Bringing you the alternative news in Orkney

The Orkney News

by Fiona Grahame

“What matters most is not the facts but how you discover and think about them: education in the true sense, very different from today’s assessmentmad exam culture” (Dawkins, 2004, p70)

Orkney has one of the largest primary schools in Scotland but also some of the smallest and many of these are on our islands.

The cost of educating a child in a small island school is expensive ranking alongside our most exclusive private schools. The small school requires all the facilities and structures that a larger school has such as: Head Teacher, Head Teacher relief, janitor, dinner staff, visiting specialists. Whatever a large school provides, the small school must also provide. So it’s not cheap, in fact the cost is such that many local authorities have dispensed with having a single Head Teacher and now share one across several schools. Whether or not that is a less expensive management model is debatable.