A new national parent's body

Read our response to the Scottish Consumer Council’s report on the need for a national parent body.

We welcome the opportunity to comment on the Scottish Consumer Council’s proposal for a national parent body. However, whilst we are pleased for the opportunity to discuss the form of a national parent body provided by the report, we take issue with many of the assumptions underlying the report and its analysis of the current situation.

1) We disagree with the view that at present there is no effective national parent body. SPTC and SSBA (Scottish School Board Association) would both from different perspectives argue that they fulfil this role. Moreover, the fact that only 49% of parents felt their views are not adequately reflected in national policy-making is actually a measure of how successful both groups are. 49% is actually a very low figure; it is likely that a much higher percentage of any other interest group - whether classroom teachers in education, patients within the health service or road users with regards to transport – would say, if asked, that they did not feel involved in national policy-making.

2) The SCC dismisses the current national parent bodies for having only partial representation of school level bodies. SSBA and SPTC would argue from different perspectives that the school level organisations actually include/represent all parents and we are puzzled as to what parents, other than those with children in schools, are currently excluded and would wish to comment on school education policy.

3) The SCC fails to understand that the main concern for the majority of parents is the immediate experience of their individual child. Parents are engaged in the here and now and have little interest in policy development that may not be implemented until after their child has left school. Because of their individual focus, parents often do not have a common/shared view on policy. Placing requests offer a good example. Parents, for whom a popular school is their catchment area school, want placing requests limited so that the school does not become overcrowded. However, parents trying to get into that popular school want no limits placed on their choice.

4) Similarly, the SCC seems not to appreciate that policy is rightly the remit of national politicians – both Ministers and the Scottish Parliament. It is not possible or desirable to engage all 1.25 million parents actively in every policy decision.

5) Understandably, because they are not currently engaged in education policy-making, the SCC demonstrates little understanding of the process. It is common practice for the Scottish Executive to embark on extensive consultations that invite wide response, only to receive relatively few comments back. It is also common practice for the Scottish Executive to set up working parties that include all the major stakeholders to help develop the practical aspects of policy. Whilst the members of these working parties bring with them knowledge and understanding of their respective constituencies, they have to work as a group on the policy in hand. It is not feasible to refer each decision back to the wider constituent groups for consultation and opinion. Moreover, it is current practice for the Scottish Executive to include someone with a parental perspective whenever the matter in hand will have an impact on parents, but it is important for this person to be able to work at the policy-making level. The outcomes of these groups are the synthesis of the views expressed. No one stakeholder has a monopoly.

6) The SCC implies that the current structure of SSBA and SPTC is finite and that neither has the capacity to expand or take on new roles. The implication is that the current income level and capacity have been developed as far as they can go. In actual fact, both SPTC and SSBA have expanded considerably since the early nineties and clearly do have scope to grow further. Moreover, research projects do not have to be funded out of current income; in the past both SSBA and SPTC have been successful in winning grants for specific projects.

7) The SCC states that Scottish Executive intervention is necessary for a new national parents’ body to be set up. However, both SPTC and SSBA were set up by their constituent bodies to represent their interests without any government intervention.

