Wish you were being taught here, Mr Salmond?

AN UNPRECEDENTED show of parent and pupil power has seen Alex Salmond inundated with postcards showing a Scottish comprehensive which looks "like a Romanian orphanage".

The First Minister's mailbag has been filled with the shocking images – almost one for each of the 860 pupils at Wick High School – which depict leaking ceilings, rotten window frames, exposed wiring, crumbling plaster and old industrial containers rusting in the playground.

Even the school's rector, Alister Traill, has admitted that he "cringes with embarrassment" when visitors come into his school.

Parents took the decision to target Salmond when they failed to persuade Highland Council to sort out the mess.

They want the school pulled down and replaced at a cost £30m, part of an officially calculated £5bn worth of repairs and building work needed on Scotland's crumbling schools after decades of neglect.

Professor Iain Baikie, chairman of the school's parents' council, said: "The idea is for our children's schools to be brought up to 21st century standards – they're stuck in the 19th century.

"We are ping-ponged from the council to the Parliament and back, and it just feels like this whole area is being abandoned. It is like the council have given up on us."

Salmond has insisted the parents deal with Highland Council, which is responsible for the school and its upkeep.

But the First Minister is under increasing pressure to meet his promises to match the old Labour-Liberal Democrat administration's school building plans "brick for brick".

His Government, however, has struggled to find the funding needed after rejecting the controversial private finance initiative which Labour and Liberal Democrat ministers used to pay for scores of new and upgraded schools.

Last week, Scotland on Sunday revealed Salmond will next year head to Qatar in the Middle East to raise money to make up for the loss of PFI.

Baikie, whose son goes to Wick High, yesterday said parents had bombarded Salmond with postcards out of desperation.

He said Highland Council no longer had the ability to deal with the problem.

Its chief executive, Alistair Dodds, had given a "lousy" and "abysmal" response to parents' concerns, Baikie added.

"It makes me sad in the morning to send my son to school and to a building like that," he said. "He goes down the street at lunchtimes now because there is no room for the pupils to eat in the canteen.

"Some of them have to sit on the dirty floors in the corridors.

"As well as it being difficult to attract good teaching staff to such a building, it is also going to affect the amount of people who move to the area.

"If I wasn't local, I would not move here because of the state of the school."

Children have added their voice to the campaign, signing some of the postcards to Salmond themselves.

One 14-year-old wrote: "This is my school. I would like to be proud of it but I can't. It's full of holes and cracks and is horrible. Please help to make it a nice building again.

Another complained: "This is my school. I would not send my children to it."

Salmond, in response to the postcards, said: "Government ministers now, as before, must stand back from intervening in the council's business or seeking to influence which schools should be priorities for replacement or refurbishment."

However, speaking at a conference in Caithness last week, he said: "From the correspondence I have had, it is quite clear that Wick High School was needing funding some time ago."

Earlier this year, parents who described the building as being similar in appearance to a Romanian orphanage, compiled a "dossier of dilapidation" about the school, containing pictures of the level of decay in the classrooms.

At the time, Rector Alister Traill said: "I cringe with embarrassment when people come to school to see me or to make presentations."

Jamie Stone, the Liberal Democrat MSP whose constituency includes Wick, has volunteered to broker a deal between the Scottish Government and Highland Council.

Stone said: "It would be a great sin to allow the standard of the educational environment to affect pupils.

"I believe that the Highland Council and the Scottish Government should meet face to face and find a solution to this.

"From a completely non-party political standpoint, I would offer to chair such a meeting."

Audit Scotland, the spending watchdog, earlier this year said that a third of Scotland's 2,720 council-run schools needed urgent investment and warned it would cost £5bn to make all schools fit for their pupils.