What was to have been the last conference of the Scottish Union of Students had the feet whipped from it on Saturday morning when a messenger from the Court of Session served an interim interdict on the president and executive - preventing a vote being taken on the motion that would have allowed the merger with the National Union of Students to go through on schedule.
The interdict, sought by John Hopwood and two other office-bearers of the Paisley College of Technology students’ association, was granted by Lord Fraser. Martin O’Neill, SUS president, found that lawyers are hard to find in Edinburgh on the Saturday of a rugby international. It was not until Sunday evening that the SUS’s lawyer arrived from Alloa.
So there was no merger at the weekend, but there was an informal discussion, and on Monday afternoon a busload of students left for Lancaster to give the NUS conference an earnest of Scots good faith.
* The Secretary of State has turned down the SUS’s request for an inquiry into all aspects of teacher training in Scotland..
* The pupil:teacher ratio in Scottish secondaries has fallen to 16.4, the Secretary of State told Mr Ian MacArthur, MP, in a written Commons answer on Monday. The improvement was better than had been expected, said an SED spokesman at a press briefing the same day, and the RC sector had improved equally.
* “I am not anxious to double the number of honours graduates in physics,” Professor Brian Pippard, Cambridge University, told physics teachers last Friday. Speaking at a one-day conference in Dundee organised by the Scottish branch of the Institute of Physics and the Physical Society, Professor Pippard said he suspected the country was turning out too many physicists, rather a large number of them students who did not get a great deal out of the study.
TES SCOTLAND, April 2, 1971
