Letter: 'First glimmer of light' in schools' debate

Lesley Riddoch (Perspective, 20 June) has written the words that rural school campaigners have been waiting for.

Instead of slavishly regurgitating council quotes, she has done her homework and understood the problem in all its depth and breadth. With more like her, we might begin to see an end to what are effectively modern clearances.

That councils face financial difficulties is not in doubt, but their misunderstanding of local government finance sometimes beggars belief.

They go with the easy assumption that if they close something a saving will be made. In Argyll & Bute, however, because of the way grant-aided expenditure is calculated, few savings would have been realised and some of their proposals would have resulted in a substantial loss.

They are also fond of quoting those "over-capacity" figures but none of Argyll & Bute's pupils are being educated in anything like the Albert Hall and some of your readers will have houses larger than our smallest schools. It's a red herring.

These are simply the mantras of councils who have been managing decline for so long they don't see any brighter option.

Nor can they see that rural communities are keen to invest in the solutions.

Education secretary Mike Russell has intimated that his commission on the delivery of rural education will look at the broader issues Lesley Riddoch mentions. It's the first glimmer of light our communities have seen for many years. Our schools measure the health of those communities, but planning is crucial to the cure.

For the first time we're seeing government that understands this and Lesley Riddoch gives us hope that the national media, which as late as Sunday much dismayed us, might be starting to see it too.

Anne Baird

Coastguard Houses

Southend, Argyll

In her response to the article by Lesley Riddoch, Dr Sarah Skerrat (Letters, 21 June) excludes consideration of the impact of an extensive, rural property-owning democracy on the local land economy and its current opposite number operating in Scotland, a private land tenure system that comprises perhaps the most intensive system of tenure in the fewest hands anywhere in Europe, if not the world.

In 1984 I made a study tour, with Angus McHattie and his wife (crofters from Skye) of Norwegian agricultural communities in those areas of western coastal Norway with the greatest bio-climatic, geo-botanical and topographical similarities to Scotland.

It was a trip that helped stimulate other, later similar ones by Reforesting Scotland and representatives of crofting interests elsewhere.

The most profound memory is not the overall similarity of the physical and biological environment, but in the strength, power and control of the many thousands of individuals in Norwegian communities over their own lives, through outright private ownership of their own land.No lairds, no factors, no non-governmental organisations, no quangos, no hostile community buy-outs and no foreign absentee landlordship were required to ensure individual and communal success in these communities. Private landowners per square mile or square miles per landowner is a question Lesley Riddoch and many others keep avoiding.

Ron Greer

Blair Atholl

Perthshire