St Margaret’s School Edinburgh set to close
June 15, 2010
More bad news on the school closures front with confirmation that St Margaret’s School in Edinburgh has called in liquidators KPMG.
The chain of events leading up to the appointment of KPMG is pretty typical of a failing school and one quote given is rather stating the obvious when it says that the solution lies in increased fees and lower costs.
The issue highlights the fact that there are no ‘quick wins’ when it comes to fixing the problems faced by a failing school. Attempts by the school to sell off some property assets also failed and this is not uncommon with independent schools due to their charitable status and potentially the legalities behind why property has been gifted to them in the first place.
Whilst it is admirable that the parents wish to pull together some kind of rescue package, especially bearing in mind the emotion attached to the issue, I suspect it’s too little too late. In any event you do have to question why the pupil numbers have halved and how quickly an annual deficit of half a million pounds can be turned around.
From my perspective the salient point here is that at the first signs of a downturn a school must act commercially and decisively to prevent a bad situation getting worse.
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One Response to “St Margaret’s School Edinburgh set to close”
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I absolutely agree with your last statement, If the Board of Govenors and the Directors had acted sooner, we would not be in the awful situation. They didn’t, and we are. We must remember that at the heart of this “business collapse” are 400 children. Many of whom have not found places in other schools, many of whom will see their hard work over the last year being rubbishes as they have to repeat years to fit in with a new schools curriculum. We all having to take weeks off work to trawl round other schools, often having to sell our kids to the schools in question. This is why we all chose St Margaret’s after long periods of deliberation, because it was an excellent school, with no entrance exam. Our children there are valued on their own individual talents (yet we are still up there with the big boys in terms of exam results!).
This is a situation which should have never arisen, if we had been notified earlier of the situation. To show you how sick the timing was, they allowed the P1 intake day to go ahead, where all the 4 year old children looking ahead to coming in August, met their teacher, saw their classroom, met their buddies etc, LESS THAN 24 HRS before we were told.
Heads will roll.