Under our next item, we will take evidence on the Scottish Government’s draft budget for 2016-17, focusing on education spending.
I welcome to the committee Councillor Jenny Laing from Aberdeen City Council; Councillor Shamin Akhtar from East Lothian Council; Councillor Stephanie Primrose from East Ayrshire Council; Councillor Gary Robinson from Shetland Islands Council; and Robert Nicol from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. Good morning to you all.
We will go straight to questions; I hope that you have not been waiting around for too long during our stage 2 consideration. I thank you for being here this morning. Chic Brodie will begin.
I start by asking Councillor Laing about the impact of pupil teacher ratios on outcomes, and the implications of that. In your submission, you state:
“the pupil teacher ratio places ever increasing strain on other council front line services”.
However, from my assessment of your submission, it seems that the council has had an underspend of approximately £20 million in the past three years. My question is not about what caused that underspend, but about why it is there. Where is the evidence that pupil teacher ratios are having a serious impact on improving outcomes?
The difficulty that we face in Aberdeen and in the north of Scotland as a whole is the recruitment of teachers, and being bound by pupil teacher ratios causes us difficulties as we go forward.
We recently held a summit in Aberdeen, which the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning attended to hear about the difficulties that we encounter in recruitment and retention of teachers as a result of the high cost of living in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire in particular.
The difficulties that we have experienced have meant that we have had to spend significant amounts of money on recruitment, advertising and golden hellos. We are now having to provide accommodation to encourage teachers to come to the city of Aberdeen, and that money comes out of our education budget.
We want to ensure that our young people in Aberdeen receive the best possible education that we can provide, but we have difficulties, particularly in STEM—science, technology, engineering and mathematics—subjects in our secondary schools, because of competition from the oil sector. People who have qualifications in the STEM field want to work in that sector.
All of that gives rise to challenges for us, but there is also the fact that our budgets are tied to pupil teacher ratios, and the threat this year that those budgets will be clawed back if we do not meet teacher numbers has put us and, I am sure, other authorities under pressure.
Our problem with recruiting not just teachers but labour across the whole of the local authority has led to underspends in our staffing budget. However, we have been prudent in years gone by. In 2008-09, Aberdeen had to make £127 million of cuts and, because we did not want to get into that situation again, from that point onwards we adopted a five-year priority-based budgeting approach. Our prudence is reflected in some of the information in our submission, particularly on how we manage our capital spend and are reducing the council’s debt.
Thank you for that fairly comprehensive answer, but notwithstanding the points that you have made about your sizeable underspend, I still find the position strange.
I have a more general question. In discussions that we had in workshops with education officers and headteachers, it was suggested that the imposition of the pupil teacher ratio inhibits flexibility of management. Do you agree with that comment? What impact is it having on the attainment of schools?
COSLA is 100 per cent behind the Government’s initiatives to raise attainment and ensure that our young people have the best possible outcomes. We are very much engaged in these processes in our own local authorities; indeed, I do not think that anyone around the table will disagree with the view that our children are our most important priority.
There is a long-standing issue with the pupil teacher ratio, and we feel that we need more budget flexibility. I am very aware from my teaching background that there is more than just a teacher in a classroom, and if our budget is constricted to the point that we can use only a small percentage of it, our pupils are going to suffer. I know that, when I was a teacher, I had a number of classroom assistants whom I could not have done without, but if we cannot free up some of that budget, we are not going to be able to employ as many classroom assistants, we are going to have issues with our classroom supplies and so on.
We would like some relaxation around teacher numbers, but we do not expect any huge haemorrhage of teachers. No council is suddenly going to go out and fire half of its teaching staff—that is not the point. However, we want the flexibility to put our teachers where we need them in our authorities, and I think that such an approach would help us to continue with our programme of raising attainment for all.
Speaking as leader of Shetland Islands Council, I think that we are at one extreme of this. Our pupil teacher ratio is 10 to 1, which is far in excess of the 13.5 to 1 demanded by the Scottish Government. At the other end of the scale, I know that at one point Edinburgh sat with a ratio of 15 to 1. Given my situation, I might argue that 15 to 1 is not unreasonable; after all, a large city with large schools could probably justify such a ratio and still have manageable class sizes.
The difficulty, particularly this year with the double bind of absolute numbers and the ratio, is that we have ended up having to employ three teachers whom we essentially did not need—with our 10 to 1 ratio, I think that you will appreciate that. The fact that we have been forced to take on more teachers than we actually need is counterproductive when the colleagues to my left are in some instances struggling to recruit teachers.
We are still some way away from meeting the 13.5 to 1 ratio. The 13.5 to 1 ratio was a one-size-fits-all measure that quite clearly did not suit everyone’s situation. Given the number of small schools that we have, we would have found it very difficult to get anywhere close to 13.5 to 1. However, I certainly do not welcome the fact that we have been more or less pegged at a ratio of 10 to 1, because that does not suit our circumstances any more. It also hides the issue that Councillor Laing mentioned about the mix of teachers. Certainly, in the islands, we are really struggling to recruit into the STEM subjects. My council met its targets this year on absolute numbers and the ratio—we have had confirmation from the Scottish Government on that—but if we dig into that we find that there are areas, particularly in the STEM subjects, where we are not well provided with teachers and we really struggle to recruit.
As others have said, what we are really looking for is more flexibility to be able to deliver across the subjects and have the right number of teachers for our particular situations.
11:45
On that point, I would like to broaden it—
Sorry, but Councillor Akhtar is waiting to come in.
I just wanted to reflect on the lack of flexibility. We have examples of schools in which, if an extra 60 pupils attended tomorrow, we would not need a single new teacher. That maybe demonstrates the difficulties that we face on a practical local level.
The biggest improvements in attainment and achievement in schools happen when there is a focus on improving learning and teaching in the classroom. That has been missed here. We need to focus more on getting the best learning and teaching in the classroom than on just the numbers.
I beg your pardon—I should not have interrupted earlier.
Are the witnesses saying that the extent to which the Scottish Government is setting targets is harming the attainment that could be achieved if it were left up to you to come up with the numbers that you require to achieve the expected outcomes? I think that you just made that point, Councillor Robinson, but carry on.
There are two aspects to that. On the one hand, we require a number of teachers to come through the system who are qualified, especially in the STEM subjects. To a large extent, the Scottish Government perhaps has more control over that than we have at local level, and it is able to put in incentives and ensure that there is a supply of suitably qualified teachers. So one aspect is the Scottish Government.
The other aspect—sorry, but I have lost the thread of what I was saying. Could you ask the question again for me, please?
