Virtual Reality - math tha

I'm starting to think virtual reality is where I live. 

East Renfrewshire Council is going to to give out Virtual Reality headsets to all its schools: 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-43451583

This will cost £250,000.

Isn't that wonderful? This is clearly a local authority with its eye on the future. It has no doubt done a deal with a manufacturer of VR headsets. Let's just hope the council and the company have worked out what they plan to do with the headsets. Otherwise, in the time-honoured fashion of Scottish local authorities, they'll be wasting their time - and our money.

And that would be a shame, because there are other things East Ren could be spending the taxpayers' money on. For example, recently a group of East Ren parents got together to ask for Gaelic Medium Education to be set up in the authority's schools. GME, as it's called in the trade, already exists in 19 out of 32 local authorities in Scotland, so it's not that weird a request to make. Scottish Government funding is available to get things going. We know that half the Gaelic speakers in Scotland live in the Central Belt, and that the nearest Gaelic schools to East Ren - in Glasgow - are full up - so what could be the problem with East Ren setting up its own provision? 

Simples. East Ren doesn't want it. 

When parents made their 'bid' for GME in East Ren, they were told to look for 50 - yep, 50 - possible enrolments. Frankly, I can't imagine an area anywhere in Scotland that could produce 50 children to enroll in Gaelic Medium Education. Most new starts involve as few as 6 children, since most councils expect the kids coming in to be only in P1 and P2 and that kinda limits the recruitment. Of course, the parents and Comann nam Parant (the national parents' group for Gaelic) did their best - as they always do - but it was clear that their bid to get Gaelic in East Ren wasn't going to succeed. 

So let me lay it out for East Ren officials: parents who want their kids educated through the medium of Gaelic are taxpayers and council taxpayers, same as the rest of us, and all they want is equality of opportunity for their children. The money has to be spent on their kids'  education anyway. Is that so hard for council education staff to understand? 

I believe parents were told that the Gaelic Medium provision would be in Barrhead. Not in leafy Giffnock or Newton Mearns. I can't see it being a problem to get kids there since transport costs are provided by the Scottish Government. Or wait - could it be that East Ren thought some parents wouldn't want their weans going to secondary schools in Barrhead rather than secondary schools like St Ninian's or Williamwood and were counting on that being a deterrent? Surely not! 

It disgusts me to hear of local authorities that still behave like this. The views of Gaelic-speaking parents are quite clear and surely no one believes the propaganda put out by the Tories (and their friends in the press) that Gaelic education is some sort of plot by the SNP to - as I read recently - 'teuchterise us all.' 

I hate the thought of children and their parents getting caught up in all this...