Tuesday February 21st 2017
Newbattle Community High School will be Midlothian’s first Centre for Excellence.
The school, which will move to a new site in spring of 2018, will offer students from across Midlothian the chance to gain digital industry skills from film and video production to programming and coding.
Midlothian’s cabinet member for education, Councillor Bob Constable said: “This is a very exciting project.
“Our aim is that Newbattle will eventually be one of many Centres for Excellence based in our secondary schools across the county.
“Each centre will have its own specialism. For Newbattle, the focus will be on digital industries such as games development, informatics, graphic design, robotics and music production.
“Others could focus on, for example, creative industries, languages and health and sport.”
At the full council meeting on Tuesday, councillors approved the Centres for Excellence model and agreed Newbattle should be the first pilot project. They also agreed £56,000 of funding from reserves to appoint a centre co-ordinator.
Councillors noted the ongoing work in developing key partnerships with the University of Edinburgh and commercial partners from digital industries. A further report about funding for the Centre of Excellence will come before council in June.
A bid for funding of £1.3m for a Newbattle Centre of Excellence has been made as part of the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region City Deal submission. The outcome is likely to be known in the spring of this year.
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