Chop, chop Willie Rennie, right, cuts Nicola Sturgeon down to size over government plans to ventilate school classrooms by chopping the bottom off doors.
By Bill Heaney
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon opened a right can of worms when she revealed to the Holyrood parliament that in order to sort out ventilation problems in school classrooms, joiners would be embarking on a £300,000 project to cut the bottom off the doors to allow air to circulate unimpeded through classrooms and along school corridors.
No wonder the Nippy Sweetie’s face was tripping her when this matter was raised by Tory leader Douglas Ross at First Minister’s Questions. As they used to say when the shipyards were open and actually completing ships, unlike the nationalised ferries at Port Glasgow, not many would like to go home to Nicola with a broken pay packet.
It would appear that although the blunder over the school doors won’t cost the SNP/Green government anything like the many millions of pounds it has squandered on the boats, it has attracted a great deal of opprobrium to be piled on the First Minister’s head.
For example, Scottish Liberal Democrat education spokesperson Willie Rennie MSP has today lodged a series of parliamentary questions after a torrid week in which the Scottish Government’s proposals to improve ventilation in schools were exposed as “totally lacking in scale and detail”.
Questions posed to the Scottish Government include:
- How it calculated that just 2,000 out of Scotland’s 50,000 classrooms need to benefit from additional Scottish Government funding.
- What research it did on health and safety before suggesting to local authorities that they undertake a £300,000 programme to chop up classroom doors.
- Why it didn’t make the meagre £5m of funding for school ventilation available earlier in the pandemic.
After lodging the questions, Willie Rennie said: “This has been a torrid week for the Scottish Government. Its plans to improve ventilation in schools have been exposed as totally lacking in scale and detail.
“It is two years since the virus arrived in Scotland. The lack of action on the part of the Scottish Government to drive ventilation improvements nationwide is leaving pupils and teachers shivering.
School classrooms where, despite the ventilation not being what it should be to combat Covid, pupils and teachers are already complaining about classrooms being too cold to learn in.
School classrooms where, despite the ventilation not being what it should be to combat Covid, pupils and teachers are already complaining about classrooms being too cold to learn in.
The Scottish Government’s fresh funding has only been designed to target 2,000 classrooms – that is just 1 in every 25.
“Instead of spending £17 million on national testing of children as young as four and five, debunked by everyone from teachers to the OECD, the SNP/Green Government should redirect that money towards keeping everyone safe at school.”
Someone in the chamber is said to have muttered sotto voce: “What great plan will she have next? If it gets too cold will she order the desks to be chopped up to light fires and heat the classrooms?”
The questions submitted are as follows:
- To ask the Scottish Government, further to the letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to the Education, Children and Young People Committee on 28 January 2022, whether it will publish the informal local authority feedback it referred to as being used to calculate the £5m schools/ELC ventilation fund, what data this contained, on what dates meetings about this took place and whether it will publish the minutes.
- To ask the Scottish Government whether it will update Parliament on a monthly basis on how the schools/ELC ventilation fund is being (a) distributed and (b) spent, including a breakdown of the items purchased and changes made.
- To ask the Scottish Government, further to the letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to the Education, Children and Young People Committee on 28 January 2022, whether the £300,000 it assumed for the undercutting of doors in calculating the £5m schools/ELC ventilation fund may be spent (a) in part or (b) entirely on other ventilation priorities, and whether there will be financial consequences for local authorities that decline to undercut doors.
- To ask the Scottish Government, further to the letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to the Education, Children and Young People Committee on 28 January 2022, whether any audit will be conducted of the “educated assumptions” that led to it calculating that £5m was the funding necessary for further remedial work on ventilation in schools.
- To ask the Scottish Government, further to the letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to the Education, Children and Young People Committee on 28 January 2022, how it calculated that £150 is the cost of undercutting a door.
- To ask the Scottish Government whether it has assessed the need for the undercutting of doors in the 48,000 learning, teaching and play spaces not covered by the £5m schools/ELC ventilation fund, and whether it is recommending this solution for those spaces.
- To ask the Scottish Government, further to the letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to the Education, Children and Young People Committee on 28 January 2022, whether it will publish the (a) health and safety advice and (b) scientific advice that it (i) sought and (ii) shared with local authorities on undercutting doors prior to it providing £300,000 for this purpose as part of the £5m schools/ELC ventilation fund.
