Chamber
Plenary, 30 Sep 1999
30 Sep 1999 · S1 · Plenary
Item of business
Non-Executive Business: Education
I will do better than that; I will read from a motion that was passed by SNP- controlled Clackmannanshire Council. The motion says:
"This council notes with concern recent developments in the negotiation of pay and conditions for teachers. In particular, the council does not wish to be associated with attacks on teachers representatives."
The motion then details the council's concerns. Therefore, no, the SNP councils did not support COSLA's offer.
The other aspect of the pay offer that the minister failed to point out is that it has lots of strings attached. The offer of more money—which would last for three years—comes with dramatic changes in working conditions that would last indefinitely.
It is important to point out that the teaching profession is not hostile to changes in conditions, and nor should it be. Like any other profession, teachers must move with the times and recognise that the old ways of doing things are not always the best. However, teachers have embraced change. They were enthusiastic participants in the millennium review and they endorsed that review's recommendations. In the course of negotiations on pay and conditions, teachers suggested counterproposals which, had they been accepted, would have improved the final offer. Teachers did not reject the principle of change two weeks ago; they rejected the particular changes proposed in the COSLA offer. Such changes would have damaged the quality of education in our classrooms and the educational experience of children across Scotland.
That brings us neatly to children. No doubt the minister would say that children are the first priority, and he would be absolutely right. However, in the past, he has gone on to imply that the interests of children somehow conflict with the interests of teachers. Nothing could be further from the truth. If we put to one side the fact that most teachers are parents and the fact that the working conditions of teachers are the learning conditions of children, the central overriding truth is that teachers and the education system are indivisible. One cannot be attacked without harming the other, which is why teachers were right to reject proposals that were educationally deficient and why the minister was wrong to try to bludgeon teachers into acceptance.
Apart from pay, the COSLA offer covered changes in three main areas: to the management structure in schools; to teachers' working hours; and to class sizes. My colleagues will return to those issues later. However, I want to outline briefly some of the reasons why COSLA's proposals were defective.
There were proposals to abolish principal teachers, assistant principal teachers and senior teachers—the middle management of schools— and to create a new post of professional leader. I do not know anyone who does not agree with a simplification of the school management structure. However, the COSLA offer would have removed the middle management without a clear idea of what to put in its place. The professional leadership post was vague and ill defined. At a time of considerable curricular change in the form of programmes such as higher still, the offer was a recipe for instability in schools, which is hardly in the pupils' interest.
That part of the offer would not have helped the commendable objective of trying to attract more graduates into the teaching profession, which is one of COSLA's stated aims. For reasons that can only be financial, the number of professional leadership posts was to be restricted to 8,000 across nursery, primary and secondary education sectors. However, there are already 7,000 principal teachers and around 4,000 senior and assistant principal teachers. All the professional leadership jobs would have gone to principal teachers, which would have left senior and assistant principal teachers, and any other qualified teacher, on a waiting list. It does not do much for new graduates to be told that, when they come into the profession and climb to the top of the basic scale after five or six years, they will sit in a holding post for goodness knows how many years behind thousands of others waiting for any meaningful promotion. The truth is that those proposals were ill thought out and finessed for financial reasons to the point of being unworkable.
Last week, the minister described the issue of class sizes as an old chestnut. It must have slipped the minister's mind that that old chestnut was one of Labour's key pledges at the previous two elections. As has been said in the Parliament, the offer to teachers would have raised the limit on composite class sizes from 25 to 30, which was a move to raise £20 million and had the potential to affect 100,000 children in Scotland. That move runs counter, if not to the letter, then to the spirit of Labour's election pledges.
The minister has said that no research shows that kids in composite classes should be in smaller classes. The minister should have a little common sense. Composite classes are an exaggeration of the age range that exists in any class. It is more difficult for teachers to teach classes in which dramatic differences in ability arise from different ages. It stands to reason that smaller classes
would alleviate some of that difficulty. That is not just my view; it is the view of parents. Earlier this month, the Scottish Parent Teacher Council said:
"The teachers' determination to stick at a maximum of 25 in composite classes is very much in line with parents' views. At the end of last session, we were inundated with phone calls from parents who were anxious because their child was going into a composite class . . . The only comfort such parents had was that the class numbers were limited to 25."
