Test row hits Glasgow
Glasgow teachers are threatening industrial action if nine primary heads are disciplined again for refusing to implement national testing. Most have already lost four days’ pay. Strathclyde officials are said to be concerned that the heads misled the authority, and may issue written warnings. They are accused of masquerading as teaching heads, misconduct that one senior official said was not to be confused with action taken in protest against tests.
Change of heart on pay review body
Frustration with permanent powerlessness on the Scottish Joint Negotiating Committee for teachers’ salaries and conditions helped swing the Scottish conference of the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers behind a call for a national pay review body. Teachers’ views were always decided by the EIS and the “EIS glove works hand in hand with the Government”, said Central Region’s Roy Robertson.
Victims of dictatorship
Sixteen months after Nicolae Ceau?escu was executed by the Romanian army on charges of genocide, subversion and destruction of his country’s economy, yet another atrocity perpetrated by the dictator has come to light. He decreed that disability did not exist when he came to power in 1974. The country’s disabled were banned from public places and forced into ghetto schools and workhouses where, for 16 years, they have suffered appalling degradation.
Fighting threat to remote Scoraig
Parents at Scoraig Secondary, the unique independent school partially funded by Highland Region, are to fight the education committee’s decision not to pay its pound;27,000 running costs. They claim a financial crisis jeopardises the six-pupil school’s future, only two-and-a-half years after opening. Scoraig, on a remote west Highland peninsula, was founded by parents who objected to the transport and accommodation difficulties of sending children to Ullapool High.
Open goal for girls
The Scottish Schools’ Football Association is set to open the door to mixed football in primary schools at its annual meeting in Falkirk, where the constitution will be amended to replace the word “boys” with “pupils”.
