Nursery closures - 'The key is retaining the excellent staff'

In the most basic terms, the council intends to close two of its best nurseries, High School Yards in the Old Town and Princes Elizabeth in Prestonfield, and instead direct parents to less highly-rated ones nearby. The move would save 200,000 a year at a time when the local authority needs to make spending cuts of 90 million.

The parents are understandably furious, arguing this demonstrates terribly distorted priorities. Doesn't closing the nurseries with the most outstanding inspection reports show that standards are being sacrificed in order to save money?

The council's logic is equally simple. There are more spaces than children to fill them in the local nurseries and the two earmarked for closure are particularly expensive to run.

The local authority after all has a duty to ensure that half-empty and outdated buildings are not allowed to drain its precious resources.

But there is a way in which the best of both worlds can be achieved, saving the caring and educational excellence, without wasting money.

The key is retaining the excellent staff whose jobs would be put at risk by the closures.

For, surely, it is them that we must save for the benefit of our kids, rather than the bricks and mortar in which they are working.

Talk isn't cheap

FIRST, the good news. After years of problems and strife and months of talks about talks, mediation finally begins today on the Capital's trams dispute.

Now, the bad news. Those talks are taking place in one of Scotland's plushest and most expensive hotels, on the other side of the country.

Many will think that this pretty much sums up the whole project so far: a vainglorious affair with no expense spared and little if any benefit to Edinburgh.

No-one would argue that the negotiations should take place over a pot of tea in a motorway service station, but the Capital is full of hotels and offices with plenty of comfortable accommodation for meetings. For that matter, what's wrong with the City Chambers?

If the choice of Kylie Minogue's favourite hotel was made to massage the egos of some involved then the organisers should be ashamed. And if it was designed to ensure secrecy, well, that has worked about as well as the rest of the trams project so far.