The offer would have removed such comfort from parents.
The offer was clearly defective in a number of ways. However, I want to move on to the crux of the matter. Why, after so many months of negotiation, were we faced with an offer that was so unacceptable to the teaching profession? In Parliament last week, the minister said:
"It has been suggested that some more money would automatically lead to a solution. I do not believe that money is the real issue".
Let us examine that statement for a moment. The COSLA offer would have added £187 million to local authorities' pay bill for teachers by 2001
02. The comprehensive spending review provision for teachers' pay over the same period is £120 million. By my arithmetic, that leaves a funding gap of £67 million. In fairness, COSLA has explained how that gap could be reduced to £16 million by 2001-02 by making efficiency savings through other aspects of the offer such as changes in management structure, the increase in composite class sizes and the diversion of money from the flagship excellence fund. In his statement last week, Sam Galbraith said: "We had guaranteed an additional £8 million to COSLA prior to the last stages of their negotiations to help achieve a settlement".—[Official Report, 22 September 1999; Vol 2, c 624.]
That still leaves a funding gap of £8 million, which raises two points. The first is a question to the minister. If the offer had been accepted by teachers, where would the additional £8 million have come from? The second point is that, if COSLA could not fund the offer as it stood, it is clear that it had no room at all for manoeuvre. Compromise might have brought about a settlement and avoided the prospect of industrial action by teachers, but that would have cost money that COSLA did not have.
The statement that money is not the issue would deserve to be laughed out of Parliament if it was not so serious. In a paper about the funding of the offer, COSLA said:
"There is a need for Scottish Executive assistance in bridging the funding gap."
Even COSLA is clear about that. The only thing that might have broken the recent deadlock was extra resources from the Executive, which were not forthcoming. Perhaps instead of picking a fight with Scottish teachers, the minister should have picked a more productive fight with Gordon Brown, who is building up a war chest while Scottish teachers are forced ever closer to industrial action.
However, the minister is trying to pick a fight with Scottish teachers. The course of action that was announced last week was provocative and doomed to failure. We have a committee of inquiry that does not have the confidence of the teaching profession. This week, the Scottish Trades Union Congress said:
"The composition of this committee of inquiry is staggering in its lack of balance."
The minister talks about working in partnership with teachers. Those are laudable sentiments; however, the only partner in education not represented on the committee is the classroom teacher in the form of the teaching unions. Why? The committee of inquiry is also subject to the same financial constraints as COSLA, so, in his remarks, the minister might like to explain to the Parliament how he thinks that the committee will come up with a better deal than COSLA managed.
The committee is by no stretch of the imagination independent. At least one of its conclusions has been predetermined by the minister. He has already decided to take away the statutory basis of the SJNC. Why? Why not let the committee decide? If a committee of inquiry is being set up, why not let it decide on those issues? The minister seems so sure that the SJNC is indefensible. Why not leave it to the committee to come to the same conclusion? Is it because Mr Galbraith is not confident that the committee will reach the same conclusion, or is it because he decided to remove the SJNC a long time ago, and has been looking for an excuse to do so ever since?
I will now read from an extract from The Guardian, taken from an interview with Lord Baker, the former English education secretary under Margaret Thatcher, on 16 September. It begins:
"When Margaret Thatcher moved him"—
Lord Baker—
"to education, he decided to deal with them (the teachers). His first move was quite open. He cut off their muscle."
I quote Ken Baker:
"I took away all negotiating rights from the union. It was quite brutal."
The interviewer reflects that Ken Baker chuckled as he recalled how he
"removed their right to negotiate . . . by statute . . . and set up an advisory committee which would set the rates of
teacher pay."
