The SED have agreed to increase the number of teachers eligible for the extra payment given to those who work in designated schools in areas of particular shortage. About 3,000 teachers get such payments at the moment; after August it will be 4,500. The payments are worth Pounds 200 a year in secondary and Pounds 100 in primary, and the biggest beneficiaries are Glasgow, Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire.
* The Scottish Labour Party conference at Perth last weekend was promised an in-depth study of segregated schools by the executive council within the next year. The promise was made by John Pollock, conference vice-chairman and rector of Mainholm Academy, Ayr.
* Not even the most ardent advocate of the New Left, or the trendiest middle-aged youth worshipper, wants to be treated by a doctor who has not been trained and examined with all the rigour that a medical school could muster, Principal Michael Swann, Edinburgh University, told the BMA Clinical Meeting at Aberystwyth last week. If such fashionable notions were instantly recognised as nonsense in the faculty of medicine, how could they be sense in some other corner of the university?
* Appreciation is growing of the havoc which unconsidered expansion of universities in Britain during the sixties has brought, says Enoch Powell in a foreword to a collection of essays on university policy by members of the St Andrews University Conservative Association.
* A remedial study carried out in Fife in 1969-70 has provided support for the findings of researchers elsewhere in the UK that children’s basic reading and maths skills do not suffer when classes are large.
* The Edinburgh branch for the Association for the Advancement of State Education may take legal action to prevent the reintroduction of fees into some local authority schools.
TES SCOTLAND, April 9, 1971
