Education Committee, 13 Dec 2006

Meeting date: Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Official Report 204KB pdf

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Petitions

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Secondary Schools (Lockers) (PE825)

The Public Petitions Committee referred to us petition PE825 from Alana Watson on behalf of the Rosshall academy students council, which calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Executive to ensure that every Scottish secondary school provides lockers for pupils.

The recommended course of action is that we ask the Scottish Parliament information centre to prepare a briefing paper for members and that we invite the petitioner to give oral evidence in the new year. Do members agree with that proposal?

I have just one point. The research seems to be focused on the practice of other countries. It would be helpful if the briefing also included contracted requirements for new build and refurbished schools. Model contracts exist, and it would be useful to see what is currently specified in such contracts and whether, if we so chose, it would be reasonable to include the provision of lockers.

I am sure that we can extend the brief to ensure that it includes current practice in Scotland as well as in other countries.

The Executive cannot ensure that every secondary school provides lockers for pupils, as that is not its role. The issue is one of guidance, in particular, as Fiona Hyslop said, on new schools. It might be considerably more difficult to ensure that every child gets access to a locker in existing schools.

I note your comment Elaine, but that will be a consideration for the petitioner if we agree to invite them to give evidence.

If no one else has anything to say, the committee will agree to call for oral evidence from the petitioner and a report from SPICe on current practice both here and abroad.

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Children's Services (Special Needs) (PE853)<br />Rural Schools (Closure) (PE872)

We move on to petitions PE853 and PE872, which have been previously considered by the committee. We took evidence from Ken Venters and Alexander Longmuir on 13 September. Following the evidence session, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities issued best practice guidance on school estate management. We have invited Mr Venters and Mr Longmuir to comment on the guidance, and we have received their comments.

Do members want to say anything about those comments?

In view of the fact that there has been a change of minister and the petitioners have not had a chance to meet the new Minister for Education and Young People yet, it might be worth waiting until they have had the opportunity to meet him.

I do not have a copy of the e-mail from Mr Longmuir with me, but my understanding, from another e-mail that he sent last night, is that there were a couple of issues other than the guidance that he wanted an answer from COSLA on. Would it be possible for the committee to pursue those two issues?

I think that we should treat the two petitions separately. On the response to petition PE853 on special needs, it is apparent that COSLA's good practice guide—if it can be called that—does not refer to the particular issues. There is wider catchment, and there are many other implications, so it looks as if there is no progress on that. We should hear from the minister about how special needs schools should be dealt with.

On petition PE872, which deals with presumption, I am a bit concerned that we have not had a response from COSLA on the 60 per cent rule. We were going to contact Audit Scotland and Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education as well, and it might be helpful to have their responses on the 60 per cent rule, which is obviously an important trigger. Reading COSLA's best practice guidance, I can see huge contradictions between it and what the minister was saying on trigger points. The minister also said that informal consultation is not particularly useful, but it comes out in COSLA's best practice guidance.

We need to wait for the petitioners to meet the minister, and we need to speak to him as a new minister to find out his views. There are also outstanding bits of information that we have yet to receive from HMIE and Audit Scotland, unless we have received them and they have not been circulated.

The answer is that we have not received that information.

I echo the points that have been made. This is a difficult issue, and I think that the committee is reluctant to go any further than the Executive's position, which is that this is a matter for local accountability and local decision making. People must have confidence in that local decision making, however, and the guidance should be followed. We seem to be getting closer to that position, but without actually getting there.

We raised a number of questions on the previous occasion, and Mr Longmuir pointed out that we did not have answers to them. In particular, why is COSLA not meeting the Scottish rural schools network to discuss the matter? It strikes me that, if we are ever to have a meeting of minds on the matter, it will not happen if we do not talk to one other. It should not be a matter of demanding anything from COSLA, though—I suggest that we just send a polite letter, inquiring whether, having said that it would make contact with the rural schools network, it will do so.

I think that we should keep Mr Longmuir's petition open. We have a new Minister for Education and Young People, and the guidance—the update from the minister and the guidance from COSLA—has yet to be fully tried and tested. We should keep the petition open while that is happening.

The response that we got on PE853, on special schools, refers to the question that I asked. It says:

"The point raised by Mr Macintosh implies that the petition focuses on one school."

I do not have the relevant Official Report with me. It is not so much a matter of the petition being about one school; rather, the committee did not have any evidence that there was a problem affecting special needs schools. I am not sure what Fiona Hyslop wants to ask the minister, although I have no problem about asking the minister anything. I personally cannot imagine any local authority taking a decision to close a special needs school without being extremely careful about how it goes about the process.

