Finance Committee, 22 Nov 2005

Meeting date: Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Official Report 313KB pdf

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Scottish Schools (Parental Involvement) Bill: Financial Memorandum

The fourth item on our agenda is evidence taking on the financial memorandum to the Scottish Schools (Parental Involvement) Bill. We agreed to undertake level 2 scrutiny, which involves seeking written evidence, and then taking evidence from Executive officials. We have written submissions from COSLA and Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education. I welcome from the Executive Colin Reeves, the head of the schools division, and Deirdre Watt, the bill team leader. I invite Colin Reeves to make a brief opening statement before we proceed to questions.

Thank you, convener. I will be very brief. The bill fulfils part of the ministers' commitment set out a year ago in "ambitious, excellent schools: our agenda for action" to promote better parental involvement in education. It has a twofold purpose. The first is to replace the school board legislation with a more inclusive and flexible system of parental representation in schools, with parents choosing locally how they want to structure representation in their schools. The second is to promote more and better-quality parental involvement in education in the widest sense, in supporting their children's education and the life of their schools. All the evidence suggests that, when parents are involved, children do better.

The main net costs of the bill will fall on local authorities, so we have been in regular contact with COSLA and the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland as the bill policy has developed. From recent discussions with both organisations, I understand that they are comfortable with the order of additional costs that are set out in the financial memorandum and that the Executive will make available to local authorities to support them in implementing the bill.

Ministers have made it clear that the bill's objective is to increase the level of parental participation in the governance of schools in its widest sense, which is reflected in the fact that the financial memorandum contains an assumption that there will be additional costs to local authorities. I welcome the recognition of the fact that increased activity relates to increased costs.

In your introductory remarks, you said that the purpose of the bill was to create as much flexibility as possible at a local level for arrangements to be designed that best suited the needs of individual schools. How robust is the financial memorandum in capturing what may be a broad range of approaches and levels of activity in individual schools? How can you predict accurately what the financial implications of the bill will be without a defined model of what might take place in every school in the country?

I am obliged to agree that, if we had a single model, it would be easier to predict what the costs might be throughout Scotland.

In discussions with local authorities, we have explored the issue and have concluded that the flexibility to allow different structures makes predicting exact costs more tricky. However, that does not substantially alter the costs of the bill that are to do with parental involvement in the wider sense. Those include a local authority's responsibility to offer a scheme to parents in every school, which will contain a model constitution with a number of options that parents can choose from. There will also be costs involved in supporting the establishment of parent councils and in enabling parents in schools to examine what they have at the moment and what changes they might like to make in the future. I do not think that the costs of that preparatory and supporting work will change substantially.

I agree that there might be slightly different costs in supporting a parent council with 20 members as opposed to one with 10 members. However, although there will be a range of structures in schools—which means that there will be a continuum between two extremes—I do not think that that will fundamentally alter many of the costs. We have discussed the matter with local authorities over the past several months and they are broadly comfortable with the figures that we have given. As COSLA says in its evidence to the committee, although the figures can never be exact, it does not foresee departures from the order of figures that are set out in the financial memorandum such as would cause local authorities difficulty. The identified additional specific costs of the bill are of the order of £1 million or just above £1 million per annum, which must be set in the context of GAE allocations to local authorities for education of the order of £4 billion per annum.

You have talked about a range of parental involvement. Are the assumptions and predictions that you make in the financial memorandum set at the minimum or the maximum level of parental involvement?

The figures have not been set at either the minimum or the maximum level of parental involvement; they have been set according to an assessment of the likely response to the opportunities for flexibility in structures. The bill that was consulted on was different from the bill that has been introduced to the Parliament. The bill that has been introduced to the Parliament defines the entire parent body—the parents of all the children in a given school—as the "Parent Forum", with the "Parent Council" being the committee or representative body that they select. Admittedly, the parents have the flexibility to decide the shape, size and structure of the parent council, but a committee that gets beyond a certain size begins to become unwieldy.

The significant advantage in the bill is the flexibility that it offers. Instead of following the formulaic approach in the School Boards (Scotland) Act 1988, which said that a school of more than 1,500 pupils, for example, would have a school board of 13 members, comprising seven parents, three teachers and three co-optees, the school in question might choose to have a parent council with 10 or 24 members. I doubt that it would choose to have a parent council of 150, although I could be wrong in one or two cases. However, neither we nor the authorities envisage such a shift in quantum that the figures in the financial memorandum would no longer be sufficient.

