Chamber and committees

That would be really useful.

I will bundle up where I have been going with these questions. The Climate Ready Clyde report that I mentioned was produced largely by the university but for the local authorities. Part of what the local authorities were trying to get at was their belief, which I share, that they need more fiscal autonomy to deal with the consequences of climate change. Obviously, extreme weather will do a lot of the damage to infrastructure for which councils are responsible.

We have discussed council tax reform at length previously, so I will not get into that, but I would be interested in the Scottish Government’s position in principle on the extent to which local authorities are able to raise their own revenue. At the moment, council tax is about 20 per cent of local authority budgets; non-domestic rates are nominally a local tax but, in practice, they are not—councils have almost no discretion over them whatsoever. Does the Scottish Government think that the current balance is right, or would you like to see local authorities raise a far greater share of their budgets directly?

The norm across Europe is that municipalities raise a majority of their own budgets; Scotland is an outlier in that regard. Does the Government have a direction of travel with regard to the degree of fiscal autonomy that you want councils to have? Should they be raising the majority of their budgets themselves?

I would strongly support that. If you can provide the committee with further detail on the Government’s engagement with the councils on pension funds being used for capital investment, in particular, I would certainly find that beneficial, and I imagine that other members would, too.

I have no further supplementary questions. That covers it.

Absolutely. That was really useful.

Perhaps I can press you just a bit further. I have sat on this and similar committees for nine years now and, in that time, really compelling cases have been made to us for all the things that teachers need to be trained in but which they are not being trained in. A couple of times in that period, the committee has done inquiries on initial teacher education, and it has, quite often, come to the same conclusion that, with the best will in the world, and even with a full four-year degree course rather than the one-year postgraduate diploma in education, teachers cannot be trained in absolutely everything.

We are coming to the point that half of all children in Scotland have some kind of additional support need. I am not saying that they are all complex needs—they can vary from their being exceptionally gifted or having English as a second language to the kind of complex needs that your daughter has. Some of the feedback that we get is that, realistically, not every teacher can be trained in everything, and what is really needed is more specialist staff in schools. In your view, what is the balance between trying to train every classroom teacher and every classroom assistant and having more specialist staff on hand in every school?

That is really useful—thank you.

I would like to start with Kate Sanger. You mentioned that a lot of teachers and school staff end up using restraint and seclusion because they feel that they have no other option. If I picked you up right, in your view, that is because they have not been trained and supported to understand what the other options are.

Will you expand on that a bit and explain what other approaches could be taken that would mean that the instances in which restraint might be inevitable could be reduced to almost zero? What is it that teachers and other school support staff are not being supported and trained to do?

That is great. I am conscious of the time. I ask Simon Webster to set out Enable’s position on the positive alternatives to restraint and seclusion. What can teachers and school staff be trained and supported to do that would avoid restraint and seclusion?

It would be quite formal, rather than the softer approach that you are indicating.

That is helpful, specifically what you said about the report. It points to the wider issue that you indicated: there is a lot of detail about how the meeting should take place but there is more ambiguity about what impact it will have on the rest of the process. Would it be helpful for the legislation to go into further detail about the purpose of the report and what it can and cannot be used for?

Some of what you said makes me think that we need amendments to clarify what the point of the process is and what the product is. There is a tension between that and your point about the preference for an informal approach, because the more detail we put in legislation, the harder it is to take an informal approach.

Thank you, convener—I was almost going to say good afternoon; it feels like that, but it is still morning, so, good morning all.

I want to tease out some issues. There has been quite a lot of consensus this morning, but in the SCRA’s written submission there were definitely points of difference. In particular, a lot of other organisations have welcomed the enhanced role for the reporter, but the SCRA flagged up issues to do with power imbalance.

We have touched on that a little bit already, but perhaps Alistair Hogg could draw out some of those concerns for us.