Audit Committee,

Meeting date: Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Official Report 185KB pdf

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Teaching Profession

I bring the meeting to order and welcome members of the public and press back to the public part of the eighth meeting of the Audit Committee in 2006. I remind everyone to turn off their mobile phones and pagers so that they do not interfere with the public address system. We have a busy and interesting programme for the rest of the meeting. I welcome our witnesses for the next item, whom I will introduce formally when we reach it.

This item is a briefing from Audit Scotland on its report "A mid-term report: A first stage review of the cost and implementation of the teachers' agreement A Teaching Profession for the 21st Century", which is a mid-term report as opposed to a baseline report. Our witnesses for this item are an Audit Scotland team led by Caroline Gardner, the deputy auditor general.

The joint report by the Auditor General for Scotland and the Accounts Commission on the implementation of the teachers agreement was published last week. The teachers agreement was the tripartite agreement reached in 2001 between the Scottish Executive, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and the teachers organisations following the publication in 2000 of the report of the committee of inquiry into professional conditions of service for teachers, which is commonly known as the McCrone report.

The teachers agreement set out to revitalise the teaching profession in Scotland through a number of different initiatives: a 23 per cent pay increase for all teachers; a simplified career and salary structure; the creation of a new status of chartered teacher; and a greater emphasis on continuing professional development. The agreement has benefited many classroom teachers, but challenges remain. I will outline for the committee at this stage the report's five main findings.

First, the teacher induction scheme has successfully addressed the weaknesses in the previous support and induction arrangements, and the quality and variety of the CPD that is available to teachers have also improved under the agreement. Before the agreement, the McCrone committee had noted that induction and support for newly qualified teachers were "little short of scandalous". Teachers were moving from school to school with little support and almost one in three was leaving the profession before they had effectively begun their career.

The agreement introduced a guaranteed one-year placement for all new teachers, with support from a more experienced teacher and dedicated time to develop their skills. That has led to improved entry rates from university into probation and increased retention rates during the probationer period. Probationers are now achieving full registration much more quickly than they did previously.

The agreement recognised that CPD is central to improving teaching practice and learning. The agreement introduced CPD plans agreed between teachers and their managers; the requirement for proper CPD records; and an additional 35 hours of contracted CPD each year. Teachers are generally positive about those changes, which they regard as relevant and helping them to improve their teaching and learning.

Secondly, the agreement has improved terms and conditions for classroom teachers, but it has contributed to increased workloads for head teachers. The McCrone committee recognised that competitive salaries were needed to recruit and retain high-quality graduates for the teaching profession. The pay increase of 23 per cent over three years has secured stable industrial relations and brought entry-level pay into line with average graduate starting pay. Satisfaction with pay is high among all teaching staff. At the same time, reductions in class contact time to provide classroom teachers with adequate opportunities for lesson preparation and marking have been achieved by recruiting an additional 1,753 teachers. The reduction in class contact time has generally been positive for classroom teachers, but it has contributed to an increased workload for head teachers.

Thirdly, more than 3,000 new support staff are now in place to reduce the administrative burden on teachers, but we found that the majority of teachers are not yet fully feeling the benefit of those appointments.

Fourthly, the introduction of the new four-tier career structure has been broadly positive in the primary sector, but it has reduced the number of opportunities available for career progression in the secondary sector by about 20 per cent. The chartered teacher scheme has not yet had the expected impact on the career structure for classroom teachers. Uptake of the scheme has been slow to date.

Overall, we found that the early good progress that has been made needs to be sustained and performance measurement arrangements need to be strengthened to demonstrate that value for money is being achieved for the £2.15 billion that has been invested so far. The agreement was designed to secure long-term change, not just for teachers but for Scotland as a whole. The Executive needs to work with councils to ensure that the changes not only deliver better terms and conditions for teachers, which they are doing, but lead to pupils getting the most from their school education. To do that, we think that the Executive and the other parties to the agreement need to agree a comprehensive set of measures against which to assess the cost and impact of the agreement. That should include straightforward things such as the impact on educational attainment; improvements in classroom practice; the quality of educational leadership; workload and skill mix; workforce morale; and recruitment and retention within the profession.

That is an outline of the report's findings. As usual, we will do our best to answer any questions that the committee may have.