Let me put it as bluntly as I can. Without Government interference, would you be able to set the correct level of teacher pupil ratios? I think that you have partly answered that, with the caveat about the STEM subjects.
Yes.
Is that the current situation?
Given more flexibility at local level, we certainly can deliver. My education authority has been one of the most consistently well-delivering education services in Scotland over many years.
We obviously need to discuss teacher numbers in some detail, but we have wider issues with our workforce agenda. Gary Robinson talked about STEM subjects but, across Scotland, home economics teachers are as rare as hens’ teeth. Also, some universities have not managed to fill all their probationer places. So we have workforce issues, and that is before we even mention supply. Teacher numbers have to sit alongside the numbers in the entire education workforce. We maybe need to look more closely at that.
If the Government takes responsibility for the teacher workforce, it cannot on the other hand say that it is going to penalise councils that do not meet the target.
We should look at staffing not just in schools but in wider children’s services. We are increasingly concerned about the pressure to maintain budgets for teachers. The magnifying effect of that has an impact on other budgets and starts to erode the ability to tackle real issues to do with vulnerability. That is another concern.
I share the concerns about workforce planning. It is clear from the difficulties that we face in Aberdeen that we need to take a long, hard look at how we plan. We have projections of our primary roll increasing by 30 per cent in the next five or six years. It is obvious that we need to ensure that we are training teachers now for the future and that we are training in the subjects that will need more teachers and those in which we have shortages currently.
When the representatives of the teaching unions were here last week, they reiterated their view that maintaining sufficient teacher numbers was essential to tackling the attainment gap. They clearly linked teacher numbers, ratios, class sizes and increasing attainment. That is a different message from the one that you are giving us. Why is that?
I absolutely respect the unions’ right to say those things. However, they are in a slightly different position from us. The Educational Institute of Scotland, the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers and the Scottish Secondary Teachers Association look after teachers. However, local authorities have to look after everyone who is involved in education, not just teachers. As I said earlier, a school is not just children and teachers. A huge number of other people work in schools. It would be wonderful if we could preserve the numbers of teachers, janitorial staff and everyone else who works in education but, realistically, given the budget restraints that are coming, that is not going to happen.
The EIS are in a better position than us, in a way, as it only has to look after teachers. However, we have a duty—not just as educationists but as locally elected members, which is ultimately what we are—to take a much broader view of the whole of education, and of children’s services, which Robert Nicol mentioned.
That ties in neatly with what I was going to ask about. Councillor Primrose, you are reflecting what we heard in informal evidence from councils across the country about the impact that the requirement to maintain the pupil teacher ratio is having not only on wider children’s services but on the number of classroom assistants, janitorial staff, catering staff and other support staff in schools, and that in the current circumstances the only prospect is that it will have a greater impact still.
You are talking about some of the lower-paid roles in the school environment, which means that you might be working against the grain of efforts to close the attainment gap, because you will be making unemployed people who previously held down jobs in schools.
We have never received statistics around this issue. Is there a picture of what is happening in local authority areas across the country in terms of the implications for jobs in other roles in schools?
My local authority is experiencing strains with regard to classroom assistants. We had a three-year budget and I know that, in order to maintain teacher numbers, we have had to cut our school transport provision. That service is fundamental in closing the attainment gap, because how will you do that if you cannot get your vulnerable children to school? We have not taken our school transport provision back to the absolute basics yet; we have managed to have a subsidised transport system. However, further budget restraints are coming. Obviously, the Scottish Government is yet to announce the spending review, but we will probably have to reconsider that provision, which means that even though we have the staff to teach the pupils, we might not be able to get those pupils in. That is an issue.
We are also going to struggle to keep teaching assistants, and we need them—I cannot stress that enough. When I was last teaching, I had a foundation class and I would not have been happy without my classroom assistants. They were not a helpful extra—they were not people who did my photocopying or helped a wee person now and again; they were absolutely critical to young people’s education and helped them with their reading and writing. Without those classroom assistants, the outcomes for those young people would not have been the same, regardless of how hard I tried. Young people in that class had very specific needs, such as dyslexia, and there was a lot of autism. I needed a classroom assistant to give me a hand. You cannot underestimate the importance of classroom assistants.
East Lothian Council had to go down the route of voluntary early retirement, which has resulted in our having 100 fewer members of staff across the council. That was to ensure that we protected education. We must not lose sight of the wider picture. If we want to address issues of attainment and achievement, we must ensure that children are living in safe, clean homes, that there are the proper support services for their family, that they are free of antisocial behaviour and that they have the opportunity to go out and play and visit libraries and so on.
All those things outwith the education budget are important and they are getting hit hardest. We must look at where we make cuts elsewhere in the council. That is 100 staff—with their skills and expertise—that we no longer have.
I do not have the statistics for education on its own, but I know that our council’s grant has reduced by around 19 per cent since 2010. We have protected education through that period, but that has come at a cost. My authority now employs around 600 fewer full-time equivalent staff than it did at the end of 2010. Like I said, I do not have statistics on how that breaks down in the education service, but I am certain that it means fewer clerical assistants and classroom assistants in schools and a smaller reduction, by comparison, in additional support for learning. It is having an impact, although it is not impacting on teachers.
To return to the convener’s earlier point, none of us here wants to see fewer teachers in Scotland. The important thing is to have enough teachers in the right places.
We would agree with that. I mentioned our issues with recruitment. The problem is that we are looking at a national figure for teacher numbers, whereas we need to look at the issue far more locally.
I mentioned the swingeing cuts in Aberdeen that we saw from the previous administration. There were big cuts to pupil support assistant provision and to administration in schools, and the impact of that was significant. Since we came in in 2012, we have tried very hard to ensure that education is at the top of our priority list. We have brought back those in PSA, admin and various other roles.
Our difficulty is that we are looking at 3 to 4 per cent cuts to our budgets, so we will have to consider those areas. Given the shortage of teachers in schools, we have our management—our deputy heads and headteachers—in teaching positions for significant parts of their working days. If management is not taking up the role that it should, that has an impact right across the school, particularly with the greater amount of work that is coming to headteachers on things such as the named person. We need to be mindful of that.
The workforce planning issue was touched on earlier; specific shortages were identified in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and in home economics, which seem to be reflected pretty much nationwide. Does that suggest that we have overprovision in a number of subjects and underprovision in others, which masks the problems that you identify? Alternatively, is provision in most areas fine? Is the shortfall in those subjects being filled by a bit of supply teaching and a bit of teachers teaching across different subjects? How is the issue manifesting itself in the classroom?
