Going into battle for shared campus

THE long wide corridor that bisects the school office and assembly hall, comes to an abrupt end. Turn left, indicates one sign, and you've arrived at Dalkeith High School, its entrance doors dominated by the lifesize Degas-style sculpture of a perfectly poised ballerina, the walls of the passageway beyond decorated with dozens of photographs of the pupils at work and play.

Turn right, and a short walk takes you to the swing doors leading to the Catholic St David's High School, the entrance guarded by the tortured figure of Christ nailed to the cross, the corridor beyond filled with the sounds from a pupil's music lesson wafting towards the stained glass chapel.

This is Dalkeith Schools Community Campus' no-man's-land, a stretch of bland passageway where children from across the religious spectrum can be found crossing to the shared PE facilities, heading to the assembly hall or making their way to the dining room.

And, strangely enough, there is no barbed wire-topped metal fences, no flying petrol bombs, no armed guards, no checkpoints and no sectarian graffiti.

Anyone daring to visit the unique shared campus - where a non-denominational school sits side by side with a Catholic high and a special needs school - may be forgiven for thinking they might need to pack a flak jacket.

If past headlines are anything to go by, within the bland clutch of modern school buildings - which look more like an anodyne computer chip factory than an educational establishment - is a seething cesspool of religious hatred pitching child against child.

Fighting, buses pelted with rocks, injured children rushed to hospital, angry parents withdrawing youngsters amid fears of sectarian violence . . . isn't that what Dalkeith Schools Community Campus is all about?

Yet here we are on a typical school day afternoon and the no man's land corridor is eerily quiet. In fact the only sound is the nervy clucking of a Midlothian Council education department official, armed with a clipboard that contains the afternoon's tightly managed schedule.

Acutely conscious of the negative headlines this unique £33 million joint school campus, housing the non-denominational Dalkeith High School, St David's Roman Catholic High and Saltersgate special needs school, attracted when its doors opened in October 2003, she has every intention of keeping this particular visit under tight control.

We've already been ordered not to mention the horrific murder of Jodi Jones by fellow St David's pupil Luke Mitchell which shattered the school in the summer just before the controversial move to the shared site. This appalling crime and subsequent trial evidence revealing lunchtime cannabis sessions among some St David's pupils have been carefully airbrushed from today's whistle-stop tour.

It's probably just as well. It would be a delicate subject to tackle on a tight timetable, moving swiftly between the three schools.

With military precision we are ushered from room to room, we dash down corridors, to be ambushed at regular intervals by assorted head boys and girls, teachers and pupils who have been told to be in a certain place at an exact time so they, too, can deliver their sterling description of life on campus.

Everyone is upbeat, positive, united. There is no tension, everyone is happy, there's absolutely no religious battleground, no fights, no arguments . . . but can all this enthusiastic camaraderie be real? Or is our terrifyingly efficient schedule possibly be hiding something much more sinister? Well, the answer is . . . probably, no.

Admittedly the clipboard schedule didn't afford any time to check the loos for signs of Rangers/Celtic graffiti, or search the shared corridors for inappropriate religious icons, but at first glance the only truly controversial aspect of Scotland's first shared campus is its curious and rather depressing location: plopped down on a chunk of waste ground surrounded by unused, boarded-up old factory buildings, the nearest houses only just visible in the distance. No wonder all but a handful of the pupils have to travel to and from school by bus.

BUT it was controversy of a different kind that dogged the early days two years ago, when the eyes of the nation's politicians, religious leaders and education experts bore down on what some regarded as an experiment that was bound to go wrong.

The critics were not disappointed: reports soon emerged of after school scuffles, followed by criticism of Midlothian Council's initial decision to keep the schools' pupils in separate playground areas.

So it's hardly surprising, perhaps, that the schools' three headteachers are determined to set the record absolutely straight, once and for all. Gathered in the conference room - one of the school's shared facilities along with the assembly hall, PE and drama facilities, library and dining hall - Dalkeith's Liz Wozniak, Saltersgate's Jean Loughlin and St David's Marian Docherty are forcefully united in their denials of any early troubles. Those reports of early friction were wildly spun out of proportion, they argue. Largely fabricated, the incidents were far from religiously motivated and the reports counter-productive.