I again quote Ken Baker:
"It was absolutely extreme stuff."
Does that sound familiar to anybody? The Minister for Children and Education is provoking confrontation with Scottish teachers, and the only people who will suffer at the end of the day are Scotland's children. I ask everybody in this Parliament to reflect on that at decision time this afternoon.
I ask the minister to withdraw his threat to the SJNC and to abandon his proposal to set up a hand-picked committee of inquiry. He should let this Parliament's Education, Culture and Sport Committee—a democratic body that all sides of this dispute can have faith in—examine the issue and work towards a settlement that can be accepted by all sides.
If teachers take industrial action—I certainly hope that they do not—it will not be possible for the education minister and the Executive to escape responsibility for it. Everything else on its education agenda will be undermined as a result. I hope that the Executive draws back from such a situation, and I hope to hear something more constructive from the minister this morning than has been the case up to now.
I move,
That the Parliament notes the overwhelming rejection of CoSLA's pay and conditions offer (dated 20 August 1999) by Scotland's teachers, recognises the validity of the concerns expressed by the teaching profession and parents' representatives about the details of CoSLA's offer and agrees that the implementation of the offer in its current form would have resulted in a deterioration of standards in our classrooms and a further decline in teachers' morale; considers that the defects in CoSLA's offer are the result of a lack of resources and that the current impasse between CoSLA and the teaching profession is a direct result of the failure of the Scottish Executive to make sufficient resources available to local government to fund an acceptable settlement and further considers that the approach adopted by the Scottish Executive on this issue has been deliberately provocative to Scotland's teachers; and calls upon the Scottish Executive to adopt a genuine partnership approach to reaching a settlement with teachers, to abandon its proposals to remove the statutory basis of the Scottish Joint Negotiating Committee and establish a Committee of Inquiry, and to refer the findings of the Millennium Review (a joint inquiry established by COSLA and teachers' unions in 1997 to look at various issues in education) for investigation by the Parliament's Education, Culture & Sport Committee.
"This council notes with concern recent developments in the negotiation of pay and conditions for teachers. In particular, the council does not wish to be associated with attacks on teachers representatives."
The motion then details the council's concerns. Therefore, no, the SNP councils did not support COSLA's offer.
The other aspect of the pay offer that the minister failed to point out is that it has lots of strings attached. The offer of more money—which would last for three years—comes with dramatic changes in working conditions that would last indefinitely.
It is important to point out that the teaching profession is not hostile to changes in conditions, and nor should it be. Like any other profession, teachers must move with the times and recognise that the old ways of doing things are not always the best. However, teachers have embraced change. They were enthusiastic participants in the millennium review and they endorsed that review's recommendations. In the course of negotiations on pay and conditions, teachers suggested counterproposals which, had they been accepted, would have improved the final offer. Teachers did not reject the principle of change two weeks ago; they rejected the particular changes proposed in the COSLA offer. Such changes would have damaged the quality of education in our classrooms and the educational experience of children across Scotland.
That brings us neatly to children. No doubt the minister would say that children are the first priority, and he would be absolutely right. However, in the past, he has gone on to imply that the interests of children somehow conflict with the interests of teachers. Nothing could be further from the truth. If we put to one side the fact that most teachers are parents and the fact that the working conditions of teachers are the learning conditions of children, the central overriding truth is that teachers and the education system are indivisible. One cannot be attacked without harming the other, which is why teachers were right to reject proposals that were educationally deficient and why the minister was wrong to try to bludgeon teachers into acceptance.
Apart from pay, the COSLA offer covered changes in three main areas: to the management structure in schools; to teachers' working hours; and to class sizes. My colleagues will return to those issues later. However, I want to outline briefly some of the reasons why COSLA's proposals were defective.
There were proposals to abolish principal teachers, assistant principal teachers and senior teachers—the middle management of schools— and to create a new post of professional leader. I do not know anyone who does not agree with a simplification of the school management structure. However, the COSLA offer would have removed the middle management without a clear idea of what to put in its place. The professional leadership post was vague and ill defined. At a time of considerable curricular change in the form of programmes such as higher still, the offer was a recipe for instability in schools, which is hardly in the pupils' interest.