- To ask the Scottish Government, in light of the First Minister stating at First Minister’s Questions on 3 February that “we are enabling local authorities, guided by health and safety considerations, to take the actions that they consider to be necessary”, whether it considers it had a responsibility to be guided by health and safety considerations prior to providing £300,000 for the identified purpose of undercutting doors or whether this is the sole responsibility of each of the 32 local authorities.
- To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on whether it has (a) contacted or (b) been contacted by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service about its announcement of £300,000 for the undercutting of doors in educational spaces, and whether it will publish a copy of all associated documentation including minutes and correspondence.
- To ask the Scottish Government, further to the letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to the Education, Children and Young People Committee on 28 January 2022, whether it will publish all the advice it received from Scottish Futures Trust which it used to make its “educated assumptions” on the provision of the £5m schools/ELC ventilation fund.
- To ask the Scottish Government, further to the letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to the Education, Children and Young People Committee on 28 January 2022, how many children and young people will be accommodated in the 2,000 learning, teaching and play spaces that fall into the “problematic category” and how this compares to the number of children in the remaining 48,000 spaces.
- To ask the Scottish Government, further to the letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to the Education, Children and Young People Committee on 28 January 2022, whether it will publish a breakdown of the number of problematic spaces by (a) local authority and (b) school.
- To ask the Scottish Government, further to the letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to the Education, Children and Young People Committee on 28 January 2022, what it means when it states that 2-4% of learning, teaching and play spaces have “so far” fallen into the problematic category, whether work is therefore still ongoing to establish if there are more spaces that fall within this category, and whether it will provide an account of the margin for error.
- To ask the Scottish Government whether every classroom has been subject to CO2 monitoring, and if not on what date this will be completed.
- To ask the Scottish Government, further to the letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to the Education, Children and Young People Committee on 28 January 2022, what criteria and definitions were used for categorising a learning, teaching or play space as “problematic” in relation to ventilation, what CO2 reading thresholds were taken into account, whether it will publish details of the descriptions of other categories, broken down by the number of spaces that fall into each category, and if it considers that the remaining 48,000 spaces are not problematic.
- To ask the Scottish Government, further to the letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to the Education, Children and Young People Committee on 28 January 2022, how it decided that persistent CO2 readings of in excess of 1500ppm are an indication of a persistently problematic area, what equivalent thresholds adopted by other countries for education spaces it considered, and whether it has considered any alterations to its existing guidance.
- To ask the Scottish Government, further to the letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to the Education, Children and Young People Committee on 28 January 2022, whether it will publish the feedback it received on the proposal to undercut doors.
- To ask the Scottish Government what its assessment is of the impact upon children’s cognitive function of learning in education environments where the CO2 readings are in excess of (a) 800ppm, (b) 1000ppm, (c) 1500ppm, (d) 2000ppm, and what studies it has taken into account.
- To ask the Scottish Government, further to the letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to the Education, Children and Young People Committee on 28 January 2022, for what reason information was used from the Department for Education in England on the average cost of air cleaning/filtration devices, and what precluded the use of data from authorities in Scotland.
- To ask the Scottish Government on what date it first identified that it was necessary to improve ventilation in schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and whether it would have been possible to make the changes proposed under the £5m schools/ELC ventilation fund earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic.
- To ask the Scottish Government whether it is (a) aware of (b) was provided a copy of the report Covid-19 Mitigation in Schools, prepared for the City of Edinburgh Council in May 2021, and whether it is (i) aware or (ii) has been provided with equivalent reports by other local authorities or COSLA.
- To ask the Scottish Government, further to the letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to the Education, Children and Young People Committee on 28 January 2022, on what date it will provide details of the mechanism for private, voluntary or independent childcare providers to access ventilation funding and how much it intends to allocate for this purpose.
- To ask the Scottish Government, further to the letter from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to the Education, Children and Young People Committee on 28 January 2022, how many classes it expects to “relocate to alternative spaces while alternative, longer-term measures are put in place”, whether it will report to Parliament on the number of classrooms that are taken out of use on this basis, and whether it has assessed how many alternative spaces are available.
- To ask the Scottish Government what assessment it has made of how many CO2 monitoring sensors are currently deployed across schools, what proportion of these have a maximum operating range of 2000ppm, and whether it has made recommendations on the maximum operation range.
- To ask the Scottish Government whether it recommends the use of wireless CO2 monitoring sensors with remotely accessible data.