There will be local manifestations. In my education authority, as I said, we do not have enough teachers of STEM subjects—the science subjects in particular. That is not to say that we have too many English or maths teachers, or anything like that. I do not want significant reductions in our English and maths departments, but we could do with an increase in our STEM subject teachers. We must also talk about supply teaching issues. In our schools, if a member of staff is off, we struggle—practically for any subject—to get supply teachers in.
The answer depends on whether we look at things on a day-to-day basis or in a wider context. We would not want to say that we have far too many teachers of this and far too few teachers of that. It depends very much on the locality.
It is a very similar situation with Shetland Islands Council. In recent times, we have had to share staff between schools a lot more. We have tried to do that on a whole-day basis, rather than on the basis of half days and suchlike, because it requires teachers to spend a lot of their time travelling. We have put in place arrangements whereby we are managing to cover most, if not all, of the subjects by moving teachers around our secondary schools. That impacts a bit on continuity for pupils, but at the moment it is the only way we can manage the issue. There appear to be shortages in STEM and home economics, as Councillor Primrose mentioned.
12:00
If councils adhere to the provisions in the agreement, they will be able to access the additional £10 million, but if they do not, they face the prospect of losing their proportion of the £41 million that has been allocated.
Given the problems that you have identified as regards the impact on your ability to respond flexibly on teaching and learning in the classroom, is it remotely realistic to think that the loss of a proportion of that £41 million and inability to access a proportion of the £10 million is pain worth taking in order to give you the flexibility that means that you do not have to lay off staff who are crucial to teaching and learning, or is the pain so significant that it is just a question of having to suck it up and do the best that you can do?
Some local authorities—not East Ayrshire Council, I hasten to add—would be in a better position to take that hit. They would have to make that decision.
I think that the census will be released on 9 December. We are trying very hard to recruit. It seems to be disproportionate that if we cannot fill five posts, we will receive a commensurate fine. Local authorities are trying their hardest, but it is simply not possible to get teachers in some parts of the country, so it seems to be a bit disproportionate to fine local authorities that are doing their absolute best. Some are, for example, offering golden hellos. Why penalise local authorities that are trying to do their best?
Is there no reasonableness test, whereby if an authority has taken all reasonable measures, it will not be penalised?
No. It is arbitrary.
There should be a reasonableness test, because we have done everything that we can do to try to recruit. I mentioned in my opening remarks all the different measures that we have tried. We are not alone, which is why six other local authorities came to the education summit to make representations to the cabinet secretary; we wanted to demonstrate what we had done to recruit and retain teachers. We should not be disadvantaged because there is a national problem in recruitment and retention of teachers. I am strongly of the view that we need to look at that. The Scottish Government must take that into account when it considers clawback of any money: it must accept that we have taken steps to address the issue.
I was interested by Councillor Robinson’s remarks about sharing teachers. In Aberdeen, we have had to introduce what we call a city campus, whereby our children move round the city so that we can provide them with the range and choice of subjects that anyone would expect young people to be given. That has costs attached to it, and it means that our young people are having to travel, as a result of which time is lost. I argue that that time should be spent in education, but we have to be flexible and adapt to the circumstances that we are in, and I feel that that is the best that we can produce at the moment. I definitely do not think that we should be penalised, because I feel that we have done absolutely everything we can.
I will speak from the other end of the scale. Liam McArthur might be aware that, last year, my council—Shetland Islands Council—was the last one to sign up to the deal. I was extremely reluctant to do so at the time, and I have come to regret it, because the penalty for our missing the target was less than the cost of the three teachers whom we have had to employ to maintain our 10:1 ratio. That is the opposite end of the scale from what Councillor Laing is speaking about.
Councillor Laing has mentioned clawback a number of times, but the money in question was specifically for the pupil to teacher ratio. If an authority does not achieve the correct pupil to teacher ratio, surely it is not entitled to the money that was specifically for that. Therefore, it is not really clawback, is it? It is simply the case that it did not manage to meet the requirements for receiving that money in the first place.
You have to accept that if whether we achieve the ratios is beyond our control it is not fair to suggest that what you say is the case.
But the money is for that purpose; it is not for your general pot. It is provided specifically so that you will, it is hoped, be able to get your pupil to teacher ratio right. If you do not achieve that ratio, why would you get that share of the money? I do not understand that. The money is not being clawed back—you did not manage to achieve what you were meant to achieve in order to receive it in the first place.
Yes—but we would like to achieve it.
And then we would like to give you the money.
If we do not achieve the ratio, it is because we cannot do so.
I am sorry, but there seems to be a lot of talk about not wanting to lose teachers, but I am also hearing that because you are having to hire teachers you are having to get rid of classroom assistants, and that you are having to do this or that. That does not suggest to me that you see teachers as playing a primary role in education. That comes as a great shock to me, because I thought that teachers played the main role in education.
As a teacher, I can take that on board. Teachers are crucial in a classroom, but they do not stand and teach in a vacuum. If you walk in the front door of a school, you find secretarial staff and other staff working in the background. A professional good-quality teacher in front of a class is what everybody wants, but that teacher has to be supported.
We are not detracting from the importance of teachers. I am just saying that we cannot view the teacher in isolation.
Your argument, however. was that because you had to get teachers in, you were losing out on classroom assistants.
Yes—they have a different role.
I accept that classroom assistants are important and play a crucial role. However, you seem to be suggesting to some extent that classroom assistants are more important than teachers.
No, I am not suggesting that at all—not in any way, shape or form. I am saying that they are equally valuable. Classroom assistants are not more important, but they are important.
Yes, you have already said that. It seems to be a strange balancing act—that is all.
You have to look at a number of issues. As I have said already, we cannot look at education in a vacuum. I am not speaking from a union point of view here, but there are workforce issues, too. Classroom assistants are needed to do some of the background work. I am talking about tasks that are as basic as photocopying worksheets. Teachers and classroom assistants are not mutually exclusive: they are very much mutually inclusive, and both have a great deal to bring to a classroom.
There are technicians, as well.
There are technicians, of course—
Let us not start cross-conversations in committee. Robert Nicol is waiting to come in.
On the first question about the money, if councils commit to the targets they must employ teachers before they can get assurance that they will get the money. Most councils would have to ensure that they have a double lock on the target.
A council will have already spent the money to employ the teachers, but if one condition is not met and—as the Government has said to us—if they miss the target by one element, whether that is due to sickness, inability to recruit or whatever, they lose their share of the money. Councils do not get the money up front. Even if they have done their utmost to achieve the target, and they fail through no fault of their own, they could be faced with losing a share of the money. That is why we think that the target is deeply unfair.
I would like you to clarify this point, because it is important. I struggled to understand your argument earlier. My understanding was that you got the money for meeting the agreement to which you signed up.
