A father has won a landmark court battle to send his daughter to Scotland’s top-performing Roman Catholic state secondary school, a victory that may have implications for hundreds of other families.
Robert Bowie successfully challenged East Renfrewshire Council’s interpretation of its school catchment area. A judge at the Court of Session in Edinburgh said that the local authority had tried to keep Blaire Bowie, 11, out of St Ninian’s High School by giving the rules “a far-fetched and strained meaning”.
The Bowie family live in the Glasgow City Council area but, because of an anomaly following local government restructuring, children living in the area who attend the local Catholic primary school have been entitled to go on to St Ninian’s. Though the Bowies’ house is in the right vicinity, the council did not include it in the catchment area because it was built after the restructuring.
The council refused Blaire entry to the school, claiming that eligibility was limited to named streets. It also began a public consultation on scrapping the Glasgow part of the catchment area.
Lord Uist has ruled that the child can start lessons in August and ordered the consultation to be abandoned. Although the ruling deals only with the Bowie case, it is likely to set a precedent for other parents in the Parklands Meadow area.
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However, St Ninian’s is already over-subscribed, as its impressive performance in school league tables makes it attractive to parents. Its current roll is 1,768 but its capacity is 1,704. The intake is predicted to rise to 1,986 by 2016 and extensions opened in 2001 and 2009 have only just kept pace with the rising roll.
A spokesman for East Renfrewshire Council said the authority would have to consider the implications of the judgment. A Glasgow City Council spokeswoman said: “We ... note the conclusions.”
The agreement between the two authorities, dating from the mid-90s, related to children at St Angela’s Primary School who lived within a certain area.
Lord Uist said the issue was whether what current regulations describe as the “delineated area” for St Angela’s should be seen as a geographical area on a map, or a list of streets. In his written ruling he favoured the former interpretation.
“East Renfrewshire Council have sought to give a far-fetched and strained meaning to that term (delineated area) by contending that it denotes a list of streets,” he said.
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He also said that he thought the meaning of “delineated area” was self-evident.