“It’s not an English problem any more than it’s a Scottish one, it’s a problem for us all.” Alan Milburn’s research report The Elite of Scotland revealed some uncomfortable facts of life in a nation that prides itself on fairness.
Inequality
Brutality of small decisions: student grants
‘every time ministers highlight the increase in the threshold in 2016-17, they are doing so on the back of these dramatic losses for two or three thousand young people from low-income homes every year from 2013-14 to 2015-16. I’d not be so proud of that’.
Education and inequality Part Three: Greater Glasgow
‘What we have here is clear evidence that points to what many people believe anecdotally: there are many parents in Glasgow who believe their children’s education is better served by a school in one of these more affluent suburbs’.
Breaking the silence around asbestos
‘My dad lost his voice a few days before he died, caused ultimately by this illness. We became his voice. It is my hope that in writing this I can help in some small way the people who are struggling to have their voices heard.’ Dianne McKay speaks up for women and men suffering from asbestos related diseases.
Education and inequality: Part Two
Why do some parents send their children to secondary schools outside the catchment area? In the second part of his series on education and inequality in Scotland, Andrew Conway finds associations between school placements and relative wealth, house prices and population density.
Mapping educational inequality in Scotland
How to assess educational inequality? This is the first in a series of posts by Andrew Conway looking at placing requests and what, if anything, they can tell us about how educational inequality varies across Scotland.
Widening access: a modest proposal
‘Most access initiatives target the people identified as disadvantaged. We remain less comfortable curtailing the effects of privilege.’
Natural landscapes shaped by social injustice
‘The wilderness of Scotland is as artificial as any cityscape.’ ‘The Laird and the pauper live much closer in a city, but the injustice remains. It is simply easier to hide injustice in an area where the remains of life can be portrayed as a romantic feature, rather than a blemish.’ Reflections on the social injustice that destroys communities of Highland and inner city life.
What kind of Scotland?
“Yet we all still need to ask and find answers to these questions: is Scotland genuinely more egalitarian? How does Scotland tackle early mortality, poor health outcomes, rising poverty, educational under-achievement – and with what instruments?” This boring binary campaign ignores all these.
The cost of dignity
“Too poor to afford tampons? In all the justifiable fury of this scandal there is one crude fact. The cause of the problem is grinding poverty, and that should shame and embarrass UK 2017, one of the wealthiest countries in the world.”