I see that you are shaking your head, Mr Nicol, but my understanding is that you have, in effect, to maintain teacher numbers, and that is why you get the money. If you do not meet the target, you do not get the money. If you do not meet the target, why would you get the money?
Our point is that to achieve the target we have to spend money that we are not necessarily sure we will get. No money is transferred to local government until the target is met, so no authority here—
There is no clawback.
I am sorry. I ask members to be quiet and to let Robert Nicol answer the question.
The money has not been transferred to local government yet. It will be transferred only if councils achieve their individual targets.
That is right.
To use the example of Aberdeen City Council, if it fails to meet its target for whatever reason, whether it is the result of being one teacher down because of sickness, or of inability to recruit, it risks losing the money that it has, in effect, already spent on trying to meet the target. It is not getting the money back from Government.
I am sorry—let me be clear about this. You are describing the hiring of teachers as a loss, because it means that you fail to meet the target. Are you saying that hiring those teachers is a loss for the children in the classroom?
No. To meet the target, we have to invest money that we are not necessarily sure that we are going to get—
I understand that, but what I do not understand is the loss that results from hiring teachers to teach our children in classrooms.
I did not say that. You are twisting my words.
This is what I am trying to understand. Surely if a local authority hires teachers, that is a good thing.
Yes it is—but that is not what I am arguing.
Even if the number does not quite meet the target that you have signed up to, it is not a bad thing.
That is my point. If the authority just misses the target, it still risks being penalised by Government: it does not get the money.
I want to stay with this important point before we move on. If I hire a builder to build a garage and he builds only 70 per cent of it, I am not going to pay him 100 per cent of the money, am I?
The point is that councils will not get any money. That is what the Government has said.
Exactly.
So councils do not get any of their share of the £41 million—or, I should say, the £51 million.
That is because you have not met the target that you signed up to.
That can potentially be because the target is missed by one teacher in a situation that is very much outwith their control—the ability to recruit. Anything could happen that would mean that, on that one day in September, the council will miss the target, and there is no reasonableness test or any other way for it to do anything about the risk of losing its money.
With all due respect, local authorities have, as I understand it, missed the target for the past three years running.
We argue that the situation is different.
At what point does the Government say, “We have to enforce the contract”?
When we entered negotiations with the Scottish Government, COSLA’s view was that we wanted a national agreement, but not a national agreement that we felt we could not deliver. That is why the Scottish Government moved to having 32 local agreements. We will see what happens next week when the statistics are published, but you must remember that we are 170 teachers down from last year, which is 0.35 per cent of the teacher workforce, and there was a change in the ratio of less than 0.1. Those are the margins that we are talking about, and the fact is that there is no evidence to suggest that that sort of change has any impact on attainment. That is why we think that the situation constrains flexibility for councils.
I will let James Dornan ask one more question before John Pentland.
I accept that you are much more knowledgeable about this than I am. I come from the city of Glasgow, which has got rid of a number of teachers over the past few years. I was looking at the attainment figures again today, and they suggest to me that more, not fewer, teachers are required.
I think that this has been clarified already, but can we just clarify again that there should be no talk of “clawback”? You have said that the money does not arrive until you have achieved the target: money that you have never received cannot be clawed back.
I am happy to acknowledge that I might have clouded the issue by using the term “clawback”, but as has been highlighted, if we do not meet the target we do not receive the money that we were expecting and which has led us to employ extra teachers.
That is helpful. Thank you.
I think that we have probably exhausted the issue, but I will ask the question again to allow you to expand a wee bit.
You have said that recruitment is a difficulty for quite a lot of local authorities, and that the situation might be exacerbated by the expected increase in pupil numbers and by teacher retirement. Obviously that is going to be a problem, so how would you like to see things rectified or supported over the next 10 years?
I am aware that over the past two to three years the Government has started to put more money into teacher training and provision of more places: that must be sustained. The numbers are probably still too small to ensure a good supply coming through and to cover all the subjects that need to be covered.
We have made a start, but I point out that after the population boom in the late 1970s and early 1980s we took on a lot of teachers, a lot of whom are going to be retiring right about now. We have a problem in that we expect to be losing teachers. I do not know whether the pipeline of new teachers will be timely enough—I expect that we will find out soon. The nationwide shortage of teachers, particularly in STEM subjects, and not just in Scotland but across the UK, is going to hit us; in fact, it is already having an impact.
12:15
From Aberdeen City Council’s perspective, we would like more teacher training opportunities in our area, because we feel that our difficulties are about the high cost of living in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire. If we were training people more locally, they would set up a home and have a social network so we would be more likely to be able to recruit them.
We are pleased that the distance learning initial teacher education—DLITE—scheme has been brought in. We have offered it to members of our organisation who have appropriate qualifications. However, we started off with 18 places last year and are down to 10 this year, unfortunately. We need to look at that because, particularly given the downturn in the oil and gas sector, there may be opportunities to recruit. Most of our physics teachers have engineering backgrounds, so there may be retraining opportunities.
We must also look at the higher education situation. I know that some higher education institutions are considering cutting back on staff because of their budgets and I believe that, in terms of teacher training, the education department is one of the ones that the University of Aberdeen is looking to cut back on. Given the projections of increasing pupil rolls, we need to take a serious look at the situation now, because if we do not have lecturers, we will not be training more teachers to put in our schools.
I would echo the point about workforce planning. Again, to go on to my favourite thing, it is not just about teachers; for example, we will have a shortage of educational psychologists. Two universities used to offer places, but now only one does and the course will not be funded. There are workforce issues. As has been said, we probably need to get more people through initial training. However, I have a issues with a couple of things to do with initial training, which I will leave for another time.
Because of recruitment shortages, a lot of local authorities have offered financial incentives. Bearing it in mind that over the next 10 years there could be difficulty in getting sufficient teachers nationally, could we end with an incentives war in which areas where the parents are better off would be more able than deprived areas to get teachers?
That is certainly an issue. I know that my authority, East Ayrshire Council, would not offer incentives. We have shortages in Gaelic teaching, for example, but we would not offer an incentive to a Gaelic teacher because we think that that would create a different tier among our teachers. We treat all our teachers the same and would not want Gaelic, home economics, biology or whatever to be treated as special cases, so we would not offer an incentive. However, I am not sure whether that might put us in a difficult situation further down the line.