"There was absolutely no sectarian rivalry," insists Mrs Wozniak, while her colleagues nod in agreement. "There was one fight which was not sectarian in any way. These things happen in any school, anywhere."

Was it all made up then? "No," admits Mrs Docherty, pictured below. "But fights occur across schools anywhere you are."

Reports of parents' complaints and fears over violence which were apparently backed up by school board members' comments, the council's appointment of an education consultant to smooth the transition period and staff being given walkie-talkies to control pupils - all are dismissed by the headteachers as wildly inaccurate. In their view, any difficulties were simply teething troubles due to moving more than 1000 children and teachers from three places into one campus.

The scolding isn't over. Mrs Docherty tuts, sighs and shakes her head as a question on the level of integration between the schools touches a raw nerve. "Integration . . . there is no integration," she insists in clipped tones. "This is what you don't seem to understand. We share some facilities - the schools . . . operate . . . APART."

I'm not the only one to be slightly confused as to how the campus works. Cardinal Keith O'Brien required several meetings with Midlothian councillors to ensure St David's RC status would not be affected by the joint campus; parents also expressed concerns that placing 850 St David's pupils alongside 790 from Dalkeith High and 120 special needs youngsters aged from only five years old, may be a challenge. So was there really cause for concern?

Dalkeith High head girl Gillian Reid, 17, has been told to wait for us in the library with head boy Michael Lambert, also 17. To prove this is a shared facility, they are joined by a group of senior St David's pupils, an S1 history class from Dalkeith High, whose lesson in medieval history has been enlivened by a visit from a Historic Scotland knight from nearby Dirleton Castle, and some junior children from Saltersgate.

"I remember reading about all this trouble and I couldn't believe they were supposed to have happened here," says Gillian.

Michael nods in agreement.

The Saltersgate special school pupils, aged five to seven, are joined by Jade Fleming, 17, a Dalkeith High sixth year who acts as a mentor.

Dalkeith High pupils Carol Jacobs, 17, of Dalkeith and Laura Morris, also 17, of Danderhall, regularly cross the no-man's-land corridor to take advantage of St David's facilities and classes in business management, Spanish and Italian. "It's been a great way to meet lots of people we might not have met," says Carol.

People such as Michaela Warnock, 17, from Musselburgh, head girl at St David's and Angus Blakely, also 17, from Cockenzie, a prefect. "This feels exactly the same as the old school, no difference, just the facilities here are much better," says Angus. Michaela agrees. "At the beginning, we felt that people were blowing things all out of proportion. We knew what the reality was. And we just got on with it."

And with that we are swept back out of the school. Their lessons are over for the day . . . and, it seems, so is ours.

• WHILE bringing a Catholic school and a non-denominational one to the same campus raised its own series of issues, Saltersgate headteacher Jean Loughlin was dealing with her own problems.

Not all parents of her special needs children were comfortable with them being removed from their rural location to the centre of not one but two busy high schools.

"Initially parents were concerned. But now they can see the usefulness of the situation," she explains.

"Similarly, we have two or three pupils from St David's supported by us in language and maths."

Pupils move between the schools for a variety of specialised subjects - yet each headteacher insists that the individual schools each retain their own identity and school ethos.

Midlothian council leader Adam Montgomery admits that there were minor "territorial, not sectarian" problems when the campuses first merged.

"The youngsters got on very well from the start and any problems were really the logistical ones of putting two high schools and a special needs school together - a major exercise," he explains.

"Yes, there were one or two minor incidents - one involving two boys was actually over a girl, nothing at all to do with religion. The religious side of it all didn't manifest itself in any form of trouble. If we made a mistake, it's that we agreed that youngsters would be separated between the schools to make it a smooth transition, not operating entirely separately but not mixing and matching in the playground.

"Instead, we should have let that go from the start.

"That only served to start the rumour that they were divided, not allowed to be together and that was never the intention."