A UNIVERSITY professor claims Tesco are discriminating against state school kids by making them queue outside – while private school pupils walk right in.
Prof Neil Pollock claimed his son and other pupils at the council school in Edinburgh are forced to stand behind a barrier and admitted in small groups.
But the academic alleges that children from £11,577-a-year George Watson’s College, easily identifiable by their maroon blazers, are allowed straight in to the Bruntsfield Metro store.
Professor Pollock, head of innovation and social informatics at Edinburgh University, sends his son to Boroughmuir High, the Scottish state school of the year in 2012.
The 49-year-old last week posted a series of tweets complaining about alleged discrimination by Tesco.
The first said: “Tesco makes one set of school kids queue outside, whilst another school walks in. One is state, the other private. Which one has to queue?”
Tesco replied on Twitter that their store manager “said the private school normally have a lesser amount of children which is quicker and easier for the store”.
Prof Pollock wrote back: “It may be easier for the store but it is discrimination. Everybody should queue or nobody should queue.”
Others backed the professor up, included one who tweeted: “I have seen just as many Watson’s kids as Boroughmuir kids.”
?Another suggested: “Another reason to boycott @Tesco.”
Prof Pollock said today: “I’ve been complaining to the store for around six months after my son said what was happening, and nothing was changing. So I decided to also send a tweet to the store.
“My son actually tried to join on to the back of a group of George Watson kids who were walking in to the store but he was removed and told he had to queue.”
“They’re a very creative store. I’m sure they could have come up with a better way of stopping large groups entering the shop. It is perhaps a form of incompetence from the management at the store.
“There is no good reason for them to held outside. I mean if they were shoplifting or something like that then I could perhaps understand.”
Despite earlier tweeting an apparent admission, Tesco’s today denied discriminating.
A spokesman said: “This is completely untrue – there has never been any discrimination between state and private school children at this store.”