I think that Aberdeen City Council was the first local authority to offer an incentive payment, which allowed us, I have to say, to recruit some extra teachers. We obviously thought long and hard about the decision for the very reason that Councillor Primrose mentioned—a differential being created between our current teaching staff and new recruits. We had such problems in classrooms that our current staff were, in fact, supportive of the move because they could see that it would bring in extra teachers. It has led to other authorities adopting the same process and offering higher rates, so John Pentland is right that offering an incentive payment leads, in effect, to a bidding war so we need to look for other solutions.
The other thing that I did not mention previously is that we asked, at the summit, for flexibility around General Teaching Council for Scotland registration. As others have, Aberdeen City Council has gone abroad to recruit—we have recruited in Canada and Ireland. Make no mistake about it—we want properly trained teachers who have expertise in the classroom, but there are issues about registration. Moray Council, which was one of the authorities that came to the summit, raised an issue about teachers who have come through the English system, and who currently live at RAF Lossiemouth with their partners, being unable to teach in our schools because they cannot get GTCS registration. We need to look at ways in which we can be flexible about that.
Teachers’ pay and conditions are set nationally and are protected from other local government cuts. Do you think that that is right?
I am kind of stumped by that question. I was part of the negotiations on teachers’ salaries until I came into my current job in June, and it is a difficult question. We want to ensure that all our local authorities are managing to recruit, and having one local authority offering more money than another local authority would mean that local authorities that are having difficulty in recruiting at the moment have even more of a difficulty. We therefore need to be careful. It might be easier to look at the issue under pay and conditions but—without saying no absolutely—we would be wary of any changes at the moment.
It is worth saying that it was policy for negotiating in all the bargaining groups that there should be fair treatment of all the different local government staff to ensure that, where pay rises were agreed, they would be applied right across the local government workforce. That is something that leaders were quite clear on, in an attempt to be fair to all local government staff.
If agreements are being negotiated, we need to have the appropriate funding to pay for them. When I go to parent councils, it comes as a shock to parents when I tell them that, when there are pay increases, we have to find the resources elsewhere.
East Lothian Council is a small council with a £218 million budget, 43 per cent of which is allocated to education. If we have allocated 43 per cent and we have to find a 1 per cent pay rise right across the board for all staff—because we must treat all staff equally—where will that come from? It will come at the expense of other parts of the council.
We will be seeing unprecedented levels of pressure placed on councils. There is financial pressure in the region of £400 million, which is about 3.5 per cent of the entire local government budget, so we cannot shy away from the issue. Councils do a hard job and work efficiently. They manage but they do so at a cost, and we are at a stage now where it is not sustainable. Having a budget for education that is 43 per cent means that we have to look at other parts of the council, and for us and for many other councils that is not a sustainable position to be in.
You have said at least twice in that answer that East Lothian Council spends 43 per cent of its council budget on education.
That is correct.
The committee did a survey of all councils in Scotland and the return from your council showed that you spent 38 per cent of your budget in the current year on education. Why did you send a return that said that you spent 38 per cent if you are sitting here today saying that the figure is 43 per cent?
I am more than happy to share the information that I have. Having looked through the ballpark figures, that is the figure that I have. We have spent a considerable amount of money on education.
This is important. As part of our work on discussing education budgets across the councils, we did a survey asking each local authority what its budget was. Nobody—not one single council in Scotland—spends 43 per cent of its budget on education, according to the returns that we got from each individual local authority. Your local authority said that you were spending 38 per cent in the current year—2015-16. You cannot really expect us to accept what you say as you sit here today saying that it is 43 per cent, which is 5 per cent higher than the return that you gave us and higher than any other council in Scotland.
I am happy to look at the information that I have. I looked at our administration budget and that was the figure that I came up with.
Can I ask you, then, to go back to your local authority and find out who sent us the return—I am sure that we could give you that information—and provide us with a clearer answer about why you have said that the figure is 43 per cent and your local authority has returned a figure of 38 per cent?
I am happy to do that.
I am keen on benchmarking and I like to see it across authorities, but when I was looking at education I found it extremely difficult to benchmark across, because of all the other things that councils have to do.
If we take the 38 per cent figure as an example, whether that is high or low depends on what other services that council has to provide. Looking from a Shetland Islands Council perspective, I note that there are not many councils across Scotland that have to provide ferry services—and some of our school transport is provided by aircraft. It is difficult to look at the percentage across Scotland and have any inkling as to whether we are comparing like with like. I have found that extremely difficult.
My intention is not to compare one council against another; it is to say that the return from one council is completely different from the answer that we have had today. It is not about that council in relation to others—I am just saying that 5 per cent is a big difference between the two answers received. That is the question that I have, and I am sure that we will receive in writing an explanation as to why that has happened.
I will just pick up on that. In the figures that you were referring to earlier, the figures for Shetland are just under 29 per cent but the request is for the schools revenue budget. There is quite demonstrably a difference between an education budget and a schools revenue budget. I do not know whether it is there that the problem lies for Councillor Akhtar in relation to her response, but I wonder whether each local authority has necessarily adopted a similar approach in responding to the committee with their figures. There are quite wide variations, as has been suggested.
I am sure that Councillor Akhtar will give us an answer in writing, which I hope will clear up the discrepancy. Did John Pentland have a quick supplementary question?
I was going to ask Stephanie Primrose what her spend was, because I notice from the paper that she was unable to give a figure. I wonder whether she is able to give an updated figure.
I do not have an update on that. I apologise—I should have checked. I have two minds at the moment; one goes into COSLA mode and one stays in East Ayrshire, and I am afraid that my mind is on COSLA today. I will get that figure to you as a matter of some urgency.
We did not receive a response from your council.
Right. There will be trouble when I get home.
Good morning. I would like to follow on from Councillor Akhtar’s idea when she talked about councils being efficient and working on efficiency. I used to be a councillor and—as I said last week when the union representatives were here—as a dark-haired fresh-faced councillor I was told of the wonderful idea of sharing integrated services across local authorities. You can take one look at me now and see that that is no longer how I look and know that it was a while ago that that was spoken about.
We are now living in challenging times, but the question is whether that sharing is happening anywhere in the country in an education scenario. If it is, where is it happening and how successful has it been?
Certainly, to go into East Ayrshire mode, we do not have shared services within education. We have them in some other areas, such as our roads alliance and tourism strategy, and I think that we have that with our out-of-hours service as well, but we do not have it within education at the moment.
I would exercise a degree of caution over trying to save money with a shared service. I think that the money that might be saved would not be commensurate with the changes that would have to be made—I am not sure that we would save enough to make it worth while.
Was that not the argument that we always ended up coming to at one stage? As a councillor, I saw report after report that came back saying that such a process had not made any savings. It had taken six or seven months to get to a given stage but it not made any savings.
