European Committee, 28 Jan 2003
Meeting date: Tuesday, January 28, 2003
Official Report
215KB pdf
Scottish Executive (Scrutiny)
Item 2 on the agenda is pre and post-council scrutiny. Please turn to page 4 for the table of recommendations. You will note from that that there are no post-council briefings for this meeting. We have the pre-council briefing and agenda for the education, youth and culture council and it is recommended that we note them.
I was particularly interested in item 5, on the internet twinning of schools. It is important to record the intention of providing 100 per cent funding for that project. That will be very helpful in rural areas of Scotland. I visited a school in my constituency with the Balearic Islands minister for education, and we were very impressed by the way in which young people are using the new technology and integrating it with language learning. We were terribly impressed that the children of Kilwinning Academy had produced a video in French of James Bond at Culzean Castle. They had also undertaken a drama immersion course in Spanish, which they recorded on video.
It is important for the Scottish Parliament to promote the initiatives that are clearly on the education, youth and culture council agenda. I wanted to note that proposal and I look forward to being kept in touch with developments in relation to that. Is it agreed that we note the information provided?
Members indicated agreement.
Colleagues will note that we have come to the end of our agreed timetable on the provision of information and we have a new timetable. The intention is that we should agree today how to proceed.
We have proposed three committee meetings at which we will undertake scrutiny, although we might have to add some committee time for the inquiry. Rather than receiving a lot of agendas from the Executive covering council meetings in May, June and possibly July, whose content is not all that meaningful to us now—there might only be a rough guess at what is on June's agenda—it might be more helpful to request for the meeting on 25 March any post-council briefing that we might want to scrutinise. We could also ask the Executive to highlight any key issues that might be coming up in the weeks when we will not be meeting in case there is anything that we want to do about them.
Are we agreed that we will do a limited scrutiny at the meeting on 25 March? Other than that are we agreed on the timetable that we have appended?
Members indicated agreement.