At 
the Education Committee tonight, members will be asked to approve the tender for the building for the replacement West End Primary Schools. This will bring together St Joseph's Primary School and Park Place Primary School and Nursery School onto a shared campus on the former Logie Secondary School site on Blackness Road.This is most welcome step in building new schools in the city. In two years time,
children in the catchment areas of both schools will enjoy state of the art school buildings and facilities that are fit for the 21st century. It also another important milestone in the Council financed school building programme which was initiated while Labour led the Council 2007/9. This was part of the capital plan which the Labour led administration bequeathed for the city. In the two years since the SNP have run the council, significantly they have not added any major school building projects to the Council's Capital Plan when it has been reviewed. Indeed, at the last meeting of the Education Committee, they refused to bring forward a feasibility study on extending and refurbishing Barnhill Primary School.
While progress has been significant with improving the West End primary schools, I wish we could see more progress with the replacement of Harris Academy. Unfortunately, this has been quagmired in the delays by the Scottish Government's Scottish Future's Trust. The SNP promised in May 2007 that they would match Labour's Public Private Partnership government funded school building programme 'brick for brick' and find a cheaper way to procure new schools. Unfortunately their recipe for cheaper procurement did not work. It seems that the Scottish Future's Trust is aptly named only ever talking about things that remain tantalisingly in the future. Readers may remember that Joe Fitzpatrick MSP Dundee West went on Newsnight Scotland and promised that Harris Academy would be rebuilt by the elections next month. Not only has this scheme not progressed even to a start on site, but the SNP's Scottish Future's Trust has yet to build even one school in Scotland let alone one in Dundee. If we are to avoid two tier set of school buildings in Dundee, we need a continuing programme of school building and school refurbishment in the city.
This is a time for parents and carers as well as teachers to distinguish between rhetoric and reality. They should be able to clearly see who is responsible for progress in school rebuilding in the West End; who is responsible for the quicks and who for the slows.
