Education and Culture Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Official Report 294KB pdf

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Petitions

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Education (Qualified Teachers Contact Hours) (PE1391)

I welcome members to the 33rd meeting of the Education and Culture Committee in 2012. I remind members and those in the public gallery that electronic devices should be switched off at all times.

Liz Smith has given her apologies for the public part of the meeting, as she has unfortunately had to leave, but she was here for the informal discussion that we have had for the past hour on the Post-16 Education (Scotland) Bill.

The first item is consideration of PE1391. The committee is invited to agree what action, if any, it wishes to take in relation to the petition. The clerks have produced a paper that summarises the committee’s previous consideration of the petition. Do members wish to make any comments?

From reading the clerks’ paper, and from what has been said in the McCormac review and subsequently by the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, I am not sure that there is an awful lot more that we can do with the petition. I would be reluctant to put into legislation a provision that would potentially close off options for individual schools or local authorities. My preference would be to close the petition at this stage.

I absolutely agree with Liam McArthur. It would be an impractical solution to put such a provision into statute—I do not know how that would affect school trips, for example, or school events such as sports days. As Liam said, we should leave it to individual headteachers to make those decisions.

I accept that the cabinet secretary said in his recent response to the McCormac review that he is not proposing to look at the Renfrewshire model. However, we need to reflect on the fact that the petition came about as a result of a proposal by Renfrewshire Council to replace teachers in primary schools for 10 per cent of the week with non-teaching staff from a youth employment scheme funded by European structural funds.

The cabinet secretary has said that he does not want that model to be rolled out across Scotland, but the problem remains. The petition was submitted because Renfrewshire Council proposed to introduce that model. The council did not proceed with it, not because it could not do so but because of public pressure.

There is still a potential legal loophole that could result in the primary school teaching week being reduced. At present, there are a statutory number of days for which children must receive an education, but that does not necessarily equate to hours. The petition raises the issue of the number of hours for which children are taught by a teacher.

I note what the cabinet secretary has said, but I ask the committee to ask the Scottish Government how it intends to ensure that the primary school teaching week is not reduced. As I said, there appears to be a legal loophole.

I tend to agree with Liam McArthur and Clare Adamson. The clerks’ paper states on page 2:

“The report ... concluded that ‘no further national guidance is required with regard to the involvement of external experts’.”

I do not think that the petition is really going anywhere. It is not logical or reasonable to demand such a legal requirement, as that would make the system too rigid and would not allow schools any flexibility.

There are no other comments. Our original suggestion was that we would wait for the McCormac review. We now have the recommendation, which is contained in the clerks’ paper in front of members. The paper mentions the involvement of external experts and how that should be facilitated. The review report states:

“Head teachers would determine whether these individuals may work directly with a class on their own”.

On external experts, I think that Neil Bibby was referring to the Education Scotland paper, which I think is also the paper—as discussed on page 2 of the clerks’ paper—from which Colin Beattie quoted.

Effectively, we must decide what action we wish to take regarding the petition. It sounds as if the majority of members believe that flexibility, as expressed by the McCormac review and Education Scotland, should probably remain. Is that a reasonable summary?

To pick up on Neil Bibby’s point, I appreciate that there is scope for concern where something is not specifically proscribed by legislation, although I would be wary of going down that route. However, I wonder whether there is an opportunity in closing the petition to raise with the cabinet secretary the question of what he feels would be a safeguard to prevent the sort of proposal that Renfrewshire Council came up with. The council’s proposal went beyond the events that Clare Adamson indicated we would not want to end up preventing simply by trying to close down the opportunity for councils to do something on that scale.

There is a distinct difference between an external expert and what Renfrewshire Council was proposing. That is the issue, and I concur with Liam McArthur and Neil Bibby that we should seek clarification on how the Government intends to deal with it.

I do not think that the two actions are mutually exclusive—we can do both without too much difficulty. I note what the McCormac review and Education Scotland have said on the matter, and I agree with Liam McArthur’s opening comments. I do not think there is a role for a statutory limit in this instance.

However, it is entirely reasonable that we ask the cabinet secretary for the Government’s view on the matter. The committee could write to him, and at the same time we could close the petition as it currently stands.

My preference would be that we write to the cabinet secretary and keep the petition open until we get a response.

I do not see the purpose of that approach, but I do not have any particular problem with it. Do members feel that there is any purpose in keeping the petition open and writing to the cabinet secretary, or should we close the petition at this stage and write to the cabinet secretary to get a response?

