Education Committee, 17 Nov 2004

Meeting date: Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Official Report 326KB pdf

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Budget Process 2005-06

The committee will not now move into private session, despite what it says on my brief, to consider its draft report to the Finance Committee on the budget process. The draft report is before us. I am constantly impressed by the ability of the clerks to turn our confused discussions into impressive prose. Once again, they have done a very good job on the draft report. I seek the committee's comments and input on it.

I have one tiny suggestion. The second sentence of paragraph 12 begins,

"Although reassured by the Minister's responses".

It might be worth adding "including his response on special schools". In the context of the Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Act 2004, that would give some reassurance to parents and teachers.

Okay. We can include that. I have a couple of suggestions. In paragraph 4, we talk about the minister's commitment to transparency, and so forth. We might add, "However, the committee believes that it should be possible to make education spending in Scotland much more transparent and accountable than at present." In a sense, that is the central statement, but it does not quite say that. Would that be all right?

Paragraph 11 states:

"The revision of the targets … resulted in many of the timescales for delivery moving further into the future."

That is a slight overstatement. I think that only some of the timescales moved. It does not matter too much.

It was most of the timescales.

Was it most of them? I did not think that it was.

Some certainly did. Some were consolidated so that, instead of there being a year-on-year increase, there was an increase by end date. There were some changes.

There were differences of scale. It does not matter too much; it was just a final thought. There is some disagreement on that point, so we will leave that paragraph as it is.

Paragraph 15 talks about the budgetary movements. I suggest that we add at the end of the paragraph, "Both these aspects"—that is, the budgetary movements up and down and the carry-over—"should, however, be routinely included as part of the budget papers." The difficulty was the fact that they were not.

There is a slight grammatical error in paragraph 16, which does not quite read properly. The words have gone slightly wrong.

With those comments, can we agree the report?

Members indicated agreement.

I will pursue further with the minister the question of drawing together the views of our advisers and the Executive's advisers on how we get deeper into the budgetary figures and so on to make the budget a bit more transparent. There is further work to be done. After all, at the previous evidence-taking session, we heard how far they had got on the matter. Subject to the minister's agreement, I will meet him and appropriate officials to find out whether we can reach a common understanding about where we are going and how the work will be carried out. We need to be able to go into the next round of committee budget scrutiny with a clear idea of how the money is spent, where it goes and so on.

Are you talking about drilling down?

Yes. I realise that the issue of local authority expenditure also raises the question of local authority independence. However, I—and, I believe, the committee—hold the view that that is different from the question whether local authority expenditure is transparent and whether people are able to judge whether the Executive's intended outputs are being delivered. None of that goes against local authority independence, but it is vital to democratic scrutiny of the large spend on education in Scotland.

I am not sure whether your meeting with the minister will be the appropriate place to pursue the issues raised in paragraph 18, which refers to the fact that local authorities have to make efficiency savings of £150 million. Given that £100 million of those savings will have to be made in education and social work, will some of that money come from reducing teacher numbers? If not, where will it come from? I believe that we have two options: either we write to the minister, seeking clarity on the matter, or the issue is raised during your meeting with him. I do not mind which course we pursue, but we should choose one of those two avenues.

I think that you have raised a separate issue that we should write to the minister about. I have to say that our file of correspondence with the minister is getting quite substantial.

Meeting closed at 12:16.