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Useful Links2003 Convenor's Report By Steve McColl
WHAT'S IN A YEAR?
It’s that time of year again when it falls to the Convener to look back and reflect on what has been going on and what SPTC has been doing. On the macro front there was, of course, a General Election which saw no change to the Executive and little change in national policy but which did result in a change of Minister.
Similarly, at SPTC, there has been little change in policy but there has
been a change in Convener.
I took over from Eleanor Coner at the AGM in November and wondered how I
would follow her pioneering work on the Safer Uses of Services on the
Internet project. In fact, it’s been a year when we have had to focus on the
basics – on parental involvement and on insurance.
Parents in School
The Banks Report, published towards the end of 2002, took a fresh look at
the role of school boards whilst the National Debate placed the role of
parents firmly back on the political and educational agenda. Banks proposed
changes to both school boards and PTAs but the national debate suggested
that what was really needed were improved mechanisms for all parents to get
involved and get information about their children.
We had a number of meetings with Ministers and officials to explore the problems and come up with suggestions that moved beyond the current organisational arrangements. Although no new blue print has yet emerged or reached the consultation phase, we are already seeing some practical changes.
The Assessment Action Group is running a series of pilot projects looking at how better to give information to parents. Parent Zone, the website that provides parents with information on everything from school holidays to exclusion, has been revamped and re-launched, with a new easier-to-remember address www.parentzonescotland.gov.uk
We have also met with officials who are interested in making information
across a range of government services – not just education – easier to
understand and more available. Whilst none of these changes has hit the
headlines they are in many ways the most satisfactory from our point of
view, as our purpose has always been to improve home-school links.
Insurance
We know that many members join SPTC because of the public liability
insurance that we provide to cover PTA/PA events. This year it has become a
central issue for us. We found ourselves in the classic good news/bad news
situation. On the one hand changes to the basic insurance meant that it was
extended to include many of the previously optional and enhanced provisions.
This simplified the process and offered a better deal to members. On the other hand uncertainty in the insurance market meant that we did not know what would happen when we came to renew the policy and at one time it was suggested that we could face up to 30 per cent increase in premiums. In the end not only was the rise more modest than that, but we also managed to negotiate a three-year deal which allows us to plan ahead. However, reaching this stage has taken a lot of time and effort and the uncertainty in insurance costs meant we had to delay spending on any new projects until we had a clearer picture of our expenditure.
We are now in a position to move forward and have several proposals in
the pipeline. Another aspect of our insurance work has been to explain the
policy to local authorities and persuade them that PTAs have all the cover
they need to sell home made cakes at school fundraising events!
National Qualifications
We have finally caught up with the rest of the world and learnt to call
“Higher Still” “National Qualifications” but we have retained our watching
brief on the whole process.
Judith Gillespie takes her responsibilities as
a member both of the Scottish Qualifications Authority Board and the
National Qualifications Steering Group very seriously, whilst I was very
pleased to be appointed to the SQA Advisory Council which has taken over
much of the work of the previous Ministerial Review Group.
Issues
The filing cabinet has an interesting section called “issues” in which we
store information about all current active concerns. Raiding the section
this year I have found folders on Discipline, Food, Guidance, the National
Debate, Placing Requests and Home Education.
Discipline turned out to be parents’ number one concern in both primary and
secondary schools in the members’ survey that we ran over the summer term.
It is also a critical issue for teachers and the Executive, and in a recent
meeting with the Minister, Peter Peacock, it took up a lot of the discussion
time. It may not be an easy problem to resolve, but it is good to see that
it is so firmly on so many agendas. It will clearly feature prominently in
the coming year.
Food, always important to us, continues to be an important item on the
national agenda both in terms of providing youngsters with a healthy diet
and in trying to reverse the growing problem of obesity. The proposal to
provide all children with free school meals has come back to the Scottish
Parliament and we have been active in finding out what parents think by
running a survey.
We started to investigate Guidance when it seemed that guidance provision in
schools could be threatened by changes arising from the teachers’ pay
settlement (McCrone). We set about establishing what guidance teachers do –
more than you think – how guidance is managed differently in different
authorities and then we challenged the Scottish Executive to say how it was
going to protect guidance provision. We also discussed the Executive’s own
review of what guidance should include. We then took the discussion around
the teaching unions before coming back to the Executive for an update. What
became clear was that guidance staff do a valuable and complicated job. What
was less clear was whether the current, varied arrangements are the right
ones. In all our discussions we stressed the importance of guaranteeing that
the provision to youngsters currently in school is maintained to a high
standard.
The outcome of the National Debate has touched us most closely over
considerations of how parents should be involved in education (see above).
Placing Requests is an ongoing issue for us. Although parents who are
successful in getting their children into a school on a placing request are
well satisfied with the system, parents who are unsuccessful or parents
whose local school becomes over-crowded because of an excess of placing
requests are less happy. We are trying to get support for a review of the
placing request legislation, which is now more than 20 years old and has
been amended twice along the way. One proposal we have is that schools
should have defined capacities both for the school as a whole and for each
year group.
We are never afraid of controversy and have found ourselves at odds with the
Home Education lobby on proposed new guidelines. The idea that there should
be some record of all children who are being educated at home and that there
should be some check to ensure that home educated children receive an
“efficient” education seemed eminently sensible to us. However, our support
for these proposals brought us into direct conflict with the Home Education
lobby.
