Cllr Laidlaw’s article does himself, and his party as their Education Spokesperson, no favours. Instead he displays his ignorance of minority language education, he ignores his party’s support for the Gaelic Language and is himself “divisive” with his inflammatory choice of words.
Cllr Laidlaw states: “the Gaelic community have [sic] since 2012 been able to educate their children at Bun-sgoil Taobh na Pàirce, the Gaelic Medium Education (GME) primary school on Bonnington Road” in fact, for decades every parent in Edinburgh has been able to choose a Gaelic medium education for their child(ren) following the establishment of a GME unit at Tollcross Primary in 1988. This fact, that GME is open to and inclusive of all children in the city no matter their heritage, home language or location, makes Bun-sgoil Taobh na Pàirce culturally and socially very diverse. His view “that an exclusively GME school would not reflect the inclusive community-based education Edinburgh schools should champion” implies that this is not the case and he is wrong. SIMD data shows that the pupils at Taobh na Pàirce have backgrounds from across the whole social spectrum, comparable with other diverse schools in the city and, incidentally, closely matching that of Drummond Community High School.
Cllr Laidlaw continues “To claim that the Gaelic language can only be learnt and developed by excluding others seems unnecessarily divisive.” No-one is claiming that Gaelic can’t be learnt by anybody with the motivation to learn and sufficient access to resources. But by definition GME cannot be delivered without teachers and pupils communicating in Gaelic. Gaelic-speaking Physics teachers deliver their lessons to Gaelic-speaking pupils in Gaelic and non-Gaelic-speaking Physics teachers deliver their lessons to non-Gaelic-speaking pupils in English. Clearly these two interactions cannot happen in the same classroom. Is this ‘unnecessarily divisive’? Not if you’re trying to deliver a Gaelic-medium education. Dedicated schools are the best model for minority-language learning as they offer the most opportunities for using the minority language in a linguistic landscape which is overwhelmingly skewed towards the majority language. I don’t know Cllr Laidlaw’s knowledge or experience when he states “by secondary school our goal should be for pupils to be sufficiently bilingual to mix with English speakers without this detracting from the development of Gaelic” but the experts in education and language-learning including Education Scotland know that the opposite is in fact true: “[At secondary school]Ideally, all subjects and contexts of the curriculum are delivered through the medium of Gaelic.” [Advice on Gaelic Education, Education Scotland]. Cllr Laidlaw’s more experienced Conservative colleagues also recognised the educational value of dedicated schools when they unanimously, along with every other councillor in the city, of all parties, voted to “note that the educational arguments for a standalone Gaelic school had been established” in June 2011.
The City of Edinburgh Council has provided Gaelic medium education, along with English medium education, in the city for 30 years. Parents are increasingly seeing the benefits of it and pupil numbers are rising. CEC has to provide adequate accommodation for all pupils in the city. The solution may or may not be to move the Gaelic pupils to Drummond. Parents of children in GME have as many questions and concerns as parents of children at Drummond and its feeder primaries. All parents involved deserve their elected representatives to be better-informed on the basic facts before publishing opinion pieces on the matter.
Brian Thunder
Convenor
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