2007 CONVENER'S REPORT – Marianne Dryburgh

WHAT A YEAR!!

When he wrote his final Convener’s Report last year, Steve McColl headed it “What’s in a Year”. Events have led me to shorten that title! This has been a very complex and busy year dominated by three main activities. The first was preparation for the new Parent Councils, the second was the passage through the Scottish Parliament of new legislation on the barring and vetting of those who work with children and the third was in-house chaos arising from a disruptive expansion and upgrade of our offices.

PARENT COUNCILS

The Scottish Schools (Parental Involvement) Act 2006 has been introduced in stages. The first stage required local authorities to start supporting parents in schools to set up Parent Councils; the second stage saw these becoming operational on August 1st 2007. As part of our work to support this process, we produced a number of leaflets on Parent Councils, turned our Annual Conference into a workshop where we explained to parents the processes they had to go through in order to set up a Parent Council, and ran articles related to Parent Councils as the lead topic in issues of our newsletter Backchat from January onwards. Our Annual Conference was so over-subscribed that we ran a second, equally successful conference in January 2007 as well as a shortened version in Dundee for nearly 150 delegates. Throughout the year we were constantly called upon for advice by parents and headteachers in schools, particularly on the proper procedure for merging a PTA with a Parent Council. We established links with all the local authorities and ran a series of seminars for them explaining exactly what we do. We have remained in frequent dialogue with them about both general and specific problems. Recognising that Parent Councils would need public liability insurance but that their legal status was different from PTAs, we discussed with experts at Towergate Risk Solutions what changes would be needed to our membership insurance scheme so that Parent Councils could join it. We also reviewed and revised all our advice leaflets to ensure that they were relevant to Parent Councils as well as to PTAs. All this has involved the office in a huge amount of work, preparing advice and information, writing and producing leaflets and then posting material either on the website or, more conventionally, in paper form to schools.

BARRING AND VETTING

In 2006 the Scottish Executive introduced legislation to extend and streamline the barring and vetting requirements of the Protection of Children (Scotland) Act 2003 (POCSA) and to bring Scottish law into line with the law in England and Northern Ireland. SPTC staff gave evidence, both written and oral, during the passage of the legislation and joined with other charitable groups to ensure that the interests of volunteers, including parents in school, were properly considered. The Protection of Vulnerable Groups (Scotland) Act 2007 was passed prior to the election in May 2007, but is not expected to be fully implemented until 2009. Meantime SPTC continues to argue for improvements and greater clarity on the requirements contained in POCSA.

Disclosure remains a major source of confusion for parent groups in school. The main questions are when is disclosure required and who has to get it done? We feel confident in answering such inquiries, using the information in our advice leaflet on POCSA that was written with the help and approval of officers from the Scottish Executive and Disclosure Scotland, as we have been told that our leaflet is regarded as authoritative and referenced by others seeking advice and help in this area.

CURRICULUM REVIEW

We continue to be involved in various committees, discussing proposed changes to the Curriculum and Assessment system. This may seem like a short item, but as ongoing work it requires a lot of detailed attention.

MEMBERSHIP

This is a transition year in terms of membership. By the start of the summer holidays in June 2007 we had 1,451 PTAs/PAs or clubs/groups as members. (This is down slightly on last year when we had 1,479 members). These are all listed at the back of this report. However, since the summer holidays, a number of our PTA members have disbanded and joined their activities to the Parent Council. We have transferred their PTA membership to the Parent Council. Further to this, the following authorities: - Clackmannanshire, Dumfries & Galloway, East Lothian, Glasgow, Renfrewshire, Scottish Borders, Shetland, South Lanarkshire and Western Isles - who between them account for 783 schools, agreed, before the end of our reporting year, to pay for all their parent councils to join our membership (including insurance) scheme. Since then, a further six authorities, accounting for 710 schools, have similarly decided to pay for their Parent Councils to become part of the scheme.

INSURANCE

We continue to work competently within financial regulations, ably guided by our professional advisers at Towergate Risk Solutions.

THE OFFICE

As we reported in last year’s annual report, at the behest of our landlord, we were involved in plans to expand our office space. However, the then hoped-for completion date of October 2006 proved to be very optimistic. The work was not actually completed until March 2007 and the subsequent snagging problems were not dealt with until September. For six months the staff essentially worked in a building site and, for some of the time, were required to go to an office on a different floor for water and toilet facilities. They also had to re-locate the actual office, including all computing and telephone links, on two occasions. I have to record a considerable vote of thanks to the sons and husbands of the office staff who cheerfully moved everything on the required weekends and who also ensured that all electrical, telephone and IT connections were operational for the Monday morning.
Our email traffic (to sptc@sptc.info) continues to increase and we now send Backchat out to half our members electronically as well as in the more traditional paper form. More and more people are making use of our website www.sptc.info and Eleanor Coner, our Information Officer, spends a lot of time ensuring that the website is up-to-date and carries a wide range of information, from fundraising ideas to the latest on Parent Councils. There are no restricted areas on our website and anyone can access all the information and download our free advice leaflets etc. This is a conscious decision by SPTC in order to provide a general public service in accordance with the new requirements under Charity Law.
In order to accommodate potential Parent Council members we have made changes to our database. We took this opportunity to make other adjustments which had become desirable. Making changes like this is always a nerve-wracking business, particularly when the changes are to a system that is in current and constant use. We are extremely grateful to our IT expert from Dunbar Webdesign for ensuring that the changes were made without a hitch.
Lynda Grant takes her responsibilities as in-house expert on the 2006 Charity Law very seriously. She has attended a series of seminars to keep her knowledge up-to-date and she ensures that we take the necessary steps to comply with the legislation. Moreover, thanks to Lynda’s expertise, we were able to tell PTAs, who approached us because they were charities but wished now to disband and become a sub-committee of their Parent Council, what the proper procedure was.