Thank you for that briefing. I take this opportunity to welcome the Auditor General for Scotland to the meeting. He has been giving evidence to the Finance Committee. I thank him for managing to get here.

We can now ask questions of the Audit Scotland team who were responsible for the report. We will consider our reaction to the report later in the meeting. Do members have particular questions?

I notice that a milestone for the recruitment of support staff was 70 per cent achieved but not completed. The recruitment was set to be completed by April 6. Do you know whether that has happened?

Antony Clark will be able to give you more detail. That was the only one of the seven milestones that we found had not been hit. On the date on which we collected the evidence on which the report was based, that had not happened, but progress was being made. I am not sure whether we know any more than that.

We are not in a position to confirm that the milestone has been reached. However, in the returns that we receive from local authorities, they predicted that they would be in a position to recruit the additional support staff who were required. We have not audited those figures.

In paragraph 25 of the report, you say:

"Some local authorities have reported that they may find it difficult to achieve this milestone."

Do you think that those fears have been overcome?

It is difficult for us to say, because we have not audited the extent to which local authorities have recruited the number of support staff by which they were shy of the target. I would not place too much emphasis on the fact that some authorities reported that it might be difficult. Had we asked questions earlier in the implementation process, they might have said that other milestones would be difficult to reach.

If we assume that the milestone is reached, would that be of any help to head teachers, who seem to have extra burdens because of the system?

The question of the impact on head teachers is complicated. We found that one of the reasons why classroom teachers were not necessarily feeling the full effects of additional support staff was that those staff were working on whole-school tasks, rather than supporting individual classroom teachers. We might expect that to reduce the impact on head teachers, even given the overall effect that we found. The impact on head teachers seems primarily to be the result of the reduction in class contact time for classroom teachers. It is difficult to unpick the underlying causes of that. We suspect that it results from the fact that more teachers are going straight through their probationary period and becoming fully qualified more quickly, so that fewer teachers are available in the supply pool to cover short-term absences. Head teachers have no option but to cover some of those absences. Support for teachers to meet the classroom contact targets is one of the areas in which we think that the Executive and its partners need to do more work in future.

The report suggested that that might affect uptake of head teacher or deputy head teacher positions. Does that remain a worry?

The evidence to date is largely anecdotal. We do not have concrete evidence that there is a long-term impact on applications for headships. If there is an issue, it is partly a consequence of the introduction of the new career structure, which means that some staff are employed on conserved salaries. Arguably, that is eroding the differential between their remuneration and that of deputy heads and heads.

I am concerned that if the impact was more than anecdotal and became a serious issue, it might become necessary to increase the salaries of heads and deputy heads to attract more people into those positions, which would add to the overall cost of the McCrone settlement, or to put in place additional management, which would also add to costs. That point may be worthy of further exploration.

I have a number of questions. I am a little puzzled that we have seen headlines that suggest that the report is in any way negative, when we can take out of it phrases such as "stable industrial relations",

"improvements in recruitment and retention",

and better morale for teaching staff. If the settlement was not intended to achieve that, I do not know what it was intended to achieve. I will move on quickly to my questions.

My first question is about the increased workload for head teachers, which Caroline Gardner mentioned a couple of times in her brief presentation. To what extent is that reduced by the use of business managers? One complaint that is made to us frequently by head teachers is that they are being taken out of the education side of the job and are doing more administration. The use of business managers was intended to counter that problem.

My second question is on the new career structure, the introduction of which the report states

"has proved more challenging in the secondary sector."

Is that because the secondary sector had a more graduated career progression that is more difficult to flatten? What are the reasons for that?

Thirdly, the report suggests that if uptake for the chartered teacher scheme had been as expected, the costs of the agreement would have increased. What are the future projections for the costs of that scheme?

My final question is more general. The changes under the McCrone agreement were meant to introduce more flexibility into the structure of the teaching profession so that it could respond to future needs. Given that rolls are decreasing in some areas and increasing in others—in West Lothian, school populations are increasing—will the agreement give us the kind of flexibility within the profession to allow us to respond more quickly to such changes?

I should start off by saying that we always seek to get balanced coverage for our reports. Clearly, the way in which the media pick up our report is outwith our control, but I agree that the report identifies that the implementation of the agreement has been largely successful to date and that the challenges are in realising the wider benefits that were intended from the agreement.