That part of the offer would not have helped the commendable objective of trying to attract more graduates into the teaching profession, which is one of COSLA's stated aims. For reasons that can only be financial, the number of professional leadership posts was to be restricted to 8,000 across nursery, primary and secondary education sectors. However, there are already 7,000 principal teachers and around 4,000 senior and assistant principal teachers. All the professional leadership jobs would have gone to principal teachers, which would have left senior and assistant principal teachers, and any other qualified teacher, on a waiting list. It does not do much for new graduates to be told that, when they come into the profession and climb to the top of the basic scale after five or six years, they will sit in a holding post for goodness knows how many years behind thousands of others waiting for any meaningful promotion. The truth is that those proposals were ill thought out and finessed for financial reasons to the point of being unworkable.
Last week, the minister described the issue of class sizes as an old chestnut. It must have slipped the minister's mind that that old chestnut was one of Labour's key pledges at the previous two elections. As has been said in the Parliament, the offer to teachers would have raised the limit on composite class sizes from 25 to 30, which was a move to raise £20 million and had the potential to affect 100,000 children in Scotland. That move runs counter, if not to the letter, then to the spirit of Labour's election pledges.
The minister has said that no research shows that kids in composite classes should be in smaller classes. The minister should have a little common sense. Composite classes are an exaggeration of the age range that exists in any class. It is more difficult for teachers to teach classes in which dramatic differences in ability arise from different ages. It stands to reason that smaller classes
would alleviate some of that difficulty. That is not just my view; it is the view of parents. Earlier this month, the Scottish Parent Teacher Council said:
"The teachers' determination to stick at a maximum of 25 in composite classes is very much in line with parents' views. At the end of last session, we were inundated with phone calls from parents who were anxious because their child was going into a composite class . . . The only comfort such parents had was that the class numbers were limited to 25."
The offer would have removed such comfort from parents.
The offer was clearly defective in a number of ways. However, I want to move on to the crux of the matter. Why, after so many months of negotiation, were we faced with an offer that was so unacceptable to the teaching profession? In Parliament last week, the minister said:
"It has been suggested that some more money would automatically lead to a solution. I do not believe that money is the real issue".
Let us examine that statement for a moment. The COSLA offer would have added £187 million to local authorities' pay bill for teachers by 2001
02. The comprehensive spending review provision for teachers' pay over the same period is £120 million. By my arithmetic, that leaves a funding gap of £67 million. In fairness, COSLA has explained how that gap could be reduced to £16 million by 2001-02 by making efficiency savings through other aspects of the offer such as changes in management structure, the increase in composite class sizes and the diversion of money from the flagship excellence fund. In his statement last week, Sam Galbraith said: "We had guaranteed an additional £8 million to COSLA prior to the last stages of their negotiations to help achieve a settlement".—[Official Report, 22 September 1999; Vol 2, c 624.]
That still leaves a funding gap of £8 million, which raises two points. The first is a question to the minister. If the offer had been accepted by teachers, where would the additional £8 million have come from? The second point is that, if COSLA could not fund the offer as it stood, it is clear that it had no room at all for manoeuvre. Compromise might have brought about a settlement and avoided the prospect of industrial action by teachers, but that would have cost money that COSLA did not have.
The statement that money is not the issue would deserve to be laughed out of Parliament if it was not so serious. In a paper about the funding of the offer, COSLA said:
"There is a need for Scottish Executive assistance in bridging the funding gap."
Even COSLA is clear about that. The only thing that might have broken the recent deadlock was extra resources from the Executive, which were not forthcoming. Perhaps instead of picking a fight with Scottish teachers, the minister should have picked a more productive fight with Gordon Brown, who is building up a war chest while Scottish teachers are forced ever closer to industrial action.
