Star letter published from Pete Gregson in the National on 5th April 2022: Bringing back local education authorities could save £500m per year | The National
I HAVE to take issue with P Keightley from Glasgow in Tuesday’s National who thinks that Scotland’s councils are too big. This reader thinks that with 32 councils there are too few; there is a suggestion we should look to Norway with 422 councils?
The problem with this thinking is to do with the officers we’ll need to run these extra councils. Edinburgh, for example, has 17,000 staff for a population of 450,000. That’s roughly one bureaucrat for every 26 people. If we moved to more councils, that means more bureaucrats. These bureaucrats need paying – say £30,000 a pop. Every time you add a bureaucrat, you lose a schoolteacher, or two binmen. There is an innate tendency for council HQs to add staff, usually at the expense of frontline services, because corporate management teams like to grow. And these corporate managers are expensive – Andrew Field, chief executive at City of Edinburgh Council, gets paid £175,000 a year, more than the Prime Minister. So – more councils, more chief executives, less money for the coalface.
My case is that we should be calling for the regional delivery of schools, roads and transport services. I argue that we should not have 32 unitary authority council education and transport departments, but nine regional shared service boards. Schools are largely autonomous – and regional transport departments make a lot more sense for joined-up thinking on roads networks across a wide area, with subsidised bus journeys not stopping at city council boundaries, for example.
The money saved by such a move would mean that existing city councils had a vast amount more to spend, as the number of bureaucrats would be lower due to economies of scale. Indeed, this was a model we followed until 1996, when the regions were disbanded by the Tory UK government; they thought them too left-wing. In those days we had proportionately more money to spend on school teachers and local services (delivered by the district councils) because the regions provided economies of scale. As soon as we moved to unitary authorities in 1996, costs mushroomed. For a while, back in 2018, I felt the SNP were listening, for after I had submitted a petition to parliament in 2016 calling for this (PE1606: Forcing Scottish councils to collaborate regionally to provide education and transport services) and gone round every hustings I could find, trying to bend the ear of SNP candidates, regional school boards appeared as an aspiration in the 2016 SNP manifesto.
In November 2016, MSPs closed my petition, stating “there are current and forthcoming consultation opportunities that will allow the issues raised by the petitioner to be taken forward.”
Six years later nothing has changed. So much for parliamentary “consultation”. Readers can find full details on my website www.kidsnotsuits.com/fix-local-government-parliamentary-petition
I have used Scottish Government data to calculate that if the merger meant going back to local education authorities (LEAs) based on the old regional councils, ie pre-1996, it would save Scotland £500 million per annum. That’s just for schools – it doesn’t include roads. Think how much we could reduce classroom sizes if we did this. £500m would allow us to double the number of teachers; instead of classes of 30 pupils, we could half those classroom sizes to 15.
Result? Happier teachers, happier pupils. And our young people would benefit massively – growing into the kind of active citizens that P Keightley feels we currently lack. It’s not about having more bureaucrats, it’s about having brighter, more confident and more engaged citizens. And moving on from a school system that discourages that, which presently churns out so many who regard themselves as failures. It’s all about education, isn’t it?
Pete Gregson
Edinburgh
FROM 2017:
Only the Scottish Government can force Councils to work regionally on sharing services
The Kids not Suits petition on the Scottish Parliament website: PE1606: Forcing Scottish councils to collaborate regionally to provide education and transport services.
Why Support the Petition?
Efficiencies could lead to staff being redeployed out of the back office and into the front line. Not 32 unitary authority Council education – and transport departments – but 9 regional shared service boards.
Scotland has a higher numbers of public sector workers per head than most of Europe, but services that are no better. Why? Because 32 local authorities serve a population of 5.2 Million- 162,500 people per Council. Looking at just upper tier councils delivering roads and schools, England has 152 Councils for 57.5 Million – that’s 378,290 people per Council. Thus we have double the number of Councils per head for big services; every authority requires admin costs, so we Scots pay twice as much for the back office as those living south of the border. Scotland suffers from duplication and inefficiency in having so many back office Council staff for so few people.