The EIS suggested that a lot of back-office savings could be made and could be worked with across boundaries as well. Just to open the discussion up a bit, is there not an argument that in the education scenario we could work cross-boundary more between local authorities, to make sure that things such as additional support get into areas where and when they are needed?
We need to be open to those suggestions. Going back to my own authority, we have Gaelic-medium education provision that is about to go into a new school. We have put a lot of money into that and we have made the offer to other authorities that if they want to send children to our GME provision we will be more than happy to take them.
We also do some work in the south of the authority whereby we have primary school children in East Ayrshire who go over the border into South Ayrshire for secondary school. There are things being done on a day-to-day basis that are perhaps not as far-reaching as is being suggested.
The important point to emphasise is not a willingness to look at shared services but how helpful they are at dealing with the financial pressures that local authorities face. As Councillor Akhtar has already mentioned, we believe that, even before we get to the current spending review, there are about £400 million of pressures. Those range right across local government, on pensions, pay and so on.
We do not believe that shared services are a panacea for tackling those problems. They are certainly a potential route for some councils. We know that, for instance, the old Tayside authorities share language teachers and things like that, so stuff is happening. However, as a way of eliminating the pressures that are out there, there is not the ability to use that route any more. I think that most councils will have looked at their back-office services and at the savings that they can try to make already. The large-scale savings are probably just not there any more from shared services.
12:30
Local government has been driving efficiencies and savings for five years now, and I think that we are getting to the point where we are almost scraping the bottom of the barrel. Having said that, local government bodies have been extremely good at finding and driving efficiencies within their own organisations.
If I am allowed, I will be a wee bit controversial. Speaking as the leader of an island authority, I know that we find it extremely difficult to do that sort of cross-border co-operation. We do what we can—at the moment, we are sharing the finance function and a section 95 officer with Aberdeen City Council. We looked at the roads collaboration project as well, and I have an outstanding offer to Stephen McCabe of Inverclyde Council to have a loan of a road roller, but I am still waiting, not surprisingly.
If we really want to drive savings at a local level, it needs to be acknowledged that local government has been extremely good at making savings and perhaps more should be given to local government in order to drive that agenda further. This is the controversial part. Certainly in the islands we have believed for some time now that, given that our borders are coterminous with our health boards, health could surely come under local government and we could drive efficiency in the health service in a similar fashion to how we have driven efficiency in our own services. I will leave it at that.
You are quite right, Councillor Robinson—that is rather controversial. [Laughter.]
I am straying from education—I understand.
I was going to exempt Councillor Robinson from a lot of my question, because I take on board that it is geographically quite difficult for his council to share services.
Councillor Primrose, you are now the COSLA spokesperson for children and young people. With the integration of health and social care, half the social work budget ended up with health and social care. A lot of councils are going down the shared services route, but have any of the councils—or has COSLA—looked at the idea of grouping authorities together to work together on education on a regional basis? Has anyone looked at such an approach as a potential way of delivering services?
No. We could take it back and do some work on it, but we have not done that to date.
For a start, COSLA is driven by the wishes of its members—that is an important point to make. We champion local democracy and the connectability between communities and local elected members, and we take a local solutions point of view.
We are not against shared services but they have to be appropriate and they have to be what councils want. There is not a single solution or something that can be imposed on authorities. Even if that happened, the extent of the savings that might be delivered would certainly not be sufficient to meet the pressures that are currently being faced by councils—and there will potentially be even more pressures when we get round to knowing the figures from the spending review.
I am not trying to impose anything on you, Robert. I am just asking whether there is a train of thought that we could look at other ways of working. I am not talking about changing the boundaries of local government—let us not go there. I am just trying to look at other ways of delivering education services.
On that point, the islands authorities have been involved in two summits in recent months. The first one was in Orkney, when we brought together the three islands councils. The focus of the summit was about how we could do more and better within our own councils and how we could share information on best practice.
The geographical handicap is in some ways insurmountable for us, although we are looking more at what can be done using distance learning techniques, even within secondary schools. That is something that all the islands councils are looking at. That might be one way that we can help to alleviate some of the teacher shortages that we have in some areas.
We also had a second summit at which more councils were present, including Aberdeen City Council. We are looking, certainly at the regional level, at how we can work better and deliver better. We are making tentative steps towards what you are speaking about.
I will ask about the relationship between spending priorities and reaching attainment levels. All local authorities have an aim to close the attainment gap and raise attainment generally. I take on board Councillor Robinson’s comment that we cannot compare authorities, because they have different responsibilities, but the seven cities should provide roughly the same levels of services to communities. Glasgow uses 25 per cent of its budget on schools and Stirling uses 42 per cent. Glasgow is an area that has very low attainment. How much leeway do you have to decide what the priority should be when it comes to education and school budgets? The difference between 25 per cent in Glasgow and 42 per cent in Stirling is quite big.
Our strategic priorities include education, of course. We set that strategic priority in our budget, but—I hate to hark back to this—our budget is constrained by the teacher numbers issue. We always have to keep that in the background. Yes, we would like to spend more money on education—of course we would—but in these times, with the constraints that we have, it is not always possible to spend as much as we would want.
Of course, we also have to take other things into consideration. Shamin Akhtar said that education cannot be seen in isolation. Spending money on improving houses and libraries and things like that all feed into attainment, and they are all part of the wider budget. It is difficult to say exactly how much we would want to spend, given that education is under an umbrella with everything else.
You said that your budget decisions are restricted by the teacher numbers issue. If we want to increase attainment, what spending decisions should be taken? What is the most effective way in the council budget of increasing attainment and why?
It would be difficult to pinpoint one thing. I have nine secondary schools and, I think, 43 primary schools, and it would be different in each one. For example, with one of the secondary schools in the south of the authority, where there is a huge amount of deprivation and poverty, I would like to see family care workers.
In a perfect world I would like to have money to put into emotional health and wellbeing counsellors. Teachers are not well equipped to deal with emotional health and wellbeing issues. I have done my teacher training and I am a teacher, and I have come across to the policy side of things. Some of the things that I have come across are horrific.
With the getting it right for every child agenda—this is why we are here—we have to have different services. Ideally I would like family care workers, and we need to do a whole lot more on emotional health and wellbeing. If I could drill into that, that is where I would go locally.
Local authority budgets are under pressure. There was a suggestion last year—and it has been commented on this year—that some councils are looking at reducing the working week to 4.5 days. That already happens in Edinburgh and has done for a number of years. Is that a way of saving money in a budget to be reinvested? What impact would that have on attainment levels?
I want somebody else to answer that. We have not gone to a 4.5 day week.
A lot of councils have looked at that, either for across the council or in particular schools. The important point is that any savings made through that are one-off savings. One you have made them, you cannot make them again, and they are relatively small.
