Jackie Baillie’s written questions to Education Secretary peg out boundaries for Argyll’s school closure proposals

Dumbarton’s MSP, Jackie Baillie, recently put down a series of five written questions to Education Secretary, Michael Russell.

This is something of a ‘watch and learn’ operation and is valuable for its strategic intelligence as  well as for the information the questions produced.

These deceptively simple questions are forensically targeted on a series of key areas of manoeuvre in which Aryll and Bute Council has shown marked interest. The answers they produced then establish the formal boundaries for such manoeuvres.

Written Question No 1: 20 January 2011

Jackie Baillie (Dumbarton) (Lab): To ask the Scottish Executive what the education funding allocation for Argyll and Bute Council will be for 2011-12 if it complies with the conditions of the concordat, also expressed as a percentage of its budget.

Mr Michael Russell : Local authorities receive funding from the Scottish Government in the form of a block grant. There is no education funding allocation. It is for each local authority to deploy the total financial resources available to it on the basis of local needs and priorities, its statutory obligations and the jointly agreed set of national and local priorities including the Scottish Government’s key strategic objectives. Argyll and Bute Council’s provisional allocation for 2011-12 is £220.059m if it signs up to the terms of the financial package by 28 February.

Written Question No 2: 20 January 2011           

Jackie Baillie (Dumbarton) (Lab): To ask the Scottish Executive  what the education funding allocation will be for Argyll and Bute Council for 2011-12 if it breaches the conditions of the concordat by either decreasing teacher numbers or increasing teacher pupil ratios in primary 1 to 3, also expressed as a percentage of its budget.

Mr Michael Russell : I refer the member to the answer to question S3W-38425 (above)  on 20 January 2011 with regard to there being no education funding allocation. All answers to written PQs are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/Apps2/Business/PQA/Default.aspx

Argyll and Bute Council’s provisional allocation for 2011-12 is £220.059m if it signs up to the terms of the financial package by 28 February. If it does not sign up by 28 February it will receive £211.981m, £8.078m less.

Written Question No 3: 20 January 2011           

Jackie Baillie (Dumbarton) (Lab): To ask the Scottish Executive  whether there will be an impact on a local authority’s education funding allocation if it decreases teacher numbers or increases teacher pupil ratios in primary 1 to 3 in October 2011 and, if so, what that impact will be.

Mr Michael Russell : The Scottish Government has made clear that for councils to access the full amount of the financial package, it will require each local authority to agree formally to the full list of commitments contained within the package.

Each local authority Leader has been asked to write to the Scottish Government, by 28 February 2011 at the latest, to provide a formal assurance that the budget approved by the council includes provision to deliver all the specified commitments agreed. If not, the revenue funding available to the councils concerned will be reduced by an average of 6.4%, rather than 2.6%.

Written Question No 4: 21 January 2011

Jackie Baillie (Dumbarton) (Lab): To ask the Scottish Executive when the statistics for local authority teaching posts and teacher pupil ratios for primary 1 to 3 are collected.

Mr Michael Russell : Teacher and pupil census data are gathered during the autumn term each year. The resulting statistical bulletins were published on 27 November in 2009 and on 1 December in 2010.

Written Question No 5: 21 January 2011

Jackie Baillie (Dumbarton) (Lab): To ask the Scottish Executive what procedures must be followed by a local authority in the event of the proposed closure of a pre-5 unit under the management of its education authority.

Mr Adam Ingram : There are legal obligations on local authorities to provide pre-school education and these are set out in the Standards in Scotland’s Schools etc, Act 2000.

When proposing the closure of any school, including a school based nursery, local authorities must undertake a consultation using the updated and robust process set out in the Schools (Consultation) (Scotland) Act 2010.

The background

Some of the questions refer to a concordat. This is a specific agreement forged between the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) and the Scottish Government where, in exchange for the councils’ agreement to freeze Council Tax for a further year, the Government has settled for lower cuts to public spending than it would otherwise have imposed.

The corcordat also carries conditions, several of which are designed to protect the quality of education provision. This is currently a local authority responsibility, although there is a growing body of thought that would like to see it under central government.

These conditions require local authorities who sign up to the concordat to maintain the number of teachers they currently employ and to maintain current teacher:pupil ratios for Primary 1.3 classes.

Councils who sign up to the concordat by 28th February 2011 will receive an average cut to their annual revenue grant of 2.54%. Those who do not will see their grant cut by 6.4%.

Pegging out the foreground

Jackie Baillie’s first three questions progressively establish:

• that there is no set percentage of its revenue grant that each council must spend on education – they make their own allocations; and that Argyll’s provisional allocation for 2011-12 is £220.059m, assuming it signs up to the corcordat
• that if it does not sign up to concordat, it will lose a further £8.078 million

Argyll and Bute Council, through an embarrassing blend of ineptitude and negligence, has already incurred the biggest cut to its grant of any Scottish local authority – 4.9%, with an additional and avoidable loss of almost £6 million. And that assumes that it signs up to the concordat.

There is already a high degree of agitation across Argyll on this matter, with some fearful consequences to come in paying for the further £6million, which doubled the area’s cut.

With the council now nationally discredited and internally distrusted, it is improbable that the council would do anything other than sigh up to the concordat and stick to its conditions. But before the huge budget boob became known the council did have other intentions

HenceJackie Baillie’s fourth question.

This establishes that post-agreement breaches of the concordat’s conditions will produce a cut of 6.4%.

A delay of three weeks to improve a deeply flawed set of 25 school closure proposals, which later had to be withdrawn from statutory public consultation, saw the cpnckl shift the date f the planned closures from the end of the summer term in June 2011, to the middle of the autumn term 2011, after the traditional October holiday.

It became know and was published here in For Argyll, that this seemingly disproportionate delay was down  to a planned wheeze the council had cooked up to try to defeat the conditions of the concordat without paying the penalty.

At the end of the three week delay, the council voted by a narrow majority to send to statutory consultation a set of closure proposals many councillors openly acknowledged to be flawed, even as they were approving them legally fit to proceed.

One of the weaknesses publicly identified by the Scottish Rural Schools Network was that the savings resulting from the closures proposed would in fact come from losing teaching posts. The council was then claiming that the savings would result from reduced property costs. It was pointed out that cutting teachers would see the council in breach of the conditions of the concordat, incurring an additional cut of over £8 million.

Then came the news of the postponement of the closures until after the October holiday, followed swiftly by tip offs on the underlying wheeze.

The annual collection of education statistics, including teacher numbers and teacher:pupil class ratios, takes place in the early Autumn, usually in September.

The wheeze was to provide statistics that were accurate on submission and compliant with the conditions of the concordat – and then close the schools in October, cut the teaching posts and stretch the teacher:pupil ratios, all as planned.

This would then not have been discovered until the following year’s statistics were collected and reported, by which time the 2011-12 revenue grant would have been received in full – and spent; and by which time the hope was that the 2012-13 settlement would operate on different principles.

Blowing the whistle on this dodge made it more difficult to perpetrate – but not impossible.

Jackie Baillie’s 4th question establishes that the door is closed to such manoeuvres and that the additional penalty cut will be imposed mid-session, should that be necessary.

So these questions are a form of dissection – laying out the specific anatomy of the financial framework within which the council must operate.

Now they have the formal confirmation of that framework – and so do the Argyll Rural Schools Network and the parent councils of any threatened school.