Proposals for a new national parent body
Main aims and functions
• SSBA and SPTC come from a different perspective from the SCC; both represent parents throughout Scotland and regularly talk to parents from every part of the country. We therefore believe that the starting point for any national parents’ body is that it should be a membership body whose first priority is to serve the needs of its parent members. It should provide support, information, advice and training through newsletters, topic-specific advice leaflets, seminars, workshops and, increasingly, the Internet.
• It should be a communication channel facilitating links between parent councils and other organisations.
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It should be a source of expert information, providing answers to parents’ increasingly technical questions. Past experience would suggest that these may often be to do with the law.
• It should offer a mediation service, offering help to parents who find themselves at odds with some part of the education service.
• It should be a champion for those parents who often feel excluded from the education system and find it hard to make representation on their own behalf.
• It should facilitate parental representation on educational policy committees. In doing this it will have to recognise the appropriateness of the particular parent representative to the task in hand.
• It should formulate its own view on policies both by drawing on the experience of its management committee and by talking to people throughout the country on a regular basis.
• It can expect to have to deal with a range of media enquiries and, within a single morning, will have to be ready to comment on matters as diverse as head lice, deferred entry, schools’ drug policies as well as non-educational issues to do with parents and children.
• It will have to ensure that the parental agenda is heard. This may not always chime with official policy and does not necessarily reflect the majority view. For example, it took five years, but SPTC were instrumental in persuading the Executive to change policy and allow automatic nursery entitlement to children who were born in January and February and whose parents decided to defer their entry to primary school until after their fifth birthday.
• It will have to establish parents’ views on key issues through surveys and research. However, it will also have to provide parents with the necessary information on educational policy and events to ensure that such views are informed views.
• It will act as an issues-filter, alerting parents to matters that could be of concern to them immediately or in the future. One example of this is the changes to teacher class-contact time that result from the McCrone agreement.
• We note the suggestion from Children in Scotland that the role of the national parents’ body should be widened to take in other services. We feel it is very important to keep it focused on the needs of the parents’ of children in school. This will often require the body to look at issues like drugs, sexual health and child safety, but this should be done from the perspective of the parents, not as part of some wider social service. Parents, in their role as parents, get very little support. There are special interest groups supporting the parents of special needs children, and groups supporting the parents of children with particular illnesses; however, very little help is offered to parents who simply have children at school. This is the role that SSBA and SPTC currently fill and it is the one that we think the new national body should undertake.

Format of the national parent body
In considering the nature of the proposed body, we would identify two different dimensions. The first and perhaps more readily agreed, is the organisational structure. The second and more debatable is how the organisation will link to parent councils and forums in schools.

1) Organisational Structure In considering an organisational structure for the proposed body, we draw heavily on our experience of operating in this arena for several years. We have grave reservations about the complex and expensive structure for five staff in the national office and five Regional Development Officers proposed by the Scottish Consumer Council. We would consider that a better starting point is the current staffing level of the existing organisations.

SSBA works with one full-time member of staff and depends on the voluntary board actually having time to “work” to supplement her efforts. In contrast, SPTC has a staff of 1.8 FTE made up of three part-time staff. This staffing level is currently sufficient and does not require SPTC to call on the Board of Directors for voluntary unpaid help (although they do attend conferences and act as members of Executive working groups). The benefit of having three part-time staff is that it allows SPTC staff to be in three different places at the same time. Moreover, using three part-time staff maximises efficiency and minimises waste.

Although there is considerable joint responsibility and cross-working, the three SPTC staff have different core responsibilities:
• the administrative officer is responsible for finance, paying salaries, preparing accounts for the auditor and managing membership
• the information officer is responsible for screening information that comes into the office, prioritising action and maintaining the website
• the policy development officer is responsible for writing policy documents for presentation to the Board of Directors and developing strategic direction for the organisation

Responding to phone calls, writing leaflets and newsletters and responding to technical enquiries are shared activities; answering the press and attending national policy committees are activities that are mainly shared by the development manager, information officer and board directors.

Every effort is made to ensure that the appropriate person undertakes each task. For example, as we had a Director with particular knowledge of special needs issues, she took the lead in developing SPTC policy, responding to consultations and attending meetings related to the Additional Support for Learning legislation. However as the development manager has been involved with National Qualifications since the early days of the Higher Still development, she carries this brief.

We see this pattern as a good model for the new national body. However, we do see the need for a slightly enlarged office: the start-up demands are likely to be quite considerable whilst, if all schools become members, the workload will increase and continue at a higher level.

In addition we see that there will be a need for field officers to go to visit both authorities and schools. We would suggest that the initial need would be for two such posts. Their ongoing work could be supplemented as necessary by occasional field visits by the central office staff with the knock-on benefit of keeping the central staff in touch with the needs, views and priorities of parents around the country.

