Sometimes what communities really need from councils is bravery

The Herald Scotland

8 hours ago

Schools across Scotland have shut their doors for the summer, but not all will reopen for the autumn term.
If you have followed any of The Herald's education coverage in recent months, you have read stories about council strategies for mothballing schools and nurseries and the Scottish Government guidance which sets the rules for this process.
Mothballing refers to the temporary closure of a school (or nursery), and local authorities are required to review this decision at least once a year.
Mothballing is intended to provide schools with a lifeline. Instead, it is often used as a way for councils to prolong the inevitable.
As a result, painful decisions become more painful and drag on for years.
The vast majority of mothballed schools never reopen, to the point that campaigners have come to describe mothballing as 'closure by stealth'.
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It is not difficult to see why this is the case. Technically, local authorities are only allowed to mothball a school when the roll has fallen to zero, or very close to zero, according to guidance for the Schools (Consultation) (Scotland) Act 2010.
At first glance, a recent decision regarding Fountainhall Primary School in the Scottish Borders Council appears to be a textbook case for mothballing. On closer inspection, however, it proves to be a better example of a council trying to soften the blow — and likely deflect some heat — by kicking the can down the road on a likely closure.
Between 2020 and 2024, Fountainhall's roll fell from 24 to five pupils, with a total capacity of 50. There was only one child enrolled for the start of the 2025-2026 academic year.
Fountainhall fits some of the criteria established in the mothballing guidance: it is only for schools with a 'very low' roll where education for the pupils is 'not presently viable.'
However, there is another important criterion that the Scottish Government guidance outlines.
Local authorities should only mothball schools when the roll is low and there is good reason to believe that the low roll is only temporary.
According to the guidance, the 'and' is crucial and it is clear about why.
Even though permanent closure is more final than mothballing, it triggers a statutory consultation process that involves extensive community engagement, culminating in approval from the Scottish Government.
This consultation process places additional requirements on local authorities and, in theory, provides more protections for parents and community members to have their voices heard.
An important side note: councils love to use the word 'consultation,' but they do not usually mean this type of statutory consultation. What they usually mean is engagement, not the legal definition of consultation found in the 2010 Act.
I like to think of it as the difference between a consultation and a Consultation. The mothballing process requires consultation, not Consultation, and councils have much more freedom to decide what that looks like.
This game of semantics frustrates parents and rural campaigners, because the guidance explicitly states that mothballing should not be a way to deprive communities of their legal right to a Consultation about the potential closure of their school.
However, because mothballing often leads to closure, parents feel that the ultimate Consultation isn't an accurate reflection of the situation. If a school has been 'temporarily closed' for one, two, three years, is it any surprise that few parents asked about enrolling their children or considered moving to the area?
This means that when the legal Consultation on closure finally rolls around, the picture is skewed. Interest has fallen off. Parents who had battled the original mothballing have since been forced to move on. Their children attend schools in other communities, and a fight for another transition is different from a fight to keep children in place.
All of this is why guidance states that if a council wants to mothball a school, it must be more likely than not that the school will be viable in the long term. Otherwise, the council should initiate the more formal process of permanent closure.
And yet, during the recent debate at Scottish Borders Council (SBC) over whether to mothball Fountainhall, the language made it clear that the assumption was that the school would not become viable in the future.
The council papers were explicit:
'The Fountainhall school roll is projected to be 1 from August, which is an out of catchment placement.
'Based on this, and considering future planning and migration, Officers project that the number of children will not significantly increase in the coming years within the Fountainhall catchment area.'
If the school is being mothballed due to low enrollment, and the council has no expectation that the enrollment will increase, then the question should be about closure, not mothballing.
In their objections to the mothballing decision, a group of parents seized on this. In a letter to councillors on the eve of the vote, they called for a statutory consultation on closure to begin "without delay".
"Fountainhall deserves proper consultation and legal safeguards – not administrative shortcuts that carry permanent consequences."
On the surface, this sounds counterproductive for a group that is fighting to save their school. However, what the parents recognised is that the permanent closure process should provide them with more protections and impose greater oversight on the council's ultimate decision.
If nothing else, it offers parents a sense that the democratic process is being followed. As many have told me, an unwanted decision is easier to swallow if there is trust that decision-makers were brave enough to take the hard way out.
Instead, another community is looking at unknown years of uncertainty, likely followed by a painful trek towards an even more painful conclusion.