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Dunoon Primary school’s transformation has received a commendation in the prestigious Scottish Design Awards.   Argyll and Bute Council’s £10.7 million investment in the school, including £5.08 million from the Scottish Government, involved refurbishing, partially demolishing and extending the building to transform it into a school fit for the 21st century, while carefully preserving its Victorian B listed building status.  

Argyll and Bute Council has announced that its award-winning Catering Service team is taking over the running of the Ocean Explorer café at the Scottish Association For Marine Science (SAMS) building in Oban.   The re-named Beach Café is now run by the Council’s catering service which already delivers a number of catering facilities across Argyll and Bute, including providing 6,000 school meals per day to more than 80 primary and secondary schools and 56 early years settings.  

All local authorities in Scotland have been provided with funding by the Scottish Government to ensure that free period products are available to those who need them. To make it easy for you to get what you need, we have made an arrangement with Hey Girls, one of Scotland’s main providers of period products, that means you can order from a range of products using this survey monkey link: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/ZDQC8JT

Argyll and Bute community groups can now bid for up to £250,000 matched-funding to help buy or take over community assets, currently at risk of being lost. Groups looking to save their local pubs, theatres, shops or sports grounds from closure can apply to the UK Government’s Community Ownership Fund for Scotland. Councillor Alastair Redman, Policy Lead Business, Regeneration and Commercial Services: “We have fantastic active communities here in Argyll and Bute who work tirelessly to provide for their area.

Issued by Argyll and Bute Council, Argyll and the Isles Tourism Cooperative and BID4OBAN   ScotRail’s new Highland Explorer, active travel carriage has been added to the West Highland Line to Oban making it easier for visitors to store bikes and hiking equipment and leave the car at home.   The Highland Explorer is the first five of ScotRail’s Class 153’s to be fitted out and the first of its type in the UK.  

Argyll and Bute Council will today launch a campaign to encourage dog owners to #maketheirpupproud and pick up after their dog. The four week social media campaign features dogs saying how they feel when their owners make the effort to clean up, or let them down by not bothering. Council staff and members of the public have shared photos and ideas for the campaign.

Parents in Argyll and Bute are being invited to find out whether or not they are eligible for a school clothing grant and free school meals for their child. Since 2015, all pupils in P1, 2 and 3 have been entitled to a free school meal, however, from August this year children in P4 will also be eligible. This will be extended to P5 pupils in January and P6 and P7 pupils from August 2022, as part the Scottish Government’s commitment to roll out free school meals to all primary pupils.

Issued oh behalf of the GRAB Trust Businesses large and small can get behind a new campaign to ensure locals, visitors and tourists treat beautiful Argyll and Bute with care this summer. The campaign designed by The GRAB Trust and Argyll and Bute Council, with support from Keep Scotland Beautiful, will provide information, advice and guidance to help minimise the effect of staycation tourism on littering. 

If you struggle to remember when to put your bins out, you can now call on Alexa to tell you. This is an additional feature, for those people who already use Alexa at home, and supports our online bin calendar look-up and downloadable calendar. It is part of the council’s ongoing commitment to delivering new and useful digital services. This 'skill' as it is called by Amazon, allows you to ask your smart device when your council bins will next be collected.  We will be adding other council-related information to the service over the next year.

More pupils at Rothesay Joint Campus would like to walk, scoot or cycle to school than currently do and a new project is looking at ways to help them achieve that – but we need your help too. Rothesay’s New School Run is an exciting and ambitious new design project to define what changes are needed, post-pandemic, to allow young people in Rothesay to get to school differently.