Agenda item 3 is consideration of the committee's annual report 2003-04, which is before the committee in draft. Are members happy with the report or are there points that they want to add or change? The report is relatively factual.
I do not think that the Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Bill, which is covered in paragraph 4, is given enough prominence. We spent the majority of our time on that bill, but people would not know that from reading the annual report. We should say that that item occupied most of our time in the past year.
We could state that the committee's time was dominated by the bill. Are there any other points?
The report reads as a list of activities. People might find the report more useful if more value judgments were made and it was more of a commentary. Our background work on the Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Bill and pre-legislative work during visits were extremely helpful. That is not mentioned in the report and it probably should be. By the time that we started on the bill itself, there was a foundation.
We hit the ground running, as it were.
Yes. That information would probably be helpful for anyone who is reading the report and wants to learn for the future. The report is descriptive and we could probably add such detail on a variety of issues, but we are working to a tight time scale. That issue should probably be flagged up for a future report, rather than included as commentary just now; it is an obvious point that arose from our work on the bill.
We could add that observation.
On the point about the Scottish Youth Parliament in the first paragraph, I am not sure whether we took oral evidence.
We have had a number of engagements, of various sorts, with the Scottish Youth Parliament. I believe that we have invited representatives to meet us. An invitation was issued to come with us to New Lanark.
I would not say that that counted as an evidence-taking session.
You are quite right.
We have done a lot of work on our child protection inquiry. Perhaps, after we have dealt with the next agenda item, we might be able to put something more useful and up to date into the report.
There is a time constraint on this process. We have to get the report finished quite quickly. As your comments have been fairly uncontroversial, would you remit authority to me to finalise the wording with the clerks in the light of those comments?
There is a standard format for these things, is there not?
Yes. I do not know whether the space that we have is limited, but I am sure that we can take up two pages.
In the part of the report towards the end that deals with meetings in private and in public we should point out that we considered much of our draft report on the Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Bill in public. We could highlight that as an example of what we have done differently that might be beneficial to other committees.
That is a good point. You are on form today, Fiona.
I will start to flag soon.
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Procedures Committee Inquiry