Education, Culture and Sport Committee, 01 Nov 2000

Meeting date: Wednesday, November 1, 2000

Official Report 223KB pdf

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Education Department Budget

Our next item of business is the education department budget, on which members have a number of papers. I draw your attention to pages 3 and 4, on which there is a summary of potential issues arising. The final item on page 4 is recommendations.

First, we must decide whether there are any issues outstanding that we feel that we should raise with the Executive. Secondly, we must decide whether the committee wants to have a minister in attendance to discuss those issues next Wednesday, 8 November. Are there any issues that members feel have not been covered, which need to be addressed?

Yes, there are two—one general and one specific. The general question of the breakdown of the level II figures needs to be addressed. Obviously, that is bound up with the issue of the changes in the figures across the columns. It is difficult to understand why there is such a dip in school figures, and in the Scottish Public Pensions Agency figures the variants seem to be very large. We need more detail on why those changes are taking place. We also need to go to a lower level to understand the expenditure under each of the headings in much greater detail, and we need written information on that.

The specific issue is that I would like a breakdown of the funding for Gaelic-medium education. One of the issues in the drafting of the Standards in Scotland's Schools etc Act 2000 was the amount of money that was being spent on Gaelic-medium education. Those figures are not in this document, and I would like to see them in context. I would also like to see a breakdown of grants to organisations, which appear under a sub-heading although we are not sure where that is.

Martin Verity has noted those issues for further clarification. Does anybody else have any issues?

We should be provided with level III data, not level II data. We should not accept this as a precedent. It is unfortunate that we have received level II data this year and that we have had to ask for more information. We should send a strong message to the Executive that we need more information. The deadlines are set so that we can make the process meaningful; without the appropriate information, we are simply returning to a discussion that we had in March, which does not take us any further forward.

Okay. We will make that known.

Are we agreed that the issues arising, as listed, should be considered?

Members indicated agreement.

With the additional request that we receive level III figures. Ken Macintosh is right about that.

Yes.

Do members wish to invite a minister—I do not know which one—to attend next Wednesday?

Will we be getting any more figures? If not, we need a basic explanation of the changes in those columns. It does not make any difference whether we get that explanation in writing or are told it by a minister, but we need to understand the changes.

We will ask for the additional figures. I understand that the Executive has said that it will get them to us by 9 November, although there is an opportunity to take evidence from a minister on 8 November.

Surely that would put us in the same position as we were in when we met Sam Galbraith, then Minister for Education and Children. I am sure that the paper that will give us the advice that the minister received will give rise to many questions that we would have liked to ask. However, we will receive that after we take evidence from him. It would be redundant to take evidence from a minister if the real questions that need to be asked might only become apparent later. As Mike Russell said, unless we receive information before that meeting, there seems to be little point in talking to the minister.

We are unlikely to receive any further information before 9 November, as that is the timetable to which the Executive is working, however unsatisfactory that might be. Our timetable is such that we need to respond in the following week.

Would it be possible to ask a civil servant, rather than the minister, to come to the committee? We will want to ask the minister about policy questions, but at this stage we want information. We want to know the reasons for figures going up and down. We do not want to know why decisions were taken. We want an explanation of the Gaelic budget. Civil servants could answer such questions clearly. Could we take evidence from someone such as John Elvidge?

I am not terribly happy with that suggestion. There are political decisions on how the money is put together, so ministers are the people who should answer those questions. All the questions that we have raised could be asked as written parliamentary questions. It might be better to say that, if we cannot take evidence from a minister and do not obtain the information before next week, we will have to reflect that in our report.

If we acted as Ken Macintosh suggested, which it might be possible to do, we would again find ourselves asking questions in the dark. I agree with Ken's first point about having level III figures; that would allow us to have the more detailed information that leads to questions. Without level III figures, we would be guessing, as we do not have comparable information. We need level III figures to have a meaningful process.

I agree. We need information before we can ask questions.

I was suggesting that a civil servant could supply the information.

As Brian Monteith said, if we had level III information, we could decide what questions we need to ask.

I think we are saying that it would not be helpful to take evidence from a minister next Wednesday. Is that right?

Not without having much more information.

We will receive the information that we seek next week, probably on Thursday. We will consider our response on the following Wednesday, 15 November. Is that agreed?

Members indicated agreement.