This article appears as part of the Lessons to Learn newsletter.

According to official figures, there are nearly 2,500 schools in Scotland, and almost all of them are controlled by one of the country’s 32 local authorities.

As the Scottish Government often reminds us, education in Scotland is actually the responsibility of councils. This isn’t limited to hiring teachers, organising school buses, and sorting out data collection – they also have to manage the buildings and overall school environments made available for educating young people.

There is, as ever, a bit of wiggle room here. Because as is so often the case, central government also (for both practical and political purposes) wants to be involved.

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That’s why the SNP is so keen to make claims about the number of school building improvement projects they’ve funded. It’s also why the government in Edinburgh set up the Learning Estate Improvement Programme (LEIP), through which councils have rebuilt, or are planning to rebuild, dozens of schools all across the country.

LEIP was set up to replace the distinctly expensive PFI system put in place under the Labour government, which is costing councils more than half a billion pounds per year for buildings worth a fraction of that total.

Many of the funded projects have progressed well, but there have been problems, the most obvious of which is on the Isle of Mull. There, overly rigid national funding rules and questionable decision-making have combined to create a multi-million pound project that remains, at the time of writing, unresolved.

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Argyll and Bute Council’s handling of the whole situation has been horrendous, but now it looks as though another council wants a share of the spotlight.

In East Dunbartonshire, a great deal of schools have been replaced in recent years, but Lenzie Academy has been left behind, and the building is now a very long way from being up to standard. In fact, things are so bad that teachers have threatened to strike over safety, the council is refusing to share the full truth of the risks that staff and students could face.

There was, therefore, considerable relief in October 2023 when it was confirmed that a new Lenzie Academy had been approved as part of phase 3 of the LEIP programme, with an expected cost of £85 million.

But from there, a series of self-inflicted problems started to pile up for the council, with officials’ choice of preferred site ultimately the root cause.

Instead of building on the existing site, which was a viable option, but happens to be surrounded by expensive houses owned by well-connected families, the council instead wants to pave over a community park called Whitegates that sits at the extreme edge of the catchment area. The park, local people were told, was simply the best option.

Rather than fully engage the communities involved, the council decided not to carry out a formal consultation as part of the site selection process, and the unelected officials running the programme failed to take minutes or other meaningful records of their discussions when deciding to recommend Whitegates over the other options.

"Many of the funded projects have progressed well, but there have been problems, the most obvious of which is on the Isle of Mull". (Image: Derek McArthur)

Locals have told The Herald that the council has locked them out of decision-making over this crucial development for the area, and accuse officials of being determined to press ahead with construction on the park no matter what.

All of which is strange, because just a few years earlier, the same council was rejecting the idea of building a school on that park. Why? Put simply, because the site was deemed to be entirely unsuitable due to issues that included the amount of peat under the ground and the presence of highly-toxic contaminants in the soil.

Moreover, removing “hazardous waste” from the site is going to add about £5m to the bill. Addressing the “instability of the underlying ground conditions” through “a significant level of piling” will add “an additional and significant level of cost to the project”, but seems to be necessary to stop the whole thing sinking into the soggy ground over time.

Add in other costs increases like those related to the war in Ukraine and, according to the most recent council papers, the work at Whitegates, is expected to cost at least £130m, with nearly £8m needed on top of that to turn the existing school site into an “open public space with biodiversity enhancement.” That would mean that Lenzie Academy had somehow managed to become one of the most expensive projects in the entire LEIP portfolio.

Local campaigners say that the numbers are about to go higher still, and that councillors have suggested to them that the total cost could now exceed £160m. With the government contribution capped at around £53m, it looks like local taxpayers are going to be on the hook for a huge amount of money.

And now we know that the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), as well as the council’s own Flood Risk Officer, have raised what look like serious concerns because a number of key documents, and some clearly critical information, are completely absent from the planning application. So, it’s not that the outcomes are being questioned, but rather that the work doesn’t even seem to have been done.

No matter how you look at it, this is clearly no way to run a major construction project, let alone one that will directly affect the lives of thousands of children.

What comes next in this comedy of errors? It’s impossible to know.

But you can be pretty certain that the mistakes aren’t going to be getting any less expensive.

© Herald Scotland