Sardonic amusement greeted some of the reporting of the royal visit to Orkney last week. “Prince William and Kate have visited the Orkney Islands - their first official trip to the remote Scottish archipelago,” tweeted Sky News, in a tone akin to a Victorian explorer scrawling in his diary about a lost civilisation he had stumbled upon.
The use of the word “remote” was particularly loaded, with its implication of being away from the things that matter. Yet, the 2020 Bank of Scotland Quality of Life survey named Orkney as the best place in Scotland to live for the eighth year in a row. Remoteness, it seems, is a less straightforward concept that it might initially seem - if Orkney is remote from an inferior quality of life, I’m not sure too many Orcadians will be bothered.
“Remote”, in its old faintly pejorative sense, seems particularly anachronistic in a world where “remote learning” has been the means by which any semblance of continuity of education has been achieved during Covid lockdowns. While countless schools around the world have rightly earned plaudits for the way they have embraced remote learning in the past year and a bit, Islay High can lay claim to having been the first school in Europe to go “fully digital” - way back in 2007.
Scotland’s island and Highland communities are still making the running in 2021. Just last week, at the UK-wide Tes FE Awards, Scotland provided the winner in the category of “Outstanding use of technology in delivering remote teaching and learning”: West Highland College UHI, North Highland College UHI and Inverness College UHI’s “virtual school” model was described by judges as “a perfect example of collaboration and cooperation”.
And when the pandemic necessitated a handbrake turn into remote learning for Scottish schools, where did the powers-that-be turn to in their hour of need? The Western Isles e-Sgoil (e-School), of course, which had been pointing the online way ahead for years before Covid. The old idea of “remote” doesn’t cut it when the mainland looks pleadingly to the Scottish islands for ideas, innovation and approaches to life and learning that work in the 21st century.
It is sad, then, to read that in England many small schools are fighting for their lives against “the tide of the government’s preference for academisation and multi-academy trusts”. Not only because remote learning has underlined that physical geography is not the impediment it once was - but because Covid has also highlighted advantages that such schools had long before the pandemic.
The first coronavirus lockdown “offered a clear illustration of just how valuable small schools’ prominent position within their communities can be”. While “some larger schools struggled to manage the remote engagement with so many families”, one head explained that “the smaller scale of her school meant she and her team were aware of what each family was going through, and were able to offer the right support as a result”.
The rationale that smaller schools in rural communities are inherently at a disadvantage is predicated on a view of urban life as superior. In 2021, however, centralised institutions, cultural jamborees and international airports also come with eye-watering property prices and salaries that are fighting a losing battle to keep pace.
Perhaps tectonic plates are shifting: perhaps “remote” communities being at the vanguard of digital learning is emblematic of a wider shift in how places beyond the big urban centres are viewed, of overdue recognition that there is a viable - even superior - alternative to metropolitan life.
And if a journalist from The Orcadian hasn’t yet written a travel feature which routinely describes Edinburgh or London as “remote”, they can have that idea for free.
@Henry_Hepburn
This article originally appeared in the 4 June 2021 issue under the headline “Scotland’s ‘remote’ islands are at the cutting edge of society”