The financial memorandum refers to four sample local authority areas, each of which accounts for about 4 per cent of the total current spend. Which four local authorities are those?

When I reread the memorandum, I could not believe that we had omitted that detail. The four are East Renfrewshire, East Lothian, North Lanarkshire and Highland. Those four authorities straddle the divide between rural and urban, east and west and big and small. Let me be absolutely clear: the four sample authorities represent, coincidentally, 16 per cent of current expenditure on school boards and 16 per cent of the state schools in Scotland. As they hit the 16 per cent mark almost exactly on those two counts, COSLA and the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland were broadly comfortable with taking just that sample and grossing the 16 per cent up to 100 per cent to achieve the figures that we set out in the memorandum.

I am interested in the financial memorandum, which, like many financial memoranda that come before the committee, seemed to me to be a little short on the potential financial benefits that could accrue. Has any thought been given to the prospect of better attendance, reduced disruption and fewer teachers being absent or taking early retirement due to stress?

I wonder whether it might be worth looking at James Heckman's Allander series lecture. He made a financial case for focusing resources specifically on children from the ages of two to six. He argued that kids who had received a proper emphasis on education in their early days were less likely to be disruptive, less likely to get caught up in the legal system, more likely to complete their education and more likely to hold down a decent job and thereby become advocates of education and work for the next generation. Is something missing in the memorandum in that respect?

I will certainly look at that. I have not considered that paper specifically. We have not factored such considerations into the bill-specific figures in the financial memorandum. We are working closely with our colleagues who deal with early years provision, as we know that involving parents at the pre-school stage has a beneficial downstream consequence in relation to the involvement of parents of school-age children.

Given that the financial memorandum that we are being asked to sanction contains a substantial spend of additional money, would it not be seemly for the Executive to place an obligation on future forums and local education authorities to reduce disruption and to ensure that fewer teachers are off school or take early retirement due to stress-related illness? Would that not be reasonable?

It would be reasonable and we would consider doing so in the guidance that accompanies the bill. The bill places new statutory duties on education authorities to devise strategies for overall improvement in parental involvement. It would be entirely reasonable to suggest to authorities that there is a direct read-across between those duties and the thrust of the bill. For instance, authorities own the statements of improvement objectives and the targets that they set. Although we very much have a self-reporting system, signalling a read-across between the thrust of the bill and those sorts of issues and statements would be entirely appropriate, as you suggest. We will consider that.

The only significant difference between the submissions on the financial memorandum from COSLA and HMIE is that HMIE seems relatively sanguine about the prospect of additional costs falling on it with the demand-led investigations through parent councils, whereas COSLA seems to be raising a note of caution. I appreciate that it is difficult to form a view on how many investigations will ultimately come to fruition, but what methodology did you use to quantify the number of likely submissions to HMIE from parent councils and the cost impact on the education authority before a submission got to that stage?

Principally, we approached HMIE and COSLA and asked them the obvious question. You have the HMIE answer in front of you. Anyone can approach or write to HMIE at the moment; my understanding is that it has—as you would expect—a protocol that requires it to consider and respond to any representations.

On the specific provision in the bill for a parent council to make a representation to HMIE once it has made a representation to the head teacher or the education authority, HMIE simply made an estimate on the basis of, for instance, 10 examples of four days apiece at £570 a day, which produced a figure of £23,000. I have since spoken to HMIE, which feels able to absorb £23,000 within its budget of £12 million. When I asked what would happen if there were 20 representations of that duration, it said that it would not be much more difficult to absorb costs of the order of £40,000.

HMIE envisaged issues being raised with it that fall within its areas of responsibility. The district inspector might pay a visit to the education authority or to the school to do a bit of investigation, which gives us an illustration of the sort of costs. At first blush, the costs to the education authority of responding or participating in that brief investigation ought not to be of a different order from the costs falling on HMIE. COSLA has certainly raised a marker; depending on how the bill progresses, we will need to discuss further with COSLA the specifics around that concern.

There are no further questions for the witnesses, so I thank you both for coming along.

Meeting suspended.

On resuming—