Education, Culture and Sport Committee, 28 Sep 1999

Meeting date: Tuesday, September 28, 1999

Official Report 211KB pdf

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Future Meetings

The next item is the programme for future meetings. Do you want to introduce this part, Gillian?

All members of the committee probably know that the various parties in the Scottish Joint Negotiating Committee for Teaching Staff in School Education have been invited to the next meeting. Members also wanted to take evidence on the bill and, because there will be limited time for that, I have written to all the organisations that were identified, asking them for written submissions. When they have been received, I will circulate them and the committee can decide who it wants to take evidence from.

What about the provisional programme for future meetings?

The only firmly agreed item is that the committee wanted to invite Mrs Brankin. We hope that she will be able to attend on 9 November.

We will circulate the provisional dates for future meetings as soon as we have them, so that members know what is happening and can decide their diary. Members will remember that we agreed at our previous meeting that the extra meeting would be rotated so as to ensure that it did not clash every time, as it has for Mike Russell this afternoon.

We will give as much notice as possible. If the provisional dates cause any problems, members should let me know as quickly as possible. We will try to juggle the programme to accommodate as many people as possible.

At our previous meeting, it was suggested that we visit community schools. I suggest that we do that in the first week after the recess and that we break into groups of three or four and visit a number of community schools, rather than 11 of us—plus whoever—all going to the same one and overwhelming it.

I agree with that. My only amendment would be to suggest, as I did at our previous meeting, that we do not visit just community schools. It may benefit us to visit other types of school.

I agree. I also want to ensure that when we visit community schools we do not speak just to teachers.

That is very important. The nature of community schools is that more than just teachers are involved. We want to get the views of all those involved, even if that means hearing about the difficulties. That would be just as useful as hearing how well the schools are working.

It is important that we go in to find out what is happening and what the problems are, for example, with the multi-agency approach to working. It is early days for many community schools and we want to see things as they are.

Is everyone happy with that? Okay. Thank you for your attendance.

Meeting closed at 15:42.