Official Report search · Parliament Workbench

Committee

Audit Committee, 13 Feb 2007

13 Feb 2007 · S2 · Audit Committee

Item of business

Teaching Profession

Deacon, Susan Lab Edinburgh East and Musselburgh Watch on SPTV

There is a problem with the Executive response. To be fair, the problem derives not from the response but from our report. Indeed, the problem can be said to derive from our consideration of issues such as the McCrone agreement, in which we swing so much from the strategic to the specific that it is difficult to do justice to either. I make that observation from the perspective of having sat on the Audit Committee for a number of years, which are about to come to a close.Certainly, a two-sentence response in a box—which is the format of the response that we are considering today—limits the extent to which one can do justice to the wider strategic issues. That said, over the longer term, the Audit Committee should add greater value to some of the strategic stuff. In that regard, I will share three observations on the issue that is before us—I suppose that they offer a past-present-future dimension.As far as the past is concerned, I found it interesting to observe the media coverage and associated discussion that were generated by the publication of both our report and the report by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education on the implementation of the McCrone agreement. In other words, I am interested in the whole debate, umpteen years on, about what the McCrone agreement was and was not meant to do and what it has and has not done. For me, the coverage and discussion reinforced how much these things can get lost in the fog of the past. Some of this is partly about the Executive being better at stating outcomes, but some of it is also about the public policy process at the time being better at capturing—and making clear to the public—what is and what is not intended by major investments such as the McCrone agreement.As far as the present is concerned, I am conscious that this is another example of where we—I say "we" deliberately, because I am talking not just about the Executive—have to be conscious of the fact that, when we look at these issues, we do so with blinkers on. Andrew Welsh mentioned resources for McCrone, but we need also to consider issues that have come along since McCrone, such as single status. Such issues have created other huge demands that are impacting on budgets in a number of parts of the country. We need to update our thinking to take account of other developments that come along and their impact on resources.That takes me on to my third point, which is on the future. Although all the analysis of the McCrone agreement has been useful—for me, it has also been interesting. I hope that others think that it has been informative—there is now a need for us to move on. In doing so, we need to contextualise the issue as part of a wider discussion on what we want to achieve in our schools and classrooms in future. In other words, the McCrone agreement is done and has been analysed. Importantly, there is a need to update our thinking and to do so consciously. If we do not, we will keep looking at things through a prism that is five or six years old. That is a long way of saying that we should note the response, although some interesting and wider points can be drawn from it. Perhaps our legacy paper is the right place for some of the points that I have raised.

Search Hansard contributions

Audit Committee, 13 Feb 2007

In the same item of business