That is a fair point. However, if there is a delay of only a week or two, I do not see much of a problem.

Given that Christmas is coming up, it may take slightly longer than that.

I just wonder what the purpose is of keeping the petition open. We are writing to get clarification, so I would just close the petition.

I do not have any objections to keeping the petition open. My thinking is that, given that we are writing to the cabinet secretary to get the Government’s view, that would effectively be the committee’s concluding decision. Closing the petition will not change anything—we will see what the letter says, and that approach will not alter the fact that we can take action on the letter if we feel that that is necessary.

Letting the petition run continually would serve no further purpose, given that our decision on the petition is that we should write to the Government and ask for its view. However, I am open to members’ views.

I do not think that the petition covers the specific concern that Neil Bibby raised. The information that we have on external experts in the clerks’ paper covers most of the concerns, and we should therefore just close the petition. By all means, we can write to the cabinet secretary on that specific concern.

Given that it was Neil Bibby’s proposal, I invite him to comment. Neil, are you content with the suggestion that we close the petition and write to the Government? We can then discuss the Government’s response when we receive it.

As I said, I am reluctant to close the petition until we have had the Government’s response to the points that the petition raises and those that I raised earlier. It would only be fair to see what the Government has to say before we take a decision on the petition.

Okay. The Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning has made a statement on the issue and Education Scotland has published a paper on it. However, I am not fussed about whether to keep the petition open. If members want to keep it open, we can do so. We can write to the cabinet secretary and then deal with the petition after receiving his response.

Like you, convener, I do not feel strongly about whether to keep the petition open, although I do not see the point in doing so.

I think that the practical effects would be the same, whether we kept it open or not.

Yes.

I suspect that it may be neater to close the petition when we get the cabinet secretary’s response, but I think that the practical effects would be the same as closing the petition now.

Okay. We will keep the petition open, although I do not think that that will have any practical effect. Are we agreed that we will write to the cabinet secretary to ask for a Government response to this and that we will leave the petition open until we receive that response?

Convener, can I just clarify that when you refer to “a response to this”, you do not mean that we are asking for a response to the petition?

No, I mean the general issue.

Right. Thank you.

I think that Neil Bibby made a wider point about the issue.

The petition was lodged quite some time ago in 2011, and other things have obviously happened since then.

Right. We will write to the Government on the general issue. We will leave the petition open until we receive the cabinet secretary’s response.

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Education Staff (Training in Learning Disabilities and Autistic Spectrum Disorder) (PE1409)

The second item is consideration of PE1409. The committee is invited to agree what action, if any, it wishes to take on the petition. Again, the clerks have produced a paper on the petition summarising the committee’s previous consideration of it. Do members wish to make any comments on PE1409?

Last week I raised at the committee not the petition directly but the issues that it raises, and I was not that satisfied with the answers that I got. I got the impression that when the guidelines are being drawn up for teacher training, additional support for learning will be covered but not specifically learning disability. It would be good if we could pass the petition on to the implementation board.

Sorry? The sound is not very good in here.

It would be good if we could pass the petition on to the implementation board.

The implementation board—that is what I did not catch. Thank you.

I agree with that suggestion. When we discussed the issue previously, I was not entirely convinced by the answers that we got about how the concerns that Enable Scotland raised would be picked up by the partnership group. I do not think that anything has happened since then to suggest that those have been adequately covered. The best solution would be for us to write to the implementation board with a copy of the petition. I also suggest that we keep an eye on the issue over the coming months, although I think that the implementation board is the best forum for taking it forward.

I agree. My experience of teacher training was that training on the issue to which the petition refers was pretty sketchy. When I moved into working in the area, I benefited from working beside a vastly experienced person whose work began to rub off on me. The implementation board needs to look at training in the area quite seriously.

I think that the suggestion is that we close the petition but write to the national implementation board and bring the petition’s contents to its attention, given that the board is taking forward the national partnership group’s recommendations.

I suggest that we also send the petition to the General Teaching Council for Scotland, because it is responsible at the beginning of the process, while the implementation board is bringing in the partnership group’s recommendations. I suggest that we write to the GTCS and the implementation board about the detail of the petition. They are the proper bodies to take forward any changes that should or could be made to teacher training. Is that agreed?

Members indicated agreement.

We agree to close the petition and to write to the two bodies that I named about the petition’s contents and detail.