Will Scotland's schools be next to experience the SNP's 'solution' to over-crowding?

James Gillespie's High School in Edinburgh is suffering from its own popularity | contributed

As we report today, pupils at Edinburgh’s Boroughmuir High School have resorted to eating their lunch on corridor floors or even in toilets because of overcrowding, while some “choose not to eat at all”.

Parents from both Boroughmuir and James Gillespie’s told a council committee meeting that the situation was so bad that some vulnerable children were refusing to go to school as they found the buildings to be too stressful. The James Gillespie’s delegation complained that some 20 science teachers were sharing ten laboratories and S1 pupils were only getting one class in food and health technology because of a lack of facilities.

Schools are the responsibility of local authorities, but it is hard to blame them for such problems, given the long-standing underfunding of councils by the Scottish Government. Ministers must take their share of the blame.

The SNP, of course, has an easy solution to over-crowding caused by a lack of adequate planning. However, the ‘early release’ of school children at lunchtime would make almost as little sense as the early release of inmates from Scotland’s prisons.