Education Committee, 27 Oct 2004

Meeting date: Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Official Report 187KB pdf

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Youth Organisations

Welcome to this meeting of the Education Committee. I welcome back Fiona Hyslop after her maternity leave. I apologise for the slightly late start. I had a bit of a wander around the building because, although I was in this room last night, I could not find it again this morning—there was a slight geographical problem. I ask everyone to ensure that their mobile telephones and pagers are turned off.

I just want to offer the apologies of Wendy Alexander, who is stuck on a train, and Ken Macintosh, who I think might be having a baby today.

He might be having a baby today?

It is due today.

The Education Committee membership has novel and innovative procedures.

Item 1 is on youth organisations, which we are considering slightly belatedly. Members will recall that we took evidence last year and wrote to the Minister for Education and Young People in November. However, there was some sort of hiccup and I got a response only in August; that reply is now before the committee. We have to cast our minds back to the evidence that we took, but my recollection is that we dealt with a number of themes relating to support for volunteers, adequate resourcing of training and things of that kind. I confess that when I first read the minister's letter I did not make the connection between it and the letter that we sent him. Although the response takes on board some of the points that were raised in the evidence, I am not sure that it deals with the central point about the need for more training and support.

The evidence that we had from Girlguiding Scotland indicated that, although the guides are the biggest youth organisation in Scotland, if not the world, they have difficulty in dealing fully with the number of people who want to become members of the guide movement, because of problems with training and the resources that go into it. We heard similar evidence from the Scout Association and others. I seek comments on the minister's response.

I was similarly disappointed with the response, which seems to focus on volunteering in general rather than on volunteering in relation to youth organisations.

The minister mentions the volunteering strategy, which was announced in May and which, in essence, he hopes will provide

"quality volunteering opportunities, and higher standards of volunteer management."

However, nowhere in the response does the Executive address the question of making it easier for people to offer their services as volunteers. Later this morning, we will get an indication of how it is becoming harder to do so. That issue needs to be addressed.

The minister made a comment about each Executive department dealing with the voluntary sector in its area. There does not appear to be a joined-up approach in the Executive; there appears to be a silo mentality. I cannot tell from the minister's response, but there might be a plethora of approaches, depending on the department in question, when there really should be a unified approach throughout the Executive, as the convener's letter suggested.

On a related point, the minister mentions the young people and families unified fund, in response to the evidence from the Scout Association that its funding had been cut arbitrarily, but he does not say that the scouts are eligible for that funding. There are more questions than answers in the minister's response.

Members might want to comment further first, but I am minded to suggest that the committee authorises me to meet with YouthLink Scotland so that I can report on its view of the issues. One difficulty that arose previously—assuming that I have not got the situation entirely wrong—is that, although the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations has an umbrella role for the voluntary sector generally, youth organisations do not appear to be 100 per cent plugged into that.

I am not entirely sure how YouthLink, which itself is an umbrella organisation for youth organisations, relates to the SCVO, the volunteer bureaux and so on. We tend to focus a wee bit more on other sorts of voluntary groups, so it might be worth getting a bit more of a feel of how YouthLink operates and seeing whether there are other issues that we can take back to the minister.

Another issue, which we might pick up on later in the agenda, is the minister's slightly irrelevant and illogical response to our point about Disclosure Scotland. Obviously, a criminal records check shows a person's criminal record at the date that the check is done, which means that it cannot simply be transferred to another local authority later on. However, that is equally the case if a person stays in their post in the same authority. What the minister says is not an argument for not looking at ways of getting round the problem of multiple applications. There must be a way of dating an initial check or a subsequent one that would ensure that there was no need to go back to the beginning. The minister's response did not address the issue that we raised.

We might be able to get a more satisfactory angle on that issue after we have considered the later item on the agenda.

I was interested to note that the minister's response seems to make no mention of the Scottish Executive voluntary issues unit. The point is how we join up the thinking of all the Executive departments. I understand that volunteering should be mainstreamed within all the different portfolios, but there must also be co-ordination between them.

Secondly, the minister's letter is dated 26 August 2004 and I would have expected that, by that time, he would have been able to give us a bit more information on the youth strategy consultation than he did.

My third point is one that I have raised previously about public-private partnership contracts. The minister's response suggests that the Executive is washing its hands of PPP contracts that limit the community use of educational buildings. We know from evidence from the scouts and others that certain PPP contracts prohibit youth organisations from using school buildings. The Executive says that that situation is within the control of education authorities. However, the Executive has produced a model PPP contract and it is heavily involved, as we know from the East Lothian example, in the development of PPP contracts. We should pursue that issue to see whether the Executive can be a bit more forthcoming about it, rather than washing its hands of it.

We could pursue information on that point.

It seems to me that volunteering is an area of growing significance and I support Adam Ingram's desire for a co-ordinated, unified approach. I wonder whether you might feel able, convener, to write to the minister again just to make that simple but important point.

Is there anything else on that? I am looking for a way forward here. The emphasis is not on the voluntary sector generally but on youth organisations in particular, because there are specific issues there. Is the committee happy for the deputy convener and me to meet YouthLink Scotland to explore the issues? We could get more detail on the impact of funding and so on and raise issues that members have raised. We could then report to the committee with a view to asking for a further response from the minister. Would that be a reasonable way of pursuing the matter?

There was obviously a delay in the minister's reply to our initial letter, so I suggest that, to keep up the pace and the pressure, we stress to the minister the importance that we attach to the issues and encourage him to respond rapidly. The delay in dealing with the issues does not give a particularly good signal to all the people who gave evidence to us.

That is right. However, we still want to be reasonably clear about and focused on the issues that we want to progress. I am not all that happy with the minister's response, which is not four-square with what we asked him. However, with regard to your suggestion, rather than just getting an update from the minister, I want to hear about movement on the issues. An announcement on the youth strategy is expected later this year or early next year, so I would hope that the consultation is reasonably well on. We need to develop a clearer focus of what is currently bothering the youth organisations; we need to have a clearer view of the issue before we return to it. I hope that we can meet representatives of those organisations within the next couple of weeks and then take it from there. Would that be agreeable?

Members indicated agreement.