Education, Lifelong Learning and Culture Committee, 02 Sep 2008

Meeting date: Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Official Report 238KB pdf

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Petitions

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Foreign Languages Policy (PE1022)

Item 7 is consideration of two petitions. As previously agreed, the committee has completed its work on petitions PE1022, on foreign language learning, and PE1046, from the Educational Institute of Scotland, on class sizes. I invite comments on PE1022.

The committee has been waiting for various pieces of work, including a report from the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council, which has now been produced. I am happy with the clerks' recommendation that we ask for the Executive response following the funding council report so that we can get a grasp of the matter. We do not have a difficulty with the report; it will be more interesting to know whether the Executive will act on the report's recommendations.

We should pursue the clerks' helpful suggestion and send the cabinet secretary a letter asking her to respond to us in writing. Are we happy with that?

Members indicated agreement.

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Schools (Class Sizes) (PE1046)

PE1046 relates to class sizes. The clerks have prepared a paper on the petition. Do members have any comments?

The committee has done quite a bit of work on class sizes, almost amounting to a formal inquiry. Given members' different approaches to the subject, I suspect that we would have difficulty reaching a unanimous conclusion in an inquiry.

It has been suggested that we close the petition, but I am reluctant to close our consideration of class sizes. The issue has been a dominant policy development since the start of this session and I imagine that it will remain so until we have evidence that the Government will meet its policy requirement. In the meantime, what is perhaps more important is how the Government intends to meet that requirement. I am totally unconvinced that the funding and the policies are in place that would allow the commitment on class sizes that was made at the most recent election to be met.

Although the topic is the same, the contents of the petition are not the same as the Government's policy statement. I welcome the petition. I am sure that the issue of class sizes is close to all our hearts and that it is one that we would wish to consider in depth. I do not mind closing the petition if the committee agrees to follow up the issue in the coming weeks or months, and if it flags up today how it will do that.

The paper on the petition recommends that we write to the petitioner to detail the work that has been carried out. It also recommends that the committee

"continue to examine the issue of class sizes as part of its ongoing scrutiny of Scottish Government policy, its budget, and the concordat with local government."

Those recommendations lay out exactly how the committee should follow through on the issue.

It is important to clarify that the clerks recommended closing the petition not to limit the committee's ability to consider the issue of class sizes but to ensure that, when we do consider the issue, we consider all aspects of class sizes. Prior to the summer recess, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities told us that it was willing to talk to the committee only in relation to the petition and that it did not want to enter into discussions about single outcome agreements on class sizes. That was rather frustrating for the committee because it was one of the issues that we wanted to get to the bottom of. We wanted to know what was happening on class sizes in local authorities throughout Scotland. I hope that if we close our consideration of the specifics of the petition, we do not close entirely our consideration of class sizes. It is an issue to which we will need to return, not least in the budget considerations that will be before the committee very soon.

Like other colleagues, I am reluctant to close the issue. I want to raise two points. First, I would like the committee to ask for the result of the census of class sizes that will be taken in September. That will give us a better picture of how things have progressed this year.

Secondly, over the past few days we have seen a great deal of media coverage of composite classes. The issue came up in some of our evidence sessions. I do not have the petition in front of me—I am always having to ask the clerks for it—but I seem to remember that it referred to capping the size of composite classes. The figure is currently 25, but the petition referred to 15. How would we pick up on that in relation to on-going developments? I would want to pick up that issue again as the policy progresses. The petition refers to the issue and I would like to keep it on the table and not lose sight of it.

I have a constructive suggestion—Mr Gibson will soon discover that I am full of constructive suggestions.

I agree that we can return to the matter as the committee sees fit and through the budget and so on, but I am keen that we have a formal session on it, and that we hold that quite soon. I ask for that because, in addition to the issues to which Mary Mulligan refers, the court ruling over the summer and the case that was settled before it went to court suggest that there is an immediate problem. The legally enforceable limit dates back to 1999 and even the guidance that was produced by the Labour-Liberal Executive does not have the force that we thought it had. There is an immediate problem and if we do not address it, we will be forcing parents to take local authorities to court. That is not a desirable situation for many reasons and the matter requires our immediate attention. Could we put that aspect of class sizes or the issue of class sizes more generally on our formal agenda? We could have a session with the cabinet secretary or, to begin with, we could write to local authorities and parent groups to find out what they would like us to do first. We could do that in writing and then put it on in our agenda in two or three weeks' time.

I was going to suggest that the best way forward might be to ask the clerks to prepare a paper for us, which would outline various options that would enable us to consider the various issues to do with class sizes and how and when best to pursue some of them. We would want to get the details of the census, which would provide a good basis for any further deliberations by the committee. We can give the committee an undertaking that we would prepare that over the next few weeks. It would be programmed into our timetable and not lost from sight, so there would be something on the immediate horizon for us to focus on. Is the committee happy with that approach?

Members indicated agreement.

That concludes our consideration of the petition from the EIS. We will write to the petitioners explaining the work undertaken by the committee and our future intentions with regard to class sizes.