I will answer the question on the chartered teacher scheme and I will ask Antony Clark to pick up the other points that were raised.

To date, take-up of the chartered teacher scheme has been lower than expected. That is for a range of reasons to do with the new structure of the profession and the fact that new teachers are markedly more enthusiastic about the scheme than longer-serving teachers have been. However, the analysis that we present shows that a number of teachers are now saying that they are interested in taking up the scheme in future. If that happens, there will be a significant financial impact because teachers who successfully become chartered are entitled to a quite substantial additional salary increment that continues for the remainder of their career.

As well as planning for that likely take-up, schools and education authorities also need to work through what role chartered teachers are expected to play in their schools. The scheme is designed not to give teachers a different sort of job but to give them a status. People should now be starting to think about what contribution they expect those teachers to make to the life of their school and to the profession more widely.

In a sense, what I have just said goes some way towards answering the question whether the agreement will deliver a more flexible profession for the future. Chartered teachers do not have a standard role, but the scheme may offer scope for developing specialist roles that can reflect local needs or emerging needs as those become apparent. In that way, we may be able to ensure that teachers deliver what the education system and individual schools need as we move into the future and as the scheme works through.

Antony Clark will answer the questions on the workload of head teachers and the career structure.

In our survey work, which we undertook with head teachers, deputes, classroom teachers and support staff, we received largely positive feedback from head teachers and deputes about the impact of support staff. Business managers appear to be making a difference in that they have removed some of the administrative and business activity burdens from head teachers. I think that we can be quite confident about that.

On the impact of the new career structure, it is right to point out that the previous secondary career structure was quite complicated as it had eight different layers. Gavin McCrone's committee identified that as a concern and proposed a streamlined five-tier structure. When the McCrone committee undertook research and consulted the profession on its proposed structure, it found a degree of dissatisfaction with the proposed loss of the old assistant principal teacher role. I think that some of the dissatisfaction that we found in our survey of secondary teachers was connected with the loss of that role, which had been quite well regarded by some within the teaching profession.

The issue is slightly complicated by the fact that two types of changes have been introduced. As well as the straightforward introduction of the new career structure, several local authorities have introduced a faculty model alongside that change. The faculty model was not part of the teachers agreement but was mentioned by the McCrone committee as a possible way forward for providing fewer, better leaders who could work across a range of different disciplines. The way in which some authorities have approached that change has caused local difficulties.

I want to ask about something that has become a bit of a postbag issue in my area. It relates to the move that will happen in August to a maximum of 22.5 hours a week of classroom contact for teachers. To fund that move and to find the teachers, the local authorities seem to have made cuts. The postbag issue for me is that, in some areas, visiting specialist teachers in primary schools, such as music and physical education teachers, have been cut to fund the measure. That brings me back to the wider picture and the perception among local authorities that the settlement was not fully funded, which is at variance with the Government's view that it was. Will you comment on that?

The report tracks the amount of funding that the Executive provided and the amount that local authorities spent. We found that, overall, the two figures were close—the amount that the local authorities reported was about £34 million less than the £2.4 billion that the Executive planned to make available. However, one area of uncertainty is the extent to which councils were expected to contribute to the deal through efficiency savings, primarily from the impact of falling rolls. As the report states, we could not unpick the exact contribution that local authorities made to the overall cost. It is possible that, in some areas, the issue may be leading to the sort of tensions that Eleanor Scott describes. In many ways, the issue is part of the next-step work that the Executive, the employers and the teaching profession need to do.

Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education is undertaking evaluation work on the implementation of the teachers agreement and will visit schools throughout the summer. HMIE is due to publish its report in September or October. It may be better placed than we are to talk about the sort of postbag issues that Eleanor Scott raises.

Might the issue impact more severely on rural areas, where the geography means that amalgamation of schools is not an option even if rolls fall?

It is certainly possible that the measure may have had a different impact in different places. It was always part of the agreement that local authorities would make a contribution through efficiency savings but, obviously, the authorities' various starting points may have made it easier or more difficult to generate the required efficiencies. We cannot go as far as to say that it would be more difficult for certain local authorities per se but, depending on the starting point and the amount of surplus capacity in schools, the scope for doing something about that is likely to have had an effect.

Can the effects of the move to 22.5 hours be seen now, or will we be hit with problems when the schools go back after the summer?

