision comes as the UK Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke, announced on Radio 5 that date rape is, in his opinion, not a serious offence.

The notion that victims of sexual assault and abuse are party to blame has always existed. It is shocking that figures like Ken Clarke and public bodies like Edinburgh Council are happy to promote this wrong-headed notion.

The good news is that Reclaim the Night Edinburgh will go ahead to challenge our blame-the-victim culture. It will assemble on the 28^th May at 8.30pm for a 9pm start. Bright Green urges everyone in Edinburgh to attend. The march will go ahead despite the efforts of Edinburgh City Council to refuse it permission. It is one of two events that aimed to raise awareness of violence against women which have been refused permission.

Reclaim the Night is part of an international movement to reclaim public spaces for those who find the night a dangerous time to be on the streets. Using collective action to change people’s perceptions about what is safe is an essential part of removing the threat of violence to women.

We must be absolutely clear: if you are the victim of crime that is never your fault. Everyone has the right to be on the streets at any time without the fear or expectation of verbal abuse, assault or other crime. This is a universal truth.

The most frequent victims of crime are those who are marginalised through the power structures of our society. In many cases these victims are seen as partly responsible for the crimes of which they are victims. And that brings us to the second event that Edinburgh Council has banned.

As part of a presentation on health and safety to school students in Toronto, a police constable, Michael Sanguinetti said “I’ve been told I’m not supposed to say this – however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised.” A better articulation of blaming the victim is hard to imagine.

“Slutwalk” marches are a global reaction to these comments. The marches aim to reclaim the term “slut” and make it clear that however someone is dressed, it is never right to attack or abuse them. The marches promote the progressive position that blame must never be attributed to the victim. This march was also rejected by the Council. It was rejected because of a major football match being broadcast that evening. Because of the football match the Council refused permission to march, claiming “demonstrators would be subject to negative drunken attention by men on the street.” So Edinburgh Council believe we must be stopped from changing attitudes to women in case men subject them to “negative drunken attention.” It seems that bigots in Edinburgh Council believe it is their role to make decisions that reinforce the long history of blaming the victim.

In Scotland we’ve had some experience of prominent individuals blaming the victims of sex crime. In February the then Conservative Justice spokesperson Bill Aitken was forced to resign as Chair of the Justice Committee.

Following a series of rapes in Glasgow’s city centre, Aitken suggested to a Sunday Herald journalist that “I really think we need to know a bit more about these [rapes]. They are not always as they seem to be, put it that way.” Aitken went on to say “Somebody should be asking [the rape victim] what she was doing in Renfrew Lane. Did she go there with somebody? … Now, Renfrew Lane is known as a place where things happen, put it that way.” When asked what he meant about Renfrew Lane he said “It’s an area where a lot of the hookers [sic] take their clients. Now that may not have happened in this case. But you know … what was happening? There’s always a lot more to these city-centre rapes than meets the eye.”

Aitken was clearly inferring either that the women who had been raped were sex workers and therefore the crime was somehow different to any other sex attack, or that the women who were raped should not have been in the Renfrew Lane area, and it was somehow their fault for endangering themselves. This set of beliefs encourages violence against sex workers and women who happen to be in areas that people like Aitken believe “things happen.”

So the Convener of the Parliament’s Justice Committee and Edinburgh City Council still hold the reprehensible belief that a victim can be held responsible for a crime to which they’ve been subjected. Changing these offensive and outdated beliefs should be a priority for all progressive people. And what better way to do that than by joining the march the Edinburgh Council bigots chose to refuse permission for. The need to change these beliefs has become even clearer as Ken Clarke suggested that there were “serious rapes and other categories of rape.” His suggestion that “date rape” fits into the “other category of rape” reinforces the idea that women are partly to blame for being attacked. It’s an idea that must be crushed.

Come on the Reclaim the Night March on the 28^th May to take a stand against blaming the victim. Everyone should be entitled to go out any time they want without fear or expectation of attack. However anyone dresses there must be no assumption that she could be the subject of abuse or assault. We must change the public perception that women, or other marglinalised groups, are to blame for being attacked, a perception so universal that Edinburgh Council feel entitled to use it to refuse the right to march. The Council’s decision makes the case for change even more urgent.