I am not aware of any evidence that suggests that shortening the school week harms attainment. Scottish pupils spend more time in the classroom when compared to comparator countries. I would not want to say that simply shortening the school week would have a detrimental effect; it is what goes on in the school and the other services that wrap around the child that matter. The savings that come from asymmetric weeks are relatively small and one-off, and they certainly do not come close to covering the pressures that we are seeing.
One of the links to improving attainment is small class sizes. You have said that the teacher numbers agreement handcuffs you to an extent. If you could choose between legislating for class sizes and the teacher numbers agreement, which would you choose?
You have some good questions today. There is no evidence that small class sizes contribute to the raising attainment agenda; it is about the quality of the teacher who is standing in front of the class. There is a view that small class sizes are better but there is no official research into that so they would not necessarily contribute to raising attainment.
Some classes are better if they are small for health and safety reasons. Technical classes or practical classes are limited to 20, I think, but that is quite different because there needs to be the space for equipment and such things. The evidence about class sizes is anecdotal, so I would certainly not be in any hurry to legislate for smaller class sizes.
Given the choice, I would abstain.
I could see such legislation causing difficulty for us and other island and rural authorities. We have one big centre of population that has one high school that contains something like two thirds of all our secondary pupils. The rest of our secondary pupils are spread across another high school plus four junior high schools. All that means that we need many more teachers to bring the class sizes down at the centre and balance out the more remote and rural areas where the pupil numbers are smaller. That rebalancing would require an immediate resource.
I want to follow up on Gordon MacDonald’s earlier point. We talk almost seamlessly about raising attainment and closing the attainment gap. All through the debate about closing the attainment gap and whether we do it completely or move in that direction, I have been struck by the fact that there is a bit of a conflict between raising attainment and closing the gap. In making the decisions that local authorities have to take about where they are investing—whether it be in teacher to pupil ratios, additional support for teachers or broader support services—are you confident that you are prioritising resources in addressing the attainment gap, or are you under the pressure of backing both horses? If the latter, we are probably seeing both of them disappearing off on parallel lines for the foreseeable future.
The difficulty that we have is that we do not have the flexibility. Councillor Primrose talked about different areas of deprivation and different issues that we might have, and all that is highlighted in Aberdeen. We have areas of great affluence and pockets of deprivation.
We need to start targeting in the early years. I am not just talking about nursery provision but much earlier than that. One of the schools in one of our most deprived areas has the greatest added value figures of any school in the city every year, but its attainment level is nowhere near that of some of the other schools because its pupils are starting at such a low level. We need to make sure that we are targeting the resources at an early stage to things such as midwives and health visitor visits to help families to progress with their children.
We need to do more around the early years agenda and the early years collaborative, but the difficulty is that if we target the money at those areas we do not see the results right away. That is where the pressure comes for local government. That approach requires us to be bold, but it also requires national Government to be reflective of that and give us the flexibility to use our budgets in that way.
12:45
From what you are saying, there seems to be no structural issue or requirement being placed upon you by national Government that is inhibiting you from targeting those resources. In a sense, you are saying to ministers, “Hold your nerve”, because this investment is going to play out and the changes in question emerge only over a medium to longer term, possibly even over a generation. However, there is nothing structural that is preventing you from making those decisions on priorities and targeting resources at those most in need.
The difficulty is that, at a time when our budgets are getting tighter and tighter, we still have to use those budgets to meet our statutory duties. That is where we need the flexibility on teacher numbers that I mentioned earlier. If we had a bit of flexibility at local level, we might well be able to invest in other areas that we think would reap greater benefit.
First of all, I say to Stephanie Primrose that I looked up the Audit Scotland figures and I am pleased to say—before you go back to East Ayrshire with your rolling pin—that they are absolutely bang on the Scottish average for cost per pupil. When you look at the urban, mixed and rural figures, the differences are actually very minimal compared with the differences in the budget as explained by Gary Robinson. Before coming to Gary, however, I should point out that the only outlier is Shetland, which still spends £1,800 more per pupil per year than Orkney.
Thankfully, I am retiring in four months, but if I was looking forward to next year’s election and a load of parents were to come to me as a politician and say, “We don’t want our school to be closed”, I might as well cut my own throat if I supported the council in closing a school. The issue of school closures, whether for educational or financial reasons, is a very difficult one. I also note that, given the teacher numbers agreement, closing schools does not always lead to a reduction in staff costs.
Do the current legislative requirements on school closures prevent local authorities from running their school estate in the most financially efficient way? We will come back to the issue of quality and other reasons in a minute, but is the legislation preventing you from managing your school estate in the way that you would wish to not just in financial terms but with regard to the quality of education?
I have—or, I should say, my executive director has—closed a school, and you are absolutely right to say that school closure is a very emotive and incredibly difficult subject. Our authority is very fortunate in that we have not tried to close a rural school, which is, I think, where the issues arise.
We need to have a chat about rural schools. I have a rural school in my authority that is a 10-minute drive from a 24-hour Asda; having lived in Shetland, I know what a rural school is, and it would be beneficial if we could actually redraft how it is defined. I genuinely think that a school that is two minutes outside a major conurbation is not a rural one and, in that context, the legislation in question would hamper us.
As I have said, my own local authority has not tried to close a rural school. We have merged and closed schools, and those decisions have not been called in.
So there is a difficulty with what is regarded as a rural school. In your view, it makes such schools more protected.
Yes, although as I have said we have not had a difficulty with that. I understand the need to ensure that young people do not have to travel too far, but I think that, realistically, the definition could do with being freed up a bit if we are talking about only a mile or two.
The short answer to Mary Scanlon’s question is yes. In the lifetime of the current council, my authority has closed three schools, including Scotland’s smallest secondary school—the two-pupil school in Skerries. I do not think for a minute that the school consultation process is something that a council enters into lightly, but the legislation is such that the effort is redoubled and the process has become hugely onerous in respect of time and resources.
I cannot speak for other authorities, but we have never had a closure proposal in relation to which Education Scotland has not said that there were educational benefits in going ahead.
To be quite honest, I do not think that we can separate the educational benefits from the financial benefits. There seems to be a perception that decisions must be taken purely on the basis of educational benefit, with the financial benefits being secondary; in my experience both things run together, and ultimately any saving that is made is probably reinvested in the education system. We need to remember that a lot of the money follows the pupil, wherever they are being educated.
The process is onerous, and I think that it stifles local authorities’ ability to manage their school estate.
Does Councillor Akhtar or Councillor Laing want to comment?
We have not closed any schools in East Lothian.
