Yet another FP and ex MSP voices his concerns about the condition of the Marr College building, Michael Russell an old protagonist in the battle for Marr College whose skirmishes with the South Ayrshire Council resulted in him being banned from the school writes for "Purple and Gold". Michael raises concerns about the school ultimately ending up in the hands of developers and being demolished.

 His article below rings alarm bells for Marr College and many other valuable, historic schools within the Scottish education system, where the preferred option for the provision of school infrastructure appears to be via Public Private  Partnership funding. 

Grahame Taylor June 2004

Michael Russell
(FP and ex MSP)

The EIS have done a service to Scottish heritage as well as Scottish education by undertaking their recent survey  on  attitudes to the supposedly massive program of school building that is meant to be changing the face of Scottish education: I say “supposedly” because actual progress is  far from clear, as the Parliament’s education committee pointed out last week.

Leaving aside the reality of whether most of Scotland is being offered a fresh start the detail in the EIS survey is  fascinating.   Only a quarter of respondents  had been consulted about the facilities they needed in any new construction and that number fell when  specific  facilities were considered. 

It may not be surprising that teachers are the last people to be asked what they need for effective teaching but overall they remain  enthusiastic about  any attempt to provide better places in which to work whilst appearing less than convinced about the sacred principle of newness which seems to underpin the whole current process.   

The thinking behind that sacred principle, much articulated by politicians , officials and  developers is that   new is always good and old is always bad.  Yet the cost of adhering to such a  flawed principle is vast, both in monetary terms and in terms of heritage and culture. 

A case in point is Hutton Primary School now under imminent threat of closure by Borders Council.   The present school was built in 1844 and its  list of schoolmasters can be traced to 1650.  Certainly the building  needs improved and an   HMI report in October 1999 drew attention to accommodation and health and safety matters.  Within a year Hutton had been placed third on the Council’s  priority projects list and a  follow up report in 2001 re-iterated the criticism but noted that  the necessary re-build  was due for completion by  2005. 

Towards the end of 2002 parents were invited to a meeting at which plans for decanting the pupils during the work were discussed and a timetable set  to kick in the following February.    But suddenly everything  was put on hold , whilst a PPP bid by the Council was developed though assurances were given that the £334,000 budgeted for Hutton was still  secure . 

Now, however, the Council wants to close the school claiming that even the “interim costs” of refurbishment has suddenly (and inexplicably) risen to almost £450,000 and that it is “40^th” in the priority list.   The Council is also making the inevitable noises about the impossibility of providing a good education in such a constrained and old fashioned place, even though the  landowner has offered to gift more land and the community wants Hutton school to  be made suitable for the future.  Its history alone demands that, as does the pattern of community living.   But  exciting new PPP is to take precedence over  boring old  provision.   The fact that the existing building could be cost effectively  upgraded  counts for nothing.  

The same applies even to buildings of unique social, architectural and historic merit.   One such is the Marr College in Troon.    This is  a complicated tale, which involves the school’s ownership by one body (the Marr Trust) but its occupation by another (South Ayrshire Council) on a full repairing lease, set against  a background of perpetual feuding between the Trust and the Council. 

According to Troon Councillor Peter Convery the present cost of bringing Marr College up to standard is in the order of £10 million – in itself a condemnation of South Ayrshire Council which has allowed such dereliction  to develop.     However, he goes on to note  that  “ even if the Council was to spend that kind of money on the building the education (sic) suitability of the interior would still come in with a bottom of the table D rating”.   Consequently proposals are being touted to demolish a building that is not yet 100 years old  and – you guessed it – hand over the magnificent site to a house builder much to the fury of a whole range of interests including ex-pupils like myself. 

Cllr Convery’s statement is, of course, mince.   Any architect worthy of the name would be able to find many ways of creating a suitable interior.   South Ayrshire Council just don’t want to do it, so hands are publicly wrung while the Council makes sure it gets its collective way and  some new trophy buildings courtesy of fashionable PPP on which the builder will make a  fat and continuing profit.   It is the community that loses an irreplaceable asset. 

The antidote to all this is my third building: the Curtis High School in New York.   It has just received an award from the New York Landmarks Conservancy after a $25 million restoration which included replacing terra cotta and limestone decoration across five structures.    The school is the oldest educational building on Staten Island and this year celebrates the 100^th anniversary of its first graduating class.   The Landmark Conservancy  wanted to mark the good sense in not only ensuring the future  of the  building, but also its future as  a school. 

