The Enterprise and Learning Committee's Report on Arrangements for School Funding

Speech by Peter Black delivered to Plenary on Thu 3rd Jul 2008

Peter Black: I welcome this debate today and that the Enterprise and Learning Committee has undertaken this report. Had that not happened and we had not had this second report, there was a real possibly that the report of the Committee on School Funding would have been lost forever and that many of its recommendations would never have been implemented. The jury is still out as to whether they will be implemented, as it is out as to whether this latest set of recommendations will be implemented, but we need to remind ourselves that it is now over two years since that ad-hoc committee reported on this particular issue, and yet the vast majority of the recommendations have not been implemented. As is pointed out in the current report, some of the recommendations have had to be repeated, in the hope that the Minister will take notice of them this time. Some of these are key recommendations. For example, recommendations 19 and 21 of the report of the Committee on School Funding on grants stated that,

'the Assembly Government should avoid initiating unsustainable policy actions through short-term specific grant programmes and should aim to provide longer-term funding … to allow better financial planning by schools'.

It went on to mention several other things, including sustainability and ensuring:

'that the benefits of new grant schemes and streams of funding are not compromised by excessively onerous and bureaucratic bidding mechanisms'.

However, if I go to my local education authority and talk about the grant regimes that it has to implement, and if I go to my local schools and talk to the headteachers about grant mechanisms, I am told that there are still scores of small grants and that the cost of putting those grants into effect often exceeds the money that is received by the local authority. Little or no action has been taken by the Assembly Government on those recommendations and, as a result, schools and local education authorities have to spend huge amounts of time and resources on implementing short-term grants, which they do not know whether they will have from year to year. The impact of those grants is undermined by that very fact. On capital, the current report notes that the ultimate responsibility for capital programmes should lie with the local authority and local government. I cannot disagree with that, but how much assistance local government is getting in terms of implementing its own capital programmes is yet another issue.

The committee report, as well as another report, highlighted the issue of school toilets, and Kirsty and others have made the very important point-this an issue that was raised continuously by the previous children's commissioner, and no doubt will be raised by the present children's commissioner-that you cannot separate that issue from the condition of the school buildings. You can put in place short-term measures to ensure that the toilets are more pleasant to use and do not become a place where children can be bullied or picked on, but unless you tackle the issue of school buildings, and ensure that some of that vast reserve of capital money that the Assembly is so far sitting on is put into school buildings and that the Assembly Government works with local councils to deliver a proper capital rolling programme, then we are never going to get to grips with the huge backlog of work that needs to be done in school buildings around the country.

What happened to the key recommendations of the Committee on School Funding on the distribution formula? Recommendation 5 was about setting:

'in train a review of the local government distribution formula so that the education element is based on the current and future costs of providing education services rather than on historic costs.'

There was also talk, very much reflecting what Huw Lewis and Kirsty said, about Bramley and dealing with deprivation and its relationship to poor educational achievement. There were recommendations on that in the report as well, and, again, we are still waiting for action by the Assembly Government on implementing those particular recommendations. Recommendation 15 of the previous committee's report recommended publishing

'minimum common basic funding requirements for school staffing'

and so on so that comparisons can be made on a like-for-like basis. Two years have passed and there has been no action. Two years have passed and a committee has had to publish another report. Minister, I hope this time that you will listen.