We are also talking about guidance for closing schools in general. There is obviously an issue about the closure of rural schools, but I am not aware of any issue about the closure of special schools. I have no evidence that there is a problem, that it is happening on any kind of scale—or at all—in our country, or that it is happening in any way that would cause alarm. I stress that that is a personal impression. In my area, we are about to build a brand new special needs school.

If the petitioner cannot present the evidence on the matter, we should perhaps ask SPICe or somebody to give us more evidence so that we can decide whether it is worth pursuing the matter. I do not see it as a special case as much as part of the bigger picture, which is about how schools are closed—or not closed—generally and how local demand is responded to.

Fiona Hyslop can correct me if I am wrong, but I understood that she was suggesting that we should seek information from the minister, and possibly from COSLA, on whether or not the guidance should cover any additional factors that could be taken into account with regard to the wider issues. Special schools have wider catchment areas than ordinary schools. Should any additional guidance be given in those circumstances, above and beyond the general guidance on school closures? I am not sure whether that is exactly the point.

I know about the experience of Carronhill school in Stonehaven and St Andrew's school in Aberdeenshire. The problem is that there is not a geographical catchment area for such schools as there is for a normal rural school. There is normally an identifiable group of people who should be consulted. There is an issue around how well consultation happens in any case. It is true that there is not an issue of volume—of the number of special needs schools that are closing.

However, while some schools are being closed, the new schools that are being built can often be part of the main stream. The situation is especially severe for parents of children with special needs, particularly if they have not yet started to attend the school. I have constituency cases where, if consultation is being undertaken, it is with only the parents of the children who are currently attending the special needs school. The change might usually be phased, but the parents who are most directly impacted can include those who are further away. Their children might be at nursery school, perhaps not in the same town but somewhere else in the county. It might be even more difficult to reach those parents.

I have read COSLA's good practice guide, which reads a bit like guidance on how to close a school and get away with it. At some point, I would like to hear the minister's view on that. The previous minister refused to endorse COSLA's guidance. The good practice guide contains nothing particular about special schools, although they have a different nature and there is evidence that they need to be addressed specifically. If COSLA's guidance addressed that issue, I would be happy but, unfortunately, it does not address it at all, so we must explore the matter further.

To clarify, I do not doubt that there are or could be special circumstances. My expectation is that any proposed closure of a special school would be treated with particular care. My point was that, as the Scottish Parliament, we need to look at the national picture. The closure of rural schools is an issue that affects communities nationally and so we should have a view on it. We obviously want to have confidence in all the systems and guidance. My point was that I am not aware of a national issue with special schools, although there are specific local issues about closures. Any proposal for closure of a special school that causes alarm and concern among parents is something to be concerned about, but I am trying to put the matter in the national context and in the context of our remit as a committee.

I think I know what you are getting at.

I hear what Ken Macintosh says, but, although the closure of special schools may not be a national issue in the same way as the closure of rural schools is, there is nevertheless an issue of reduced choice for parents. Fiona Hyslop is right to mention parents whose children have not yet entered the school system, but who in the future will be limited in their choices. We should broaden the consultation process to ensure that everyone in the community is involved. We should remember that special school areas cross over local authority boundaries and that there are clusters of special schools. There are issues that need to be addressed.

I agree with Elaine Murray that our consideration of the petitions should be continued, at least until we have a meeting with the minister. We need further thought on the issue of consultation papers. The issues could easily be a matter for our legacy paper in due course.

I am afraid that it is inevitable that, whatever the committee decides on the petitions, at some point, the future committee will have further petitions on the subject.

Let us do something about the issue, then.

Whatever we decide to do on the petitions, the issue will never be closed. The committee has a practice of taking an annual update from ministers on school closure policy. We may wish to suggest in our legacy paper that the future committee continues that practice.

I suggest that we write to the minister to ask whether he has any further comments on the COSLA guidance, taking account of the views that have been expressed, and, in particular, whether he considers that additional guidance needs to be given on steps that local authorities should take when considering the possible closure of special schools. We should also write to COSLA to ask whether it has similar thoughts on the closure of special schools and whether it will, as it previously said it would, meet with the Scottish rural schools network to discuss the guidance.

We should also ask COSLA for its view on the 60 per cent rule. We are awaiting responses on that from COSLA and HMIE.

We will chase up the responses on that issue.

Do members agree to those suggestions?

Members indicated agreement.