The petition is clear: No staff would be made compulsorily redundant as a result of Councils sharing education and roads services; they will be redeployed out of the back office into the front line. the result would be reduced class sizes and better transport services. Other shared service savings from those taking early retirement or employment elsewhere, to be ploughed into building more, small, schools and fixing roads.
If we’d done this in December there would have been no need for Councils to cut their budgets due to austerity.
Fix Local Government. Anyone in the world can sign. Due to IT problems, Parliament has made an arrangement with Kids not Suits, that if we collect signatures they will add them. We are compiling a list of names- make sure yours is on it! To add yours, sign above.
What the petition proposes is not new
Roads and schools were delivered in Scotland on a regional basis until 1996, when the 7 Regional Councils and 2 Island Authorities were abolished by the UK Tory Government: they were seen as bastions of socialism. The new 32 Unitary Authorities were based on the pre-existing District Councils and took over the delivery of education and transport.
Just 3 years later, the new Labour Government established a Scottish Parliament.
The new Unitary Authorities went on a spending spree and duplicated the Departmental structures of the region at local level, thus multiplying back office costs instantly. In Lothian, four unitary authorities were created and so Education and Transport admin costs increased fourfold. More reasons why Councils sharing services is a good idea can be found on the Parliament website at www.scottish.parliament.uk/gettinginvolved/petitions/PE01600-PE01699/PE01606_BackgroundInfo.aspx where most of the arguments in favour can be found.
In addition, this document published by the UK Government in 1995 is helpful: The Working of Joint Arrangements 1995 – click to open. It observes that reforms of local government in England have led to the creation of many joint arrangements, where district or borough councils work together to provide specific services. However, some types of joint arrangement work more effectively than others. This study, by Tony Travers , Stephen Biggs and George Jones of the London School of Economics, looked at local government in the six metropolitan areas and London to test how existing joint provision works.
Political Support for this Petition
The first time politicians commented publicly on this petition was at the East Edinburgh hustings in Northfield on the 7th April. The candidate’s responses can be seen in the 10 minute clip at https://youtu.be/GX023_oKDEM
Whilst there seems to be some support for the regional provision of transport, there is resistance to the same for schools. Kids not Suits suspects that for many politicians, their gut reaction will be to say no to this part of the petition. But there are big reasons why they should say yes.
Reasons to Regionalise Schools Delivery
In order to see why this should be supported, it would be useful to give some background to the petitioner. Pete Gregson worked for Lothian Region Education Dept from 1984 as a part-time youth worker until 1988, and latterly he was funded by them for the project work he did in schools with pupils suffering social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. As manager of a region-wide voluntary organisation (Young People Speak Out) he worked with the Region and thereafter with the 4 City Councils that replaced it – until he moved to Edinburgh Council in 2005. He was a witness to additional bureaucracy that abolishing the Region created.
By visiting other pages on Kids not Suits website at Edinburgh Schools Deserve Better and Running Education on a Regional Basis it will be possible to understand other benefits – not least the value of small infant’s class sizes – www.kidsnotsuits.com/campaigns/p2p3-class-sizes .
There has been widespread political support for reducing infant’s class sizes. Since 2010, Kids not Suits has argued this can be best achieved by taking teachers out of the back office and into the front line. Here is a protest at Edinburgh City Council Chambers in August 2010 calling for just this:
Politicians attending the launch of Kids not Suits at Edinburgh City Chambers in Aug 2010 were Cllr Paul Godzik (Labour), Robin Harper MSP (Greens) and David McLetchie MSP (Conservative). They joined the KnS call for teachers to get out of the back office and into the front line to create smaller class sizes. Adversity makes strange bedfellows. All united in their opposition of the Lib Dem Education Convener, who was in power at the time with SNP support.
Financial Savings
The KnS petition argues that by forcing Lothian’s four Councils to fund and run Lothian’s schools through a region-wide joint board, vast sums of cash would be saved. Edinburgh alone spends 39% of its £1Bn budget on education. Huge sums are kept at Waverly Court HQ for admin purposes.