All the indications from the work that underpins the report are that people are planning well for that. A series of milestones has been passed in the right direction and progress has been made—it is not a falling-off-the-cliff target. However, that is not to say that tensions will not arise in some areas.

While we are on the subject, I have a couple of comments on what has been said so far. Mary Mulligan talked about the balance in the report. Anyone who has read it will know that it contains positives and negatives. One of the positives on which I would like to comment as convener of the Audit Committee is the close match between the costing assumptions and the actual spend, which is explained in detail in exhibit 6. It is good news that the Education Department's estimates for the costs of such a large spending project were generally on target. The committee has experience of other departments' spending targets being largely or even wildly off target. The committee should acknowledge that success. However, exhibit 6 shows some variation between the estimates and the actual costs. For example, the difference in the figures on salary conservation perhaps requires further explanation.

To pick up on Eleanor Scott's point, it strikes me that the total underspend of about £35 million is pretty close to the £37 million of expected efficiency gains. From what I understand, it is not possible to pin down the costs in individual local authorities, so we cannot tell whether the efficiency gains were achieved or whether the amount that was not spent was simply because the local authorities did not make efficiency gains. Local authorities had their grant cut by £37 million. Can you give us more detail on that? Is there any relationship between the underspend and the fact that the efficiency gains were not achieved?

We were not able to find any such relationship. We probed the area hard, particularly with the Executive, to try to understand how the cost estimates that were built up and the money that was spent during the implementation of the agreement fitted together. We considered the contributions that local authorities made and the efficiency savings that were assumed. Paragraphs 36 and 37 of our report show that we were not able to come up with a definitive answer. The £34 million is a small percentage of the overall sum. We were not able to pin down the shifts in the costs as much as we would have liked.

I acknowledge that the sum is a small proportion of £2.4 billion. My concern is more about the extent to which the other efficiency gains that are being talked about might be realised.

It is interesting that we have touched on the question of balance. The sentence in the report that neatly expresses that balance is:

"The Teachers' Agreement has brought about a number of benefits for the profession, but more work is required to demonstrate long-term outcomes and value for money."

Lengthy reports cannot always be summarised in such a way.

I will focus my questions on the two identified areas for improvement: demonstration of long-term outcomes and value for money. On outcomes, it has been suggested on a number of occasions—not just in recent weeks or months but going right back to when the agreement was first reached—that the agreement could or should have been used as a mechanism for driving forward reform. Was there, or is there, greater scope for that? Do you think that the outcome measures that your report said were absent but would be necessary in the future could act as drivers for reform?

The HMIE report will consider the wider areas of change that fall outwith the scope of the Audit Scotland report. What opportunities will there be for the work of Audit Scotland and the inspectorate to be drawn together, to give the Parliament and the public a rounded picture of what the agreement has secured?

Now is the time to start concentrating on some of the wider measures of what the agreement was intended to achieve. There were two important aspects of the agreement's objectives. One, which relates to teachers' salary levels, has clearly been achieved and we are starting to see its impact, with the new teachers coming into the profession and the climate of stable industrial relations. The other relates to children's experience in the classroom and their educational opportunities. It is time to put in place better outcome measures for that.

A moment ago, we talked about the close management of costs for the initiative. The effort that has been put into ensuring that it is well managed has to an extent limited what it has been possible to do in relation to wider questions. We are looking not for heavy-handed, bean-counting measures of what is going on but for measures of staff morale, which is one of the key areas that we considered; workload and skills mix; and recruitment and retention. Those things ought to be relatively straightforward to measure and can be matched with measures of attainment to give us a good picture of whether things are getting better or worse. Now is the time to address that.

You asked about the HMIE report. We have worked closely with the inspectorate over the past 18 months. We bring different skills and experience to the job. We are not education inspectors, so it would be hard for us to assess the difference in what is happening in the classroom. However, we have been able to apply some useful analytical skills to what has been spent and the way in which that process has been managed. HMIE's report is due out later this year and we hope that the two reports will complement each other and, if taken together, provide a rounded picture. It should be remembered that they are reporting before implementation has been completed—changes remain to be made in the future.

We have had tentative discussions with HMIE about the possibility of holding a joint conference to bring both sets of findings together so that people can see both sides of the coin.

