Education (Qualified Teachers’ Contact Hours) (PE1391)
We should be moving on to evidence from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, Michael Russell but, because of traffic and weather problems, he is not yet with us. Instead, we will take the agenda item on petition PE1391. I hope that Mr Russell will be with us shortly.
It is an interesting petition in terms of its principles, but it would be premature to take it much further given that the recommendations of the McCormac review are still to be discussed in their entirety. There are a lot of interesting recommendations in the review and some of them may impact on this area. I would be reluctant to take the petition further until we have had a better discussion of the McCormac review.
I echo that. The only option open to us would be to seek the Government’s views on specific aspects of the McCormac review, and we have already given notice of our interest in seeing the Government’s responses across a range of those issues. I do not think that much would be served by making a specific recommendation.
Does any member have a contrary view?
I support those comments, but we should recognise the petitioner’s concern. There was a strong feeling in her local authority that premature decisions had been made about how to go forward on Scottish education.
We have a number of options, but the main one is to leave the petition open until the discussions and negotiations on the McCormac recommendations are complete.
Perhaps the way forward would be to leave the petition open until we have heard the McCormac evidence and to revisit it after that.
Are we aware of the timescale for the conclusion of that process?
No, we do not have a timetable for that. The other thing that we could do, which might be more helpful, is to send the petition directly to the Government, asking it to look at it as part of the negotiations and discussions. In that way, it would be evidence that the Government could incorporate into its thinking. That would not change the fact that we could leave the petition open and discuss it later.
It may be, however, that other people with similar issues would request that their views be submitted as evidence as well.
The bottom line is that we could leave the petition open and come back to it at the end of the negotiations on McCormac because of the overlap between the McCormac review and the petition. Are we agreed to do that?
Can we seek clarification from the Government of the timetable according to which McCormac will come back to the committee?
Yes. We can certainly ask for clarification of the timetable. Do we agree to leave the petition open until that point?
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