The Dept that was Children & Families employs 45% of all Council staff: it has more non-teaching staff employed than teachers; there are 3,436 teachers employed and 3,380 others (see staffing summary in CEC Key Facts 2015-16). These others are classroom assistants, nursery and early years staff, community centre staff, educational psychologists and therapists, disability workers, Active Schools Co-ordinators, Youth Music Initiative Co-ordinators and instructors, Children & Family Centre staff; Early Years Centres staff; Residential Care Officers; domestic staff and social workers. Also included in these “others” are 524 staff involved in back-room services and management. Some of these “others” will have teaching qualifications, but will not be employed as teachers.
Of these 524 staff, 190 are managers (we know this ‘cos Pete counted them when he worked there).
Just looking at Edinburgh alone, the scheme would see these 524 staff redeployed back into teaching. If they didn’t want to return to the classroom (in either an admin, classroom assistant or teaching capacity) then they may succeed in finding a place at the new region-wide education authority.
The petitioner’s aim is to see much smaller class sizes and lots of new schools being built- and smaller ones, too. His son is at Craigmount High, a badly-designed PFI factory of 1300 pupils, with huge classes, where bullying is rife and crowd control the best most teachers can hope to achieve when dealing with the “less motivated” pupils.
Anyway, he proposes a means of giving teachers the resources to enjoy life in small classes in well-resourced schools, without being hassled by meaningless directives and bureaucrats from HQ – when most of the time they can organise their own training. Under Lothian Region, schools were run more effectively than they are under the Unitary Authorities- schools were comparatively better resourced in those days and teachers enjoyed teaching more. The Lothian-wide teacher training and support run from the Dean Centre by the professional education advisors based there worked like a dream. Admin on catchment areas and placements was run from Torphichen St.
Schools still had loads of problems with tricky teenagers, true (Pete worked with many) – but they probably got better youth work support in those days as well.
Will you help him bring those golden days back to Scotland? Read more on the petitioners arguments for regionalising education and the links to SPICE data that informs his calculations, by clicking here.
The news that Edinburgh Council paid £100M too much for badly designed PFI schools only makes the case for properly resourced and managed regional boards even stronger. For a joint Board, in that it would be controlled by 4 different Councils, would impose greater (not less) political scrutiny of contracts such as PFI. For every single Cllr serving on a joint board would know they are accountable to the whole authority that appointed them and that their every decision would be heavily scrutinised by their Council colleagues.
Other Websites- Links
If you want to view the petitioner’s proposal to Edinburgh to share services with other Lothian Councils to save cash through reducing duplication, please click on Council Budget Challenge
The Evening News and Scotsman carried opinion pieces from the petitioner calling for Councils to share services on 16th Dec 2015 “Shared services way forward for councils“.
On 24th April there was an indication that the SNP were moving forward on the regional delivery of schools: The Herald article “Secret Scottish government plans to shake-up schools system” said “The Scottish Government has held private discussions about creating new regional education boards to help deliver sweeping changes to the country’s schools system….”
Unison View: e-mail to Kids not Suits
“We are not opposed to shared services in principle and have supported such initiatives when appropriate. We agree that some services are best delivered ‘regionally’. For example, some purchasing initiatives and we are in favour of pooling or merging pension investments.
However, we have some serious reservations about shared services and have successfully opposed some initiatives. Most recently in the Clyde valley and the Stirling/Clacks plan. The business case often doesn’t stack up and far from saving money they often just move costs around – mostly onto operational staff an experience I have also encountered in our private sector employers who tried this approach. This is particularly the case with initiatives that seek to create large back office services. The member survey in our report ‘The Front Line Starts Here’ makes this point well….
We have a strong preference for public service reform that starts from the bottom up rather than top down solutions like shared services.
I appreciate that you might not agree, but I hope that explains our position.”
– Dave Watson, Head of Policy and Public Affairs, UNISON Scotland