If the most commercially oriented society on earth can realise that “new” is not always best then there is some hope.    But presently that hope is thin on the ground in Scotland.       Marr is a particular worry for even its distinguishing interior features – such as the granite entrance hall, which resembles a Communist mausoleum, complete with a bust of the school’s benefactor, the Troon coal merchant CK Marr – are being disfigured by careless use.   Perhaps it will just crumble away until the Council says  that there is literally nothing to be done –  therefore justifying  once more what it  really wants  to do.  

I suspect that many of those who teach in significant buildings would like the option of their renewal, rather than their destruction.   So would communities pupils and  parents ; in fact  all of those who  know that you cannot  build a better future by destroying the past.     If only fad-struck councilors and Directors of Education knew that as well.    

Reproduced from an article by Michael Russell published in the June 2004 Times Educational Supplement (Scotland)

 Read here of Michael's impressions of Marr College on his last conducted tour of the building under the watchful eye of the Convenor of South Ayrshire’s Education Committee.

Grahame Taylor 2004

At a certain level in politics, the subjects you specialise in become the luck of the draw  (or at least the whim of your leader)  but I suppose it was inevitable that eventually I would come to speak on education for my party.   After all my  wife is a teacher and so were my both my parents. I have absorbed the regurgitated chat of the staffroom  at the dinner table for more years than I care to remember and frequently have   stood silent at parties (or as silent as a politician can)   while teachers swooped shop gossip over my head. 

For those who are not teachers, the longest period they  are likely to have spent  in contact with the classroom  will have been when they were themselves  at school. Accordingly I decided early on in my tenure as Shadow Minister for Education to try and learn as much as possible about what teachers and pupils actually did some thirty years after I last sat in front of a blackboard.   In the last two years I have visited almost a hundred schools of all varieties.   But  I still felt – trailing behind the head teacher and sometimes not  being allowed to speak to anyone else – that I remained a step distant from reality.    My wife as usual had the answer – why didn’t the shadow do a bit of shadowing  and spend some time experiencing the daily challenges faced by  some of those, like herself, who actually had to work in education?  

And where better to set the scene  than in the school which I attended and which was also attended by my father, my aunt , my two brothers and my cousins? The green dome of the Marr College was still lowering over Troon even though it had ceased – a quarter of a century ago – to be a grant aided school and was now merely one outlet of the  South Ayrshire Education Department. 

Re-entering  Marr College was , however, more easily  talked about  than achieved.   The problem lay in a passage I had written in a book published in 1998 in which I attempted  to update Edwin Muir’s 1935 “Scottish Journey” .    As Marr College was opened in that year, and as my father had been in the first intake, it seemed an appropriate place to write about. Alas I found a school crammed to the gunnels, whose fabric was deteriorating  almost before my eyes and whose potential – as envisaged by its founders – was far from being realised by  lack lustre management and a chronic  shortage of resources. 

I said so in print and then after I was elected in 1999 helped a group of parents and sixth year pupils  protest at the downgrading of the PE department in the school.   Both actions were noted by the gualieters of South Ayrshire Council who quickly decreed that I could never again visit the school even as one of  Ayrshire’s regional list MSPs.   Instead  if I wished to speak to the Rector it had to be in the County buildings in Ayr, with an education department official present.  My offence, given to me in writing, was that I had published an article “critical of the Council”. 

A flurry of correspondence failed to change the collective mind of the Labour administration  and my promotion to Shadow Minister for Education did not melt their resolve either.   Some former pupils, I reflected in an article for a internet website , are invited to present prizes: I was forbidden to cross the threshold of the building! 

It was the web , however, that was my salvation.   The article was picked up by a site in America devoted to all things Marr College which acts as a clearing house for former pupils.   Many of them e-mailed me and wrote to South Ayrshire Council.   After a while newspapers began to report the ban.   Eventually it was rescinded, or at least rescinded for long enough to allow me to visit one more time. 

What then did I find , as I trudged the familiar corridors in the company of the Rector and the Convenor of South Ayrshire’s Education Committee (sent to make sure that I did not misbehave myself again)? 

First of all the same shortage of resources. Certainly the school has a fine computer department , some new cookers in home economics (as it used to be called) and it is even replacing the original seats in the hall , courtesy of a fund raising drive by former pupils.   But a school built for 400 and with an annex added in the mid 70’s that might take another 400 at a pinch now contains 1200 young people. Every available space is used and that includes a number of spaces that should be available for something else – the present Rector’s office is the former medical room and the magnificently proportioned library under the dome is an overflow staff room , sprinkled with plastic chairs. 