Climate Conspiracy comes to Edinburgh Council

So Edinburgh Tory Councillor Cameron Rose has decided to start a climate change denial blog. I’ve had a look around and I can’t see any qualifications Cllr Rose has for a blog on climate change. I can see that he was a policeman. Perhaps since he retired he’s been studying climate, physics, geology and other subjects that would qualify him to talk about climate change, but I can’t find any evidence of that.

It seems he’s just decided that climate change is one of those issues that the good people of Southside/Newington need to be informed about. Or, perhaps he thinks they should be misinformed, as his blog is so heavily partisan that there’s not much in the way of information on there.

He does go out of his way to criticise Professor Geoffrey Boulton. That’s Professor Geoffrey Boulton, one of Britain’s leading geologists, former Regius Professor of Geology at the University of Edinburgh. He is an expert in glaciers and ice sheets. A world renowned expert. Prof Boulton actually has more letters after his name than Cameron Rose has in his name.

He was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society for his outstanding contribution to science. He has an OBE for his services to science. He has received awards from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Geological Society of America, the International Glaciological Society, the Swedish Royal Academy, and the French government.

But Cameron Rose obviously thinks his years of service on the beat qualify him just as well to comment on climate science.

Of course were this any other realm, Cllr Rose wouldn’t even bother challenging an expert as eminent as Geoffrey Boulton, or indeed comment on the IPCC or other expert opinions. Indeed, I watched him tell the people of Portobello that traffic wasn’t a problem at the Planning Committee. This was because an ‘expert’ employed by a company wanting to bring 900 waste lorries into the middle of Portobello said it wouldn’t be a problem.

It’s obvious that in Cllr Rose’s view every expert is up for sale and you pick the expert that suits your prejudices. If you want companies to be able to profiteer by destroying Portobello you listen to paid experts. If you don’t want to have to deal with climate change you don’t listen to experts. After all, in his view they’re all self interested. No expert could possibly be evaluating evidence and coming to a conclusion based on that evidence. (I’m a little bit terrified by a former policeman holding this position).

Cllr Rose has a very clear agenda here. He’s an ideologue. He doesn’t want a society where people come before profit. He doesn’t want to move away from a culture in which big companies ruthlessly exploit people and degrade the environment. And climate change is very obviously a major challenge to the exploitative, dystopian society he so values.

Either that or he’s just a crank who believes that the moon landings didn’t happen, Princess Diana was killed by MI6 and that the President of the USA wasn’t born there. He might be an enthusiast for the Illuminati. Who knows, he might think they’re behind all this climate conspiracy?

Perhaps in the near future we’ll be seeing Cllr Rose blogging on the full range of conspiracy theories?

Peter’s Vision for Edinburgh

In 2005, just as I’d moved to Portobello, the community had just won a campaign to stop a supermarket being built on the site of an old Scottish Power electricity transfer station. There were, however, no plans for the site.

I got involved in a community group.

We wanted to bring the community together to create a sustainable plan for the site. We applied to the Lottery’s Living Landmarks fund to build an urban eco-village. We hoped this would be the start of transforming Portobello and transforming Edinburgh to a more sustainable way of life.

But this story doesn’t have a happy ending… yet.

We failed in the bid to the Lottery. The community’s moved on. Although PEDAL has been successful in bidding to the superb Climate Challenge Fund – and are delivering a successful project, it doesn’t have the same buy in as the Campaign Against the Superstore.

We’re now involved in a fight with Viridor to oppose their plans for a waste transfer site. .

What I realised is that our Council puts communities in a position where they can only fight bad proposals. Communities don’t control their own destiny. Greens have the opportunity to hand power back to communities. We can give the groups that are rooted in our communities a real opportunity to change our city. We can make the Council serve communities.

By using the powers of the council to create these strong, resilient communities, focused on eliminating poverty and dealing with climate change. We should use the Council’s powers to prefer local providers, to hand over assets like the Portobello Town Hall.

PEDAL is currently working on a community wind turbine that could generate over £100k every year to be invested in the community. Greens can make the council replicate this elsewhere, with community assets, and renewables.

I’m already working hard for the people of Portobello and Craigmillar, but I could do so much more as a Councillor.