However, the minister is trying to pick a fight with Scottish teachers. The course of action that was announced last week was provocative and doomed to failure. We have a committee of inquiry that does not have the confidence of the teaching profession. This week, the Scottish Trades Union Congress said:
"The composition of this committee of inquiry is staggering in its lack of balance."
The minister talks about working in partnership with teachers. Those are laudable sentiments; however, the only partner in education not represented on the committee is the classroom teacher in the form of the teaching unions. Why? The committee of inquiry is also subject to the same financial constraints as COSLA, so, in his remarks, the minister might like to explain to the Parliament how he thinks that the committee will come up with a better deal than COSLA managed.
The committee is by no stretch of the imagination independent. At least one of its conclusions has been predetermined by the minister. He has already decided to take away the statutory basis of the SJNC. Why? Why not let the committee decide? If a committee of inquiry is being set up, why not let it decide on those issues? The minister seems so sure that the SJNC is indefensible. Why not leave it to the committee to come to the same conclusion? Is it because Mr Galbraith is not confident that the committee will reach the same conclusion, or is it because he decided to remove the SJNC a long time ago, and has been looking for an excuse to do so ever since?
I will now read from an extract from The Guardian, taken from an interview with Lord Baker, the former English education secretary under Margaret Thatcher, on 16 September. It begins:
"When Margaret Thatcher moved him"—
Lord Baker—
"to education, he decided to deal with them (the teachers). His first move was quite open. He cut off their muscle."
I quote Ken Baker:
"I took away all negotiating rights from the union. It was quite brutal."
The interviewer reflects that Ken Baker chuckled as he recalled how he
"removed their right to negotiate . . . by statute . . . and set up an advisory committee which would set the rates of
teacher pay."
I again quote Ken Baker:
"It was absolutely extreme stuff."
Does that sound familiar to anybody? The Minister for Children and Education is provoking confrontation with Scottish teachers, and the only people who will suffer at the end of the day are Scotland's children. I ask everybody in this Parliament to reflect on that at decision time this afternoon.
I ask the minister to withdraw his threat to the SJNC and to abandon his proposal to set up a hand-picked committee of inquiry. He should let this Parliament's Education, Culture and Sport Committee—a democratic body that all sides of this dispute can have faith in—examine the issue and work towards a settlement that can be accepted by all sides.
If teachers take industrial action—I certainly hope that they do not—it will not be possible for the education minister and the Executive to escape responsibility for it. Everything else on its education agenda will be undermined as a result. I hope that the Executive draws back from such a situation, and I hope to hear something more constructive from the minister this morning than has been the case up to now.
I move,
That the Parliament notes the overwhelming rejection of CoSLA's pay and conditions offer (dated 20 August 1999) by Scotland's teachers, recognises the validity of the concerns expressed by the teaching profession and parents' representatives about the details of CoSLA's offer and agrees that the implementation of the offer in its current form would have resulted in a deterioration of standards in our classrooms and a further decline in teachers' morale; considers that the defects in CoSLA's offer are the result of a lack of resources and that the current impasse between CoSLA and the teaching profession is a direct result of the failure of the Scottish Executive to make sufficient resources available to local government to fund an acceptable settlement and further considers that the approach adopted by the Scottish Executive on this issue has been deliberately provocative to Scotland's teachers; and calls upon the Scottish Executive to adopt a genuine partnership approach to reaching a settlement with teachers, to abandon its proposals to remove the statutory basis of the Scottish Joint Negotiating Committee and establish a Committee of Inquiry, and to refer the findings of the Millennium Review (a joint inquiry established by COSLA and teachers' unions in 1997 to look at various issues in education) for investigation by the Parliament's Education, Culture & Sport Committee.
In the same item of business
The Presiding Officer (Sir David Steel):
NPA
The first item of business this morning is a non- Executive debate on motion S1M-172, in the name of Mr Alex Salmond, on education, and amendments to that mo...
Nicola Sturgeon (Glasgow) (SNP):
SNP
To begin, I would like to say a word or two on why the Scottish National party has chosen as the subject of our Opposition debate this morning the pay and co...
