Education cuts: 'Headteachers are deeply concerned'

Those most directly affected will feel, with justification, that they have fought too long and too hard for the upgrading of Portobello and James Gillespie's high schools to let go now.

But in the current climate it is impossible to brush aside any serious proposal that can free up 70 million in the next few years.

One thing that is clear is the deep level of concern among headteachers at the council's plans to increase class sizes for English and Maths, charge for music lessons and cut staff.

Scrapping the rebuilds is just one alternative the heads are discussing in search of "out of the box" solutions. Other radical suggestions include more school closures and individual schools, or clusters of them, opting out of local authority control.

Councillor MacLaren will have to listen very carefully to whatever they finally propose. We have many forward-thinking headteachers and they are well-placed to judge the impact of any change.

Some ideas will naturally be dropped along the way. There is a 20-year backlog of repairs and maintenance affecting at least a fifth of city schools, so support for shelving building work may prove thin on the ground.

Empowering school boards to take over council management responsibilities is fraught with difficulties and unlikely to produce significant savings, if any, in the short term.

That leaves the deeply unpopular school closures. There has been a feeling ever since the Lib Dem-SNP coalition pulled back from a cull during their early days in power that this was an area which would eventually have to be revisited.

Is it realistic to continue indefinitely paying for almost 3000 spare classroom places in high schools across the city? It is a bitter pill to swallow, but the time to look again may be here.