SPTC is very fortunate in having such an able and dedicated office staff who take change and development in their stride and continue to sound calm and unruffled on the phone.

OFFICE HOURS

The official office hours are from 9.00 a.m. to 2.00 p.m. Monday to Friday, but there is usually someone around until 4.30 p.m. most days. Otherwise, messages left on the answerphone will be dealt with as soon as possible.

PUBLICATIONS

We continue to issue regular editions of our newsletter, Backchat, and the in-house production means that it’s very up-to-date. We have also improved its e-provision. We now send members a link to Backchat on the website so that they do not have to cope with downloading huge files and we have a special email-friendly version for contacts. Similarly our leaflets are all downloadable from our website as well as being available by post. All our material is available on request, free of charge.

HELP AND ADVICE

Our telephone helpline is available during office hours and we take calls on anything affecting any parent or teacher, whether they are from a member organisation or not. Not surprisingly the top topics have been police checks and Parent Councils, but there have also been the normal range of questions on topics as diverse as insurance, the use of a bouncy castle, handling money, the role of office bearers, course choice for SQA exams and the reasons for composite classes.

SURVEYS

This year we undertook one major survey of members which is still ongoing.

PTA Status: We surveyed all our PTA/PA members to find out how many and which ones are remaining completely independent, and how many and which have disbanded in order to work as a sub-committee of the Parent Council. Currently the response rate is 44% of whom just under half (46%) have told us that they are remaining as independent PTAs.

INVOLVEMENT

SPTC Directors and staff have been actively engaged in a number of national/local policy committee groups.

Audit Scotland Advisory Group on School Estate - Judith Gillespie
Edinburgh City Council SEN Forum - Miranda Harvey
Equal Opportunities Commission Advisory Group to the review of pay and conditions of classroom assistants - Eleanor Coner
Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS) Advisory Group - Eleanor Coner
National Qualifications Steering Group - Judith Gillespie
National Sexual Health Advisory Committee - Miranda Harvey
School College Partnerships Stakeholder Forum - Angela Anderson (Eleanor Coner is our representative as of 26th September 2007)
Scottish Council for Financial Education Advisory Group - Eleanor Coner
Scottish Executive Education Department (SEED) Working Group on Class Sizes - Judith Gillespie
SEED Data Access Panel - Judith Gillespie
Scottish Network for Parental Involvement in Children’s Learning - Susan McColl, then Eleanor Coner
Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) Board - Judith Gillespie
SCVO Intermediaries Group - Lynda Grant
SQA Advisory Committee - Steve McColl
SQA Internet Safety Project Steering Group - Eleanor Coner
Several SPTC Directors are on their local authority parent groups.

Changes from last year

The Scottish Forum on Education has now disbanded
The SCFE Working Group on PSE and the LTS Enterprise Group were short-life working bodies that have now ended
We no longer have a representative on the Scottish Joint Committee on Religious and Moral Education.

CONFERENCES

As usual there have been a number of conferences this year attended by SPTC members. These include conferences on dyslexia, leadership, child protection, charity law, healthy eating. The cost of many conferences is prohibitively high and we only attend those that are directly relevant to parents and parents’ concerns.

SPTC AND OTHER BODIES

This year we have had a telephone discussion with the Cabinet Secretary for Education and had meetings with officials from the Commission for Children and Young People, Her Majesty's Inspectorate for Education, Parenting Across Scotland, Scottish Executive, Scottish Qualifications Authority and Scottish School Board Association.

Judith Gillespie has delivered lectures on parents in schools to undergraduate and post graduate students at Glasgow University.

NCPTA

We continue to have very good links with our sister organisation in England - the National Confederation of PTAs. We have a free exchange of ideas and information and are not afraid to borrow good ideas from each other.

AND FINALLY

I have enjoyed my first year as Convener of SPTC. It has been interesting and informative to be at the heart of educational policy making and I like to think that we make a difference by arguing for the sensible tendency and for parents. In everything that SPTC does, the office staff play a very important role but my thanks also go to the dedicated band of volunteers who serve as directors, input their views from a range of different perspectives, engage in vigorous debate and represent SPTC at a wealth of conferences. During one of our meetings we realised that as SPTC was founded in 1947, we have been serving parents groups in schools for sixty years. There have been a lot of changes in that time, but SPTC has always adapted to change and now, with the formation of Parent Councils, we continue in our role of serving parents in school. We hope you think we do it well.

Return to previous page