I am very familiar with the Moray consultation, which cost the authority a lot of money. The focus was on the quality of education, and I think that some proposed mergers and closures were more acceptable than others, but after a huge amount of consultation and expense the whole thing has been abandoned.
When we go round the Highlands, people say, “We can’t attract young families unless we have a school here.” I am thinking in particular of the island of Whalsay. Communities have very particular, indeed unique, identities, as we are hearing in the context of the situation in the north of Skye at the moment. Many communities have their own local culture.
What should be taken into account? The witnesses talked about the shortage of teachers in home economics and STEM subjects, so if we close some schools in rural areas there will be economies of scale. For example, there would be economies of scale if everyone was taught in Lerwick. Perhaps that would be better, educationally speaking, but is it worth what we would give up in terms of attracting young families into remote and island communities and conserving the local culture and heritage?
How on earth do local authorities weigh all those factors up? I find these things difficult, as a politician, and I seek a bit of clarity on how the witnesses go about the process. I would not like schools to be closed on the basis of a shortage of teachers only to find that in five years’ time there are plenty of home economics and STEM subject teachers. How should things be done?
It is very difficult, because we have to try to future proof our schools. We have to be realistic. Local authorities cannot afford to run as many schools as they have been running. In my authority we have far too many buildings.
I am open to being corrected on this, but I think that, under new legislation, with any proposal to merge schools an educational statement, which must at least be neutral, must be provided before an authority can do anything.
I can talk only about my experience. We have not closed rural schools—I think that that is the issue that people want to pick up on—so I cannot comment on what Mary Scanlon said. The executive director has closed a couple of schools, but they were not rural schools.
It would be hard to talk about this subject without mentioning the Western Isles, which I think now have 24 schools, including three secondary schools. In Shetland, despite what has happened recently, 31 schools are still open, of which six are secondary schools—and that is where a huge amount of expense and difficulty lies. I talked about the teachers in Shetland—they are largely in Yell and Unst and in Whalsay, which Mrs Scanlon mentioned, and the mainland.
The legislation is resulting in a very strange mixture at the moment, in which some authorities have many more schools. To put it into perspective, the Western Isles is twice the land mass of Shetland yet has fewer schools. Orkney is another good example, in that it has more inhabited islands than Shetland but fewer schools.
How willing an individual council is to close schools—and, certainly in the Western Isles case, oppose the Government over it—has a lot of bearing on what we end up with. There is no question about it, though: we want to see the money being spent on education. The Education (Scotland) Act 1980 asks us to provide education but does not stipulate the number of schools or teachers. That is where we are coming from: we are saying that we need more flexibility to drive attainment.
Sorry, I have strayed from the question again.
According to the survey returns from local authorities, from 2012-13 to 2015-16 the vast majority of councils spent an increased percentage of their total budget on education. Broadly speaking, we could say that local authorities have protected education spending in the face of some pretty severe budget cuts. What is the realistic prospect that local authorities will continue to be able to protect education as we go forward and see further cuts?
The figures that I quoted earlier were for pre-school education and childcare, additional support for learning, primary, secondary and school support services. As a councillor, budget time is really difficult when a large percentage of the budget is in education. We want to protect that, but it is at the cost of other parts of the council.
I have given you examples of what we have done to make savings in other parts of the council, but the position is not sustainable position. The Scottish Parliament information centre report indicated how much local authorities’ budget had been cut by. At the same time, as my colleague Stephanie Primrose said, attainment and achievement are a priority for all of us. In East Lothian, we got the best exam results this year. We want to keep at that level and keep supporting our schools, but in the current financial environment it is difficult to look at where else we can make the savings. We have already tried to cut backroom services in the council as much as we can.
I refer to my earlier comments on the 19 per cent real reduction in grant to my council since 2010. In spite of that, we took a decision in 2012 to protect the education budget to ensure that it received a bigger percentage, albeit of a smaller pot. We have managed to do that up until now. We have stuck to our plan and kept the spend in education as far as we can. I am happy to say that we now spend a bigger percentage than we used to, although there is still a reduction in that.
Local government is now facing a further reduction of perhaps a 10 per cent—I do not have the exact detail yet—real reduction in our spending power over the next three years. As Councillor Akhtar said, in those circumstances it will be extremely difficult to keep going. About 80 or 90 per cent of most councils’ education spend is on staff and fixed costs, so there is very little leeway for us to do any more. Given the scale of reductions that we are facing, if education is not to suffer, there needs to be some movement around teacher numbers and the school estate.
I echo what the previous two councillors have said. As I mentioned earlier, when we came in in 2012 we made education a priority. I am proud that we have maintained that spending—in fact, we have increased it. With the ever increasing pressures on the council budget, it will be difficult for us to maintain that going forward. We are considering our budget at the moment but, when we do not know what the settlement will be, it is difficult to make the difficult choices.
13:00In Aberdeen City Council, we have experience of massive cuts across the board and the impact that those cuts can have in our schools and other council services. That is why we have considered innovative ways to raise revenue. We have entered into an agreement to develop a site, from which we hope to get a £2 million to £2.5 million return each year, which we will plough back into services. That has caused controversy in Aberdeen but we are prepared to consider such measures when necessary. However, we also need to flag up the fact that there are challenges ahead. The situation is likely to hit front-line services, and education will not be exempt.
From the top-line figures for the spend as a percentage of the overall budget, it appears that education is protected, but I will dig deeper into that. How much of the increase in the spend as a percentage of the overall budget has been driven by the teacher number and teacher salary targets and requirements from national Government? How much of that has been a local political priority? Even though overall budget share for education has increased across almost all councils, does that mask big cuts to areas of the service other than teacher numbers and teacher salaries?
Any global figure probably masks some local detail of how an authority responded. I suspect that you would not find a council in the land that would not want to make education a political priority. However, a number of things have added to the overall figures, including teacher numbers, pay, new statutory duties that have been introduced over the piece and other policies that have been agreed.
A range of stuff will be within those figures, but the pressure on other services across local government when we protect education is becoming unsustainable. When we face demand pressures in health and social care and other services, we begin to have the ingredients for a situation in which it will be increasingly difficult to maintain education budgets at the level at which they have been maintained in the past.
There is a lot in the maintenance of education budgets—a lot of new stuff and a lot of local and national commitments—and it will be increasingly difficult to maintain them in the future.
I thank not only the witnesses but the members for surviving through a rather long meeting of the committee. In particular, I thank the witnesses for attending and for their forbearance. We are grateful to them for taking the time to take part in our examination of the budget process.
Meeting closed at 13:03.Previous
Education (Scotland) Bill: Stage 2