Walking through the wide tree-lined avenues flanked by grand detached houses - each having at least one top of the range SUV parked in the drive - you might not be immediately aware that you have entered an area of extreme poverty.
Yet, according to the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD), Dumbreck, where four-bedroom houses can sell for well over £600,000, is classified as being within the 20 to 40 per cent band in the rankings of the most deprived areas in Scotland.
Either Scotland has just undergone an economic miracle which no one noticed or the SIMD, one of three methods used to determine who can gain entry to a Scottish university through the “widening access” scheme, is an incredibly imprecise measuring tool.
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The pupils who qualify through the scheme can gain entry to higher education with lower pass marks. While this is great news for the winners of this postcode lottery, it should be remembered that some are taking up places from those who are more in need of help from such schemes to get into university, who have to overcome such barriers as not having a quiet place to do homework or a lack of internet access at home.
Using the SIMD to determine those with genuine needs has already been criticised for its lack of precision. Destitute pupils who would benefit from this scheme may well live in wealthy areas or vice-versa, but when the whole of a SIMD postcode is wealthy, the measurement becomes farcical. Especially when you consider the range of information-gathering tools at our disposal - from clothing allowances to state benefits - that can determine whether a pupil needs more help to reach their full educational potential.
I am sure Dumbreck, in the south side of Glasgow, is not the only suburb in a Scottish city where pupils in comfortable areas benefit from the postcode lottery of being adjacent to genuinely deprived zones. Maybe canny estate agents are already using the SIMD catchment area as a selling point to parents looking for a house move to benefit their offspring.
A more cynical observer might think that, rather than making a genuine mistake in its method of determining poverty, the Scottish government is deliberately using a measure which will help middle-class students who would have got into university anyway.
That, certainly, would be one way of boosting the government’s chances of achieving their 2030 target of 20 per cent of university entrants coming from the most deprived 20 percent of the country.
Gordon Cairns is a teacher of English who works in Scotland