Additional Support for Learning
One important area of activity has been our discussions on the Additional
Support for Learning Bill.
This proposes to look at special education from the point of view of what
support a child needs rather than by focusing on the nature of their
problems. It proposes to end the system of Records of Need and will mean
that children not traditionally seen as having special educational needs -
for example, children for whom English is a second language - will be
included for the first time.
We have responded to the consultation, carried information on the Bill in our newsletter and been part of a small group discussion with Peter Peacock. In this we are particularly grateful to parent members who have specialist knowledge of the current SEN provision and of what the proposed changes will mean to parents. THE OFFICE At the end of November we had to say good bye and a big thank you to our long serving information officer, Mairi Craven. However, we were very lucky that Eleanor Coner stepped into the post. Eleanor had already spent time actually working in the office as the project officer for Safer Use of Services on the Internet and so was familiar with all the systems. She decided that the new job and new offices provided an excellent opportunity to re-organise all our records.
The first requirement was to improve the storage arrangements, which meant buying new bookcases and cupboards. Eleanor then went through everything - all the archived records and information library. Everything has been reviewed and re-organised.
We now have catalogues of our own records back to when we were set up in
1948, of our information library and of topics that we have covered in
Backchat. Judith Gillespie continues as Development Manager and Lynda Grant
is becoming increasingly invaluable as Administrative Officer.
Office hours
The official office hours are from 9.00 a.m. to 2.00 p.m. Monday to Friday,
but there is someone around until 4.00 p.m. most days. Otherwise, messages
left on the answer phone will be answered as soon as possible. An increasing
number of members are now contacting us by email -
sptc@sptc.info - whilst our website
www.sptc.info is
offering a useful service to people who want immediate access to
information. Our leaflets on-line are proving particularly popular.
Membership
Despite an increase in school closures, our membership has continued to rise
with over 55 new PTA members this year. Our ordinary membership now stands
at 1316 and there are 34 associate members.
There is a list of members by council area for the beginning of October. (A number of schools have joined since
then and are not included in the lists but they are on our current
database.)
The balance between primary and secondary schools in our membership
reflects the actual balance between primary and secondary schools in
Scotland. We are pleased to have members from every authority area.
Help and Advice
Our telephone helpline is available during office hours and we take calls on
anything affecting our members, or indeed any parent or teacher, member or
not. Queries include:
- PA or PTA matters - what can a PTA/PA do?
- Money handling questions
- Constitutions
- Insurance queries - particularly the difference between public liability and personal accident insurance
- Personal problems which individual PTAs and/or parents are experiencing
- The need for police checks - an area of uncertainty for parents and schools alike.
Regional Meetings We continue to get out and about and this year we’ve held regional meetings in South Lanarkshire, Glasgow, North Ayrshire and Edinburgh, much to the benefit of ScotRail.
Surveys This year we did one of our periodic member surveys to find out what PTAs do, what fundraising events they hold and what parents’ main concerns are. We also somewhat rashly asked members what they thought of our various publications.
We were delighted with the response, particularly for the insight it gave us into what issues are important for parents – discipline is a major concern at all levels. We were also pleased to get fairly positive messages back about what we do. Thank you to all who took part.
As I write we are also in the middle of a survey on proposals to provide all children with free school meals. Again, the response is excellent.
CONFERENCES
As usual there have been a number of conferences this year attended by SPTC members. These include conferences on access to higher education, problems of boys' under-performance in schools, school grounds, ethos, bullying, assessment, linking with Europe, literacy, numeracy and equality. Reports from conferences are posted on our website.
SUPPORT FUND
Two years ago we set up a Support Fund for parents to attend relevant conferences. This year the fund has been only modestly used for conferences on bullying and special educational needs. The fund remains a permanent feature of our support for parents.
SPTC AND OTHER BODIES
Top of this agenda has been a series of meetings with Education Ministers -
Cathy Jamieson and Nicol Stephen before the election, and Peter Peacock
after the election. We discussed a number of issues including parental
involvement.
We also continue to have formal and informal meetings with other
organisations including officials in the Scottish Executive, Scottish
Qualifications Authority, Her Majesty's Inspectors and the various teaching
unions. I was delighted to attend the new Education Awards ceremony, which
celebrated good practice in schools.
We also represent parental interests on a number of committees, as listed below.
- Eleanor Coner: Learning and Teaching Scotland's Advisory Group and their 5-14 Reference Group, the advisory groups for the Anti-bullying Network and Scottish Centre for Financial Education
- Linda Coad: the Scottish Joint Committee on Religious and Moral Education and the Religious Observance Review Group
- Ruth Higham: the Health and Safety Executive's Industry Advisory Group for Schools
- Susan McColl: the Ethos Network Advisory Group and Scottish Council for Research in Education
- Steve McColl: Scottish Qualification Authority’s Advisory Council
- Judith Gillespie: National Qualifications Steering Group and SQA Board.
- Jennifer Stewart: Assessment Action Group
CONSULTATIONS
As always we have responded to a number of consultations. These have included:
- Scottish Executive consultations on Communities First for an anti-social behaviour strategy, the Additional Support for Learning Bill, Draft Education (Pupil Records), Religious Observance, Guidance on Home Education.
- Scottish Qualifications Authority on Review of the Certificate, changes to the NQ Compensatory Award