Education Committee, 10 Nov 2004

Meeting date: Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Official Report 268KB pdf

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Budget Process 2005-06

Because of the tight timescale that we are working to, we have to give a steer to the clerks to enable them to draft our budget report. We have to reach some sort of agreement, based on the evidence that we have heard, about what we want the report to say.

Transparency issues about the local government settlement arrangements remain fairly much unchanged. We accept the independence of the local government sector, but we need to force some sort of resolution of some of those issues and of issues relating to the national priorities action fund, on which the minister has promised to give us further information. We have to work better with ministerial officials to try to tease out some of the issues. We ought to push for that, because I had hoped that things would have moved a little bit further. I do not accept that things cannot be done because of the independence of the local government sector. That is a different issue.

Another issue is the alignment of the 11 key commitments and the national funding priorities with the targets. The minister gave us some reassurance, suggesting that there were moving targets. However, it is clearly difficult to monitor what is happening if there is a misalignment between what we say that we are trying to achieve in education and the mechanisms for monitoring.

We have to structure our report around what the Finance Committee is doing, and we have to agree whether we are content or not content with the report. I do not know whether we can do that by circulating a draft report.

We will discuss the draft report next week but, before we can produce a draft report, we will need some input from members. Perhaps we should look through the questions posed by the Finance Committee. Question 1 asks whether we are content with the Executive's response to any spending recommendations that the committee made at stage 1. We had an answer on additional support for learning, but not much else was said on those recommendations. I do not think that there is a big issue there. Is that fair?

Question 2 is on the Executive's response to other budgetary issues that the committee raised at stage 1. That covers the issue of transparency and all that goes with it.

Question 3 is on the revised statement of portfolio priorities, objectives and targets. We touched on the issue of targets. Wendy, you are the expert.

Adam Ingram made the point that links between priorities and targets are one issue, and links between targets and the budget are another.

Question 4 is on the Executive's highlighting of the portfolio's contribution to wider cross-cutting priorities. We did not hear too much about that in the evidence.

Before the meeting, our budget adviser said that there has simply been a restating of the priorities in a different order. There has not really been any further explanation of a link to budget headings.

Things have not really moved.

Question 5 is whether we want to draw any other budgetary matter to the attention of the Finance Committee. That probably relates to the more individual kind of issues. I raised the issue of looked-after children and youth work. We got an answer of sorts—saying that things now came under another budget heading—but that re-emphasised the point about how difficult it is to follow the budget document. There ought to be a clearer explanation—perhaps there is in various other places—of what changes the Executive has made. That should not be too difficult to provide. In Glasgow District Council, we used to provide detailed information on what had changed from the previous year's budget, so it should not be difficult for the Executive to give us some meaningful information.

An issue also arises about how the measures in "ambitious, excellent schools" and all the new announcements relate to the budget. From what the minister said, that information is elsewhere, so this budget document already looks a bit out of date.

Peter Peacock talked about "ambitious, excellent schools" and the spending announcements related to it, but we should know what information has been superseded.

We certainly had confirmation that monitoring—albeit at a lower level—would continue even if targets had been dropped. Issues might arise over how such issues are kept in the public domain. The Finance Committee might want to consider that.

Question 6 asks for comments on the efficiency target. A few issues arose in terms of the local government settlement.

Exactly. We cannot comment on the portfolio, but we know that savings of £150 million are coming from local government and we know that education and social work together—on which we properly have a locus—account for more than £100 million of the £150 million. We have heard that 70 per cent of the schools budget will be excluded. As Elaine Murray said, that puts enormous pressure on a small part of the education budget, as well as on the social work budget. Simply telling local authorities to use their heads about where they could find some savings is not the approach that has been applied elsewhere, where there is clear guidance about how to release resources for the front line.

That is right. We have previously considered issues to do with targeting money in certain directions—although this is a sort of reverse targeting. We might end up in the silly position of recruiting more classroom assistants and having to sack teachers. We must be careful about this. There seems to be a significant fear about whether it would be possible for local government to fulfil the Executive's intentions in practice.

It seems highly questionable to tell authorities that they cannot take funding from teachers' salaries without being at all transparent about where we suggest the £100 million should come from. That is buck passing and it is not very helpful.

We are also committed to increasing the number of social workers. Presumably, that target will not be touched either. There are a lot of unanswered questions here.

In England, education is funded separately, through local education authorities rather than through local government. There are commitments to make savings in England, but it is done differently there, because the local government budget there no longer covers the local education authority allocation.

It is not quite true to say that staff cannot be considered. There may be things that are being done that do not need to be done, so staff could be saved and diverted to doing other things without affecting the overall targets. I do not think that staff can quite be excluded in the sense that the minister suggested. We do not want to affect the targets on staff.

It might be helpful to engage officials on this subject. There seemed to be a lack of clarity, and it would be worth finding out what is in the public domain. If the £150 million is to come from local government, the Executive should tell us about what guidance it has given on how that will impact on education and social work.

A specific issue is that the Executive is pushing forward devolved school management. That begs the question whether we need all the bureaucracy at the education authority level. If the education budget is going to be managed at school level, there is a case for efficiency savings.

There are a lot of issues around the matter of 80 or 90 per cent of budgets being devolved to head teachers and how that is defined in terms of what I covered. I think that some authorities take back a slice, which complicates matters even further.

Question 7 in the introduction to our issues paper asks:

"What written evidence is available to the Committee, and from which individuals and organisations did it take evidence?"

There is nothing much to be said about that.

Is there anything else on which we need guidance? We will have the Official Report of today's meeting, and we will be able to dredge through that. Is there anything of a more general nature that we might have missed?

It would be helpful to know when we are going to get performance reports about targets 5, 7 and 8, which I and another member asked about. It is always helpful to know how things are progressing there, especially with regard to social work staffing. If performance reports are available, it would be nice to be told; if they are not, it would be nice to know when we will get some information and how the reports are progressing.

The other issue relates to the national education priorities, on which the minister showed us a report. Perhaps we should have considered that today.

I might have seen that report before, but I do not remember it.

No, I do not remember it.

There was also the question of the measurement of targets. There is still an issue to do with what targets should be measured and what targets cannot meaningfully be measured. There is on-going work on that. We will have a draft report on that next week.