Cruellest of all the glorious granite mausoleum of an  entrance hall , complete with bust of the coal millionaire Charles Kerr Marr , resembles nothing more than a junk shop.  Some of the junk is, however,  the remains of a fine collection of art works and historic objects which originally belonged to the first Chairman of the Governors, Sir Alexander Walker of whisky fame and which featured in the  school museum cases  (yes, I was at school in a place that had its own museum!). Understandably the Marr Trust , which still owns the building and the grounds and which continues to give bursaries to pupils going to University, is nearly always at war with the present school regime over issues such as these. 

But the physical deterioration has not been accompanied, surprisingly, by an educational one. 60% of all leavers go on to Higher Education, one of the highest percentages for a local authority school in Scotland.   SQA passes are well above average  and the school – despite cut backs in the PE department – still excels on the sports field.   Its old motto of  Hic Patet Ingenus Campus "Here lies a field open to the talents" may have been superseded by the management speak mission statement that is printed on the front of the school profile (“Striving for excellence in service to the community”) but the school does manage to live up to its ambitions, despite the problems. 

Troon is an  irredeemably middle class town – although there are pockets of deprivation even here – and it is a mecca for upwardly mobile commuters.  As placing requests into the school from other parts of Ayrshire are now virtually impossible, it is more than likely that people move to the town simply to take advantage of what Marr College  offers. That will inevitably drive standards up. 

But there is something else at work. A motivated staff, again despite the disadvantages, is not unaware of the history and traditions of the school. It may have inevitably moved on from its semi independent status but there is something about the building and the grounds that demand at least an attempt to aim  high. Such efforts take place elsewhere, as I have regularly seen, and in more difficult circumstances but in Troon the results speak for themselves. 

The school is also a noticeably more  relaxed place than it was thirty years ago. All schools probably are, but whilst  some of the best of the past has been retained  some of the worst – rigid and unthinking discipline, mock public school structures – has fortunately been discarded. It is certainly more socially inclusive. 

In my last year at Marr College I worked on the school magazine. There is a photograph of the magazine editorial board of that year which has been regularly leaked to newspapers by another Marr College former pupil. the broadcaster Tom Morton.  It shows me sitting in a dustbin.   

In a sense that  was the fate of Marr College pupils who weren’t academic or who didn’t come from families that forced the pace and had high expectations.  The school perhaps did too little for them, but that is not the case now. There is more effort to make all young people achieve something and South Ayrshire and a more modern Scotland can be thanked for that. 

I enjoyed my  afternoon at Marr College. It brought back memories but it also raised some new questions about what education was and is.    Is success still  largely a matter of background and aspiring parents or are  policies aimed at social inclusion succeeding in breaking down the privileges of the few and advantaging – at last – the many?   Is the shortage of resources in Scottish education endemic and if so, is it as fatal a disadvantage as we all believe - and what do pupils and teachers think of the education system they work in together?  I had not been allowed to ask such questions within  Marr College.   But I had a number of people to shadow elsewhere who might answer them for me.

Reproduced from an article by Michael Russell published in the Times Educational Supplement (Scotland)

Local Councillor and member of the Marr Educational Trust, Peter Convery remarked  recently that he has been inundated with emails from all over the world as visitors to “Purple and Gold” and “Jeanie’s Jotter”  reacted to the slum like state of the Marr College building described on www.marrcollege.co.uk . 

With the Marr Trust due to meet in June keeping up this pressure on the mail boxes of the trustees is vital if the condition of the Marr College building and the neglect of the South Ayrshire Council is to be discussed at that meeting, visit the lobby page and fire off your email to the trustees now!

For too long the trust have sat on their hands and failed to address this issue.  

If the decline in the condition of the Marr Building is to be arrested time is running out, the Marr Educational Trust need to be made aware that around the world Marr FP’s are appalled at the condition to which the School buildings have sunk. 

Judging from the response to both “Purple and Gold” and “Jeanie’s Jotter” in recent weeks there are thousands of FP’s, all who have their own special memories of the school and it environs, prepared to stand up and be counted to save this building from further neglect. 

Put www.marrcollege.co.uk in your favorites link, visit regularly for breaking news.    

Read below Peter Convery’s assessment of the situation.  

Grahame Taylor 2004

Many of you will have read an article in one of the local papers recently about some of the short and long term problems facing Marr College. Both of these issues are well and truly entangled in each other. As you know South Ayrshire Council have chosen to go down the road of Private Public Partnership in relation to bringing their school estates up to a standard fit for the 21^st. Century.