I turn to value for money. You have identified that in excess of £2 billion of additional resource has gone into education spend to support the implementation of the McCrone agreement. You mentioned the estimation process. On what basis was the initial estimate of costs reached and how was the envelope of resources to fund the agreement identified? Where have the resources come from and what has been the opportunity cost of the additional investment? Could the same have been achieved for less?

Those are difficult questions for us to answer, especially the one about the opportunity cost. You would need to direct that question to the Executive if you want to explore the issue further.

In many ways, it is impossible to untangle value for money from the outcomes. The pay rise that teachers were awarded was significant, although it obviously included a catch-up element. If we want to assess whether the cost of that investment and the other changes that were made were worth it, we cannot disentangle that from consideration of whether pupils are having a better experience during their school lives and are coming out better equipped for their futures at the end of it. Such investment must be tied to clear measures of what we expect to improve. That is the bit of the jigsaw that we do not have yet.

I want to go back to exhibit 6 on funding, which shows a close match between the Executive's costings and what the authorities spent. Did the authorities have to plunder any departments to make up a funding shortfall?

There was always an assumption that local authorities would make some contribution themselves and that some efficiency savings would be made as a result of falling school rolls in many parts of Scotland. Antony Clark is better placed to answer on the detail of that.

As Caroline Gardner says, the figures that we have cited were based on assumptions that, throughout Scotland, local authorities would put in £50 million over the three years of the agreement and that efficiency savings would be made. They also include what one might call funny money that the Executive has provided. The teachers agreement must be viewed as part of the wider process of improving education in Scotland. For example, money is available to deal with ill-discipline in schools and for curriculum development.

If all members have asked their questions, I have a few to finish off. In your report, you say that the number of extra administrative and support staff who were recruited was 30 per cent short of the target and that the assumption that salary conservation costs—which I mentioned earlier—would fall out of the system within five years was an

"overly optimistic assessment as the financial returns from local authorities indicate that it is more likely that these costs will take 10 to 20 years to fall out of the system".

That is quite different from the assumptions that were made. Can you throw any light on why there has been such a large shortfall in the employment of administrative and support staff and why the assessment of what would happen with salary conservation costs was so out of kilter with what is happening?

I will answer the first question and Antony Clark will deal with the second. As you say, we identified a shortfall in achieving the target for the recruitment of support staff. That is continuing; the final milestone is due to be reached in August. We have identified three main reasons for that. The first is that it took some time to work out where support staff could best be used. Planning the tasks that they could do was a lengthy process. Secondly—and, in our view, rightly—some pilot initiatives were undertaken to ensure that the right staff were used for the right tasks. Those were evaluated before the initiative was rolled out more widely. Thirdly, consultation with the head teachers and teaching unions was important, but it took longer than expected to ensure that the fit of support staff in classrooms was such that there were the expected benefits and that problems were not created in the classroom. Those are the reasons for the shortfall.

They are not financial reasons.

No, they are very much to do with ensuring that the approach is well implemented and that support staff are in the right places.

Antony Clark will respond to the point about salary conservation costs.

The point has been made that the teachers agreement brought about a large-scale, complex process of change. Assumptions had to be made across a range of areas to determine the overall expenditure and the subheads within it. As the convener said, we point out in our report that the assumption about the speed at which salary conservation costs would fall out of the system appears to have been overly optimistic. Why that assumption was made is probably a question for the Executive.

Caroline Gardner talked about the recruitment of support staff. Was there an issue about the level of remuneration that was set for such staff?

I do not think that the matter came up in our work.

You said that the issue was not just financial measurement but measurement of staff morale, for example. To what extent could retrospective work be done? If the Executive takes up your recommendations, a number of measures will be brought in, but will that work have to start now—in other words, 2006 will be year zero—or can any matters be tracked back in time?

There is a mixed picture. Some aspects would be difficult to track back. For example, workforce morale would be difficult to measure in retrospect. In other areas it might be possible to construct measures or proxies. For example, there could be more analysis of recruitment and retention, to put in place a comparative baseline for the future.

I thank the team from Audit Scotland for giving us a briefing on the report. Under item 8 we will discuss the committee's response to the report. I am conscious that members of the press are present, so I should say that although that discussion will take place in private, we will ensure that our conclusions are communicated, so that members of the press can follow up their reports on today's meeting.