Hugh Henry (Paisley South) (Lab) rose—
Lab
Nicola Sturgeon:
SNP
I will give way in a minute, Hugh. The Executive is the third party in the Scottish Joint Negotiating Committee for Teaching Staff in School Education, albei...
Hugh Henry:
Lab
Will Ms Sturgeon tell us whether the SNP recommends paying in full the demand from the teachers' unions for an 8 per cent pay rise this year? Is the SNP prep...
Nicola Sturgeon:
SNP
No, Mr Henry, I believe in the continuation of the SJNC and that this year's pay dispute is a matter for teachers and COSLA to deal with through the SJNC. Th...
Dr Elaine Murray (Dumfries) (Lab):
Lab
Will Ms Sturgeon inform the chamber whether the SNP councils represented on COSLA supported COSLA's proposed offer?
Nicola Sturgeon:
SNP
I will do better than that; I will read from a motion that was passed by SNP- controlled Clackmannanshire Council. The motion says: "This council notes with ...
The Presiding Officer:
NPA
Before I call on the Minister for Children and Education to reply and move his amendment, I wish to remind members that yesterday's opening speeches overran ...
The Minister for Children and Education (Mr Sam Galbraith):
Lab
I will try to keep to time. I was pleased that the SNP spokesman, Nicola Sturgeon, mentioned children—at least in her speech. One of the striking features of...
Nicola Sturgeon rose—
SNP
Mr Galbraith:
Lab
No, I have just started. Please sit down. I welcome this opportunity to set out again the clear and positive thinking behind the Executive's decisions on the...
Nicola Sturgeon:
SNP
Which individuals and bodies did the minister consult before taking the decision to set up the independent committee of inquiry? Will he justify his decision...
The Presiding Officer:
NPA
Order. Interventions are supposed to be brief.
Mr Galbraith:
Lab
Ms Sturgeon has already made her speech and she should be content with that, be a bit patient and let me deal with the matters before me. As part of our cons...
Nicola Sturgeon rose—
SNP
Mr Galbraith:
Lab
We need to consider why the process of discussion and deliberation, which took so long, led to such an outcome. We need to consider how we can deliver the ki...
Dennis Canavan (Falkirk West):
*
Will the minister give way?
Mr Galbraith:
Lab
No thanks.My job is to raise teachers' salaries to the highest possible level. Like the Prime Minister, I see no reason why some teachers cannot be paid as w...
Tommy Sheridan (Glasgow) (SSP):
SSP
I do not know whether the fact that the minister has given way is an indication of favouritism. He was asked a question on the committee of inquiry, which I ...
Mr Galbraith:
Lab
The member forgot to point out that representatives of the teaching profession are involved in the committee. Two head teachers, one from a primary school an...
Michael Russell (South of Scotland) (SNP):
SNP
Will the minister give way?
Mr Galbraith:
Lab
I will give way, but for the last time, as I am trying to keep to the time limit.
Michael Russell:
SNP
I hear the minister's point. Will he, however, respond publicly to the official letter that he received from the Scottish Trades Union Congress? The letter s...
The Presiding Officer:
NPA
Order. I have no friends.
Mr Galbraith:
Lab
It is a principle of mine always to respond privately to letters that are sent to me. I suggest that the member does the same, rather than, as he always does...
Nicola Sturgeon:
SNP
Will the minister give way?
Mr Galbraith:
Lab
I am winding up.Nevertheless, we have acted decisively and positively to show the way forward. Our approach allows the existing machinery of the SJNC to deli...
The Presiding Officer:
NPA
Both front-bench speakers have kept within the time limit, which is a new record for the Parliament. I call on Mr Monteith to do likewise and to move amendme...
Mr Brian Monteith (Mid Scotland and Fife) (Con):
Con
I am pleased to take part in today's debate, because it is important that someone tries to bring the two sides together. In these days of cosy consensus poli...