The nursery and the family

Glasgow has taken about 2,000 asylum-seeker families since April last year under the Government's National Asylum Support Service (NASS), designed to disperse asylum seekers and relieve pressure on local authorities in the south-east of England. Many of them have been housed in Sighthill. As a result, Mrs Garry says, the asylum seekers have had 'quite a negative experience'.

Mrs Garry believes that more could have been done to prepare the local community for the newcomers. 'There has been racial harassment. There's a real lack of understanding,' she says. 'People do have their own problems here. There is deprivation and poverty, and not many work. They deal with things aggressively. There was no spadework done to prepare them, no community meetings, and a lot of the problems stem from that.' 'Our original contact with people fleeing from conflict was with Kosovan families. Their arrival was more planned and better financed than the latest asylum seekers coming through NASS. Translators brought them to the nursery and explained things. We had extra staff. This time, though, the nursery management have had to deal with it on their own. In Scotland nursery places are only offered once parents have been given leave to remain (see news story on page 4) and the parents don't understand why we can't take their children.'