Official Report 224KB pdf
Item 4 on the agenda is the budget process for 2003-04. The committee has a report from Frank McAveety, which provides further information on areas of spending that the committee identified at its meeting on 26 February. The report is essentially for the information of members. It will assist the committee when it considers the Executive's annual expenditure review in April. Are there questions or comments on the report?
I thank Frank McAveety and the clerks for their excellent work in producing the report so quickly and in such detail. I draw the committee's attention to paragraph 2.2 on page 7 of the report. On the ring fencing or earmarking of funds, it states:
That is a good point. I commend the report, which addresses the major issues. The reporter has done a good job—I am sure that it is all his own work. The issue of ring fencing is important, as is the matter of the excellence fund allocations. A related matter is the difficulty that schools regularly report that they face arising from the fact that various pots of money come to them in various ways at various times. The situation is such that there is almost no such thing as a school budget but instead lots of little budgets that must be juggled. I have been told again and again that schools' ability to plan is diminished considerably because they do not know what resources will be available to them at any given time and because they have to make special arrangements in special budgets. Under the excellence fund, the division of some of the grants into categories such as salaries and travel means that the money is not used effectively. In the long term, ring fencing affects schools' ability to plan ahead, particularly given the substantial level of devolved management in schools. We should think about that as we gather evidence and talk to head teachers about the difficulties that they face in that regard.
The document shows how the national institutions are performing and there is useful information on the funds that are coming from the Executive and elsewhere.
I thank committee members for those questions. Following the good work that was done by Arthur Midwinter and Stephen Herbert, the clerks and I tried to organise the information under the key points in the executive summary. Any elegance that the report might have was added at that point.
I thank Frank McAveety and his partners for the report, which provides details about the global sums for special educational needs that are provided through specific grants and through local authority grant-aided expenditure. Questions need to be asked about how the money is distributed. Does the money follow the youngster to the responsible local authority or does the extra money come only through a formula that does not reflect the needs of individual pupils and authorities? How is SEN provision assessed? How much money is spent? Who decides how much is spent? On what basis are the allocations made? We need to probe those questions a wee bit further.
I agree with Mike Russell that we need to seek clarification on ring fencing. My local education authority has also told me that it has difficulties juggling pots of money that cannot be connected. It would be useful to examine the flexibility of different funding streams.
I would like to tease out how extra money for rural areas is allocated and spent, which is an issue that came out of our report on our inquiry into Scottish Borders Council. It appeared that money that was allocated to the council for extra nursery teachers might have been used for other purposes. We also need to try to grasp how the rural dimension is factored into the funding of education budgets. Over the past year, that aspect of our work has been a source of concern both to local people and to the committee.
Another factor that needs to be taken into consideration is the impact of school transport on rural education budgets.
Yes, but my point is that there are large rural areas that receive no additional funding. In my constituency, for example, 80 per cent of the local authority's landmass is considered to be rural. However, even though the local authority faces all the additional problems of a rural area, it receives none of the additional funding. That issue continues to raise its head at every opportunity.
The whole issue of how GAE relates to rural areas is worthy of examination. There is a school of thought that problems that local authorities in rural areas encounter are due to the large number of schools with small rolls. GAE is apparently calculated on the basis of the number of pupils and does not take into account the number of teachers. For that reason, those local authorities are disadvantaged. Another school of thought, which emanates from the Scottish Executive, says that that issue is taken into account when GAE is calculated and that the problem has its origins in the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. The committee would do a useful public service if it pressed that issue when taking evidence and sought further explanation from COSLA and ministers on exactly what formula is in operation. Are there a number of formulae of which we need to be aware in order to give clear answers to the public, who are concerned about the issue?
That would help our understanding of the Executive's priorities, not just in the various areas and levels of funding, but in how it funds services in rural and urban areas where there are significant levels of disadvantage, to which budgets are effectively skewed. That dimension adds to the wider question of how we target both rurality and disadvantage.
I might usefully have mentioned this issue before Frank McAveety made his excellent report, although it is still worth taking into account. Expenditure on social work training is forecast to rise by 20.5 per cent in real terms. That is a considerable increase and it would be useful to have some detail about it. It comes under the budget heading "Education and Children", so the money is presumably going into children's services. Does it relate to social work input into new community schools, to the development of sure start Scotland or to the new Scottish Commission for the Regulation of Care? There will be an additional requirement for the registration and inspection of child care facilities under the Regulation of Care (Scotland) Act 2001.
I am sure that Frank McAveety, Stephen Herbert, Susan Duffy, Ian Cowan and everyone else will be able get the relevant information for us in advance of the discussions on the budget in April.
I have one further point to raise. On page 7 of the report, under the heading "School rolls and School Buildings", the
That concludes discussion on the issue and we move now into private session.
Meeting continued in private until 16:07.
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