What has become increasingly clear is that the private sector companies who may be interested in a joint partnership have an overwhelming desire for new build rather than refurbishment of old, out of date school buildings. Given that part of the deal would involve them in the full repair and maintenance of any joint partnership building for the first thirty years, you can understand their reluctance to become involved in any project involving an old building.

The point about all of this is that even if South Ayrshire Council owned the building it would still be extremely unlikely that an outside company would wish to include Marr Collage in any future PPP bid.

In the short term the latest Building Needs Assessment shows that the collage needs substantial finical investment just to bring the fabric up to a reasonable standard. Something in the order of £10 million would not be unrealistic. The most worrying fact is that even if the Council was to spend that kind of money on the building the education suitability of the interior would still come in with a bottom of the table D rating.

Given these facts you can see why the Council has to look at one of the options being the need to develop an exit strategy from the current site and go for a new build elsewhere. If they chose to go down this road it will be on the basis of a longer-term strategy, there is no question of leaving this site either in the short or medium term.

There are many critical issues that will have to be resolved before major decisions are taken, not least of these is the Councils relationship with our landlord the C. K. Marr Trust. What they do need to do is start talking to each other, something that has singularly failed to take place over the last year.

Many of you reading this will be pupils, staff or parents. You know first hand just how difficult it is to either teach or learn in an environment where water comes through the roof and walls, windows neither shut or open and many of you find it unacceptable even to use the toilets. Whatever happens longer term these kind of issues have to be addressed as a matter of high priority.

I appreciate this is a highly emotive issue, this is not just a school it is part of Troon’s heritage. One of the greatest gifts one person can give to another is knowledge, Charles Marr left this town a truly remarkable gift. That legacy has allowed generations of young Troon people the opportunity to go out into the wider world better equipped to make a positive contribution to whatever society and country they chose to live and work in.

My closing point is this: Any debate has to involve the people of Troon, this is not only your school but it is also your heritage. I would hope that you might consider expressing any thoughts you have on this subject to the Council possible through our chief executive and if another body chose to have a public meeting about this issue that you would take the opportunity to attend and express your opinion.

Peter J. Convery

 "Concern Over The Future Of The Marr College Building"

 
John Scott MSP

Concern over the future of Marr College is not limited to Former Pupils, Jim Wallace prompted by the correspondence in "Jeanie's Jotter" and "Purple and Gold" received the following reply as a result of his email to John Scott MSP (George Watson's FP).

Dear Mr. Wallace 

Thanks for copying me the correspondence on Marr College, which I read with interest, and my apologies for my delay in replying. 

The current position, as I understand it, is that Marr College was originally included in South Ayrshire Council's proposed Public Private Partnership (PPP) investment programme, with an improvement package of some £12 million being assigned to the building and associated facilities. This, in my opinion, would have been a superb boost to the school, which is in clear need of very significant refurbishment work, and would have ensured a range of improvements including an upgrading of the fabric of the listed building, re-roofing, window replacement, a recovering of the dome and restoration of panelling and other furnishings and fixtures. The school would also have been extended, to ease the significant problems that have existed for years with a burgeoning school roll, which is currently capped. 

It subsequently transpired that under the arrangements for the delivery of PPP funding, Councils are precluded from investing by these means in properties that they do not themselves own, and so the £12 million earmarked for Marr was dropped from the overall outline business case. 

Since that time, the Council has considered a number of options, which included further exploring the PPP option by attempting to overcome the obstacles in the path of securing funding by this means, and also an approach to the Trust with a view to purchasing the school outright. I am not clear how far the latter option has been pursued, if indeed it is still viewed by either or both parties as a viable option.  

Although I am unaware of anything being committed to paper in an official sense, it does seem that the construction of a new school is a further option being considered by the Council, although I would expect that if this is indeed the case, it will not take place for at least a decade and perhaps longer. That of course poses concerns over the long-term future of the existing building, which I personally believe should be secured as a vital part of Troon's heritage, and indeed concerns over the short to medium term investment that is required in the fabric of the building and facilities for pupils. 

As a suggestion, it may be helpful if you were also to contact my colleague Councillor Peter Convery, who I know also to be concerned about this matter and who has himself been involved with Marr College over many years, although he as only recently been appointed to the Trust. He can be contacted on pjc@omne.uk.net. 

I hope you find this to be helpful, and please be assured that I also share your concerns that Marr must be saved for future generations.

John Scott