Expanding the workforce to five people would bring the organisation within the scope of employment legislation. Pensions would become an issue. The new organisation would need access to Human Resource expertise and this might be an area where the Scottish Executive could offer practical support. Similarly, the new organisation would probably need occasional access to legal expertise and this might be another area where the Scottish Executive could offer practical support.

2) Links between the central body and local parent bodies
We believe that the new national body should be a membership body, and we see the links to the local parent bodies being established through a voluntary board of management drawn from the member organisations.

There are a number of ways in which this could be done. For example the link could be established directly to the parent forums. This would accommodate the fact that different forums in different schools might come up with quite different committee structures to represent their interests; some might continue to operate with two committees analogous to the current PTA and school board arrangements whilst others might choose to operate with a single committee, combining in one body the functions currently carried out separately by the school board and PTA; yet others, particularly in small schools, might operate with no committee and have the parent forum itself take all the decisions.

Similarly, there are different ways in which the management board might be chosen. The SSBA operates a system of a representative per authority selected by open election. The drawback to this system is that it takes no account of the fact that authorities vary considerably in size nor does it allow for two interested parents from the same authority to come forward. However, it does allow for geographic spread.

SPTC does not have restrictions in terms of authority, but allows only one parent from any one school. This process has always resulted in a board that is drawn from throughout Scotland, from the various sectors and with a good balance between rural and urban. It sees parents as being representative parents in themselves rather than being representative on the parliamentary model. Teachers can be representatives of schools, but there are strict limits on the number of teachers allowed on the board, “parents” must always have children currently at school and the convener must always be a parent.

Another possible way to select the management board is for local parent committees to nominate someone to serve. With the new duty imposed on local authorities to develop strategies for parental involvement, it is likely that they will themselves develop local committees and these could be the source of nominees for the national body.

It should be for the local bodies to decide which system of representation they would like to have.

When and how should the new body come into being? It would be useful if the new national body could come into being, at least in shadow form, as soon as possible after the legislation is passed so that it can support parent forums and councils through the set-up phase. A skeleton office could be set up, perhaps using staff from the existing national bodies as they already have experience operating in this area. The management body could be an invited group drawn again from parents who have some experience of working at strategic level. It is important that the national body engages in offering practical support even in advance of its constitution being decided so that local bodies can understand the role such a body could and would play. If the nature of the constitution is the first item of discussion, the whole exercise might become bogged down in the minutiae of standing orders, etc.

Proposed working party We can see the value of a working group being convened to consider the specific issues of organisation, particularly funding, support arrangements and how the management board should be drawn from and linked to the school-based organisations. However, such a group should only look at the range of options and the type of external support, in terms of HR and legal expertise, needed for the new national body; it will be for the local bodies to make the final decisions and have ownership of the new body. As part of this the new national body should not be remote and too different from school organisations, nor seem too like a local authority education department. Moreover, whilst having adequate funds, it should be a low-cost model as parents do not like to see money that could be “better spent” on children, “wasted” on glossy publications or expensive bureaucracies. If the new national body is not “owned” by the local bodies, all that will happen is that they will follow the example of PTAs and school boards in the past and set up a national body for themselves. The working group itself should have an independent chairperson and should be quite small in size.

And finally On the day when this response was drafted, we had a series of enquiries from distraught parents asking for our help and information on a range of issues that they were having problems dealing with. The problems ranged from the parent whose son was not being allowed to sit Higher English to the PTA that had discovered that the treasurer had gone off with their funds. We took time to listen to them, responded to them as individuals, gave them the support and advice that they needed, gave them reassurance and, at the end of the call, invited them to call back if they needed any more help. All said thank you before they put the phone down. This aspect of our work is critically important and must be an integral part of the work of any future national parents’ body if it is really to serve the needs of parents.

March 2006