Speech in the Scottish Parliament

Schools management

I confess that I feel slightly sorry for East Lothian Council, because not only has it unwittingly garnered the support of the Tory party, which must be a great shock to it, but it finds itself at the epicentre of a debate on a policy that does not actually exist.

As the council has made clear, its trust idea is not fully formed yet.

When I first heard about it, it seemed to me that it was more a pragmatic response to financial pressures, similar to the establishment of leisure trusts across Scotland.

I hope that I do not do the council a disservice in saying that.

Elizabeth Smith made clear that lying behind the Tory enthusiasm for trusts and having a wider debate on them in Scotland is the old chestnut of creating a marketplace for schools in Scotland.

There is no one more sceptical about that kind of policy than me.

There is no international evidence that that kind of policy raises education standards. Indeed, the evidence all runs in the opposite direction—tomes of OECD evidence testify to that.

Does that mean that the status quo in Scotland is right in all respects?

The emphatic answer is no, in my view.

I have made it clear previously in the chamber that there are too many local education authorities; I would move to having a more regional structure—I speak very personally on that.

I would hope that, in such a structure, local authorities would create education boards that could co-opt on to them other interests representing, for example, parents, further and higher education, trade unions, headteachers and business, which would allow more people to participate in and support our education system.

I very firmly believe that it is necessary to devolve more authority to headteachers.

David McLetchie: Will the member take an intervention?

Peter Peacock: With the greatest of respect, I will not.

I want to develop my argument.

I will not reveal too much, but it would be a mistake to think that ministers always win the battles inside their departments or in the system.

When I was a minister, I moved devolution to headteachers a bit further forward, but I did not get as far as I wanted to.

With the benefit of hindsight, I very much regret that.

However, there has never been a better time than now to move more authority to headteachers.

The calibre of our headteachers is truly outstanding.

We should remember that that has not always been the case.

Only in the past seven or eight years have headteachers had any training or qualifications to do their job, which is an astonishing fact.

Now, headteachers are better qualified and prepared.

In my judgment, they need not only greater control over their budgets but real control over staffing.

They need to move away from the standardised way in which staffing seems to emerge in our system.

For example, a school of a certain size tends to get so many physics teachers, physical education teachers and so on.

Much more discretion is needed on that aspect.

As I travelled around the country, I used to find a worrying sameness in Scottish secondary schools.

Obviously, they are not entirely the same, but there is no real expectation, particularly in our secondary sector, that any one school should be particularly different from another. There are no rules about that, but there are unwritten conventions that clearly bind the system.

Why is that the case?

There is no legal impediment to freedom.

In fact, our schools are legally completely free to do different things on the curriculum, staffing and the like, but they tend to conform.

That is partly due to the inspection system and how it is interpreted, not necessarily how it works.

However, schools also like to keep in a comfort zone with one another and never step too far beyond the boundaries.

It is the same with local authorities.

I remember that North Lanarkshire Council was one of the very few local authorities in my time that pushed the boundaries and broke the conventions—thank goodness that it did so.

I also found very few schools that tried to break the conventions and the boundaries, although the highly successful St Modan's in Stirling was one that did.

For those reasons, we created as an experiment or trial, but a promising one, the schools of ambition programme.

We wanted to break the barriers and say to schools that, if they were given authority and autonomy, they could be different and be the schools that they wanted to be.

That programme gave headteachers complete discretion on budgets, which was new

It tried to provide more colour, variety and creativity in the system.

I very much regret that the Government ended the programme, and I hope that, as part of the present process, Mike Russell will reconsider it.

It was only a first step towards creating greater variety.

All that is entirely consistent with the modern curriculum for excellence and the desire for more curriculum freedom in our school system.

There is plenty of scope for change in some of those regards.

I emphasise that I am talking about devolution to headteachers, not devolution to schools, which are very different things

I have never detected any thirst among parents to be more involved in the governance of their schools.

Indeed, the opting-out experiment failed because of that.

The way forward will involve the new parent councils, which are less constrained than the school boards were, working in partnership with teachers and headteachers who have more authority.

Is there still a role for local authorities in that world?

I think that there is.

Why?

There are some obvious reasons, which are to do with economies of scale.

Why would a headteacher want to organise a specific transport system or a specific school meals system for their school, or hold budgets for major maintenance projects? It makes sense for that to be done at local authority level.

In addition, councils continue to require to perform pay bargaining functions.

More than that, local authorities exercise trouble shooting functions on a daily basis to sort out nitty-gritty problems that the public often do not see.

Not every headteacher is brilliant—things go wrong and someone needs to intervene to protect the public interest.

Local authorities can do that.

Local authorities need to develop a greater ability to spot the next generation of school leaders, whom they should nurture so that we get the benefit of their skills.

Induction and support for probationers should be organised more effectively than happens at the moment.

Local authorities need to do a range of activities, but does the balance need to shift towards headteachers?

In my view, yes.

Every system needs checks and balances.

To me, the debate is about adjusting the balance.

If we want to improve the educational experience, we should not look just at governance; it is not a magic bullet.

We should look at investing in our teachers, school leadership and self-evaluation, which the Finns do, as Michael Russell said.

Part of that mix should involve giving headteachers more discretion.

However, there is no single, quick answer to all the problems in Scottish education.

A mix of measures is required, and governance is only a small part of that mix.

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