Children’s Services in Stirling

I have been promising for some time to add more information on the Children’s Services budget. What we have provided up to now has been very general so I thought that it would be useful to try to break the budget down even further.

In 2007/08 the budget that was devolved to schools was £37.93 million. The budget allocated to schools, but not devolved to them was £6.6 million. The reason for the split is that it does not make sense to devolve all of the budgets to schools. If schools cannot make decisions about spending on these budgets, there is no real benefit in having them devolved. There are also some budgets that are better held centrally. Covering for long term absence is a good example. This is not something that schools can control, but it could be very expensive for them, so it is often better for that funding to be held centrally.

There were a number of other areas of spending on primary and secondary education. These included Gaelic education (£34k), Primary swimming (£95k), Footwear and Clothing Bursaries (£210k), Transport (£1.27m), Specialist Teachers, the visiting teachers in primary schools who cover music, art etc. (£740k), Schools ICT Services (£188k). We also hold property budgets and costs for compensatory pensions which amounted to £1.742m.

We paid £172k to the McLaren Leisure Centre. This provides essential facilities for McLaren High School and a further £3.8m for the PPP costs of Balfron and McLaren High schools.

We spent £7.05m on our Early Years provision. £5.39m went on the early years’ centres, which provide extended support for children, and on our nursery classes attached to schools and on child care(£396k).

£398k went to partner nurseries providing places for 3 and 4 year olds. We spent £605k on the Sure Start/Childcare Strategy, £206k on Out of School Care, which is split between direct provision(£106k) and grants to partners(£100k).

We spent £211k on play schemes and £240k on playground maintenance.

Our spening on social work was £5.64million - £509k on purchasing services from agencies (Barnardo’s , £275k and National Children’s Homes, £113k). We also contributed to Women’s Aid(£64k) and other agencies(£57k).

The cost of the Brucefield Children’s Home including the facility that we have in Glasgow Road, was £495k; Fostering and Adoption services  cost £1.575m, while we spent £592k supporting children with disabilities, including payments to carers(£407k) and staff costs(£185k).

Our Area Teams and the Emergency Duty Team cost £2.348m and Youth justice/Through and Aftercare cost £337k.

All of these provide essential services to some of the most vulnerable families in our communities.

Educational support, as well as care, for vulnerable young people took up £8.75m of our budgets and this is an area where we are projecting an overspend. Speech and Language Therapy cost £210k, Transport, £770k and Escorts and Support for Learning Assistants, £1.6m.

We had a budget of £2.67m for the establishments that we have to support young people with additional learning needs. We also had a budget of £3.50m for the Multi-agency Resources Group. This is the group that has to decide on provision for young people who may need expensive packages of care and/or education. Sometimes the group has to deal with orders from the Children’s Panel for particular placements for young people.

There are two further elements of the budget that provide support to schools and pupils. These are ERIS(Educational Resources and Information Service, which can provide additional resources for schools who may not be able to buy these for themselves or who may only require the resources at particular times of the year) which cost £153k and Psychological Services, which cost £499k.

Our central costs are very small by comparison. We spent £1.6m on staff and property costs for Viewforth and £0.5m for Drummond House. We also spent £710k on quality assurance and support to schools and £121k on essential training for Social Work staff.

I hope that this makes clear the difficult choices that face the service when there is a need to reduce spending. The budget is large, but most of the spending is unavoidable. We have to provide nationally agreed staffing levels and statutory services. We have to meet nationally agreed pay and pension deals and provide agreed class sizes.

As ever I am happy to discuss these issues further, but I am also hoping that the new year will bring more interest in the new proposals for the curriculum and some of the other key areas in Children’s Services.

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The debate on this has been continuing through conversations with parents and letters to Councillors. It is clearly a major issue of concern, especially as we approach the time of year when the Council’s budget is set.

I am going to post a breakdown of how we spend our current budget. I just need a wee bit of training and support to get the diagrams on to the site. Then you will be able to see, and comment on, the way that we spend the money that we get. We cannot control the total amount of money that we receive. That is a decision taken by the Council. It looks likely that this will be a difficult year for the budget and there will be all sorts of competing priorities, but the Council has always been supportive of Children’s Services in Stirling.

I also promised that I would look at the way that the overall occupancy figures for schools were calculated. The figure seems to be based on the occupancy across the whole school estate and I am not sure how that would affect our figures on this. I remain genuinely convinced that the very high rates of occupancy that we have in many of our schools does reduce our costs. However, I do not think that this is the main point of debate. The key issues are whether or not we devote enough of our budget directly to schools and pupils and whether or not the budget that we get is reasonable given the need to address other priorities and meet the ambitions that parents and educators have for our young people.

I hope to post the budget breakdown early next week at the latest.

04/12/07

 “I apologise for the delay in posting this breakdown of the budget.  I appreciate that it will need some further explanation and I will cover that in my next post”.

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I have received three comments reacting to the statistics on the amounts spent per pupil in Stirling schools. All three are concerned because the spend on primary pupils has been classed as the lowest in Scotland and the spending on secondary pupils is also below the Scottish average. These figures were recently published by the Scottish Government .

Naturally, these figures cause alarm.

There are straightforward reasons that go some way towards explaining the level of spend. The figures are influenced by all of the costs associated with a pupil, including the costs of buildings and staff. Councils with high levels of occupancy in their schools are more economic and this has a big influence on the costs per pupil. If you have significant numbers of schools with low numbers of pupils your costs will be higher. Stirling has many schools close to 100% occupancy. This means that staff costs are more economic and staffing is more efficient. It has an impact on the number of composite classes, for example. These classes cannot take more than 25 pupils, whereas classes involving pupils who are all at the same stage can take higher numbers.

We have schools in Stirling where the cost per pupil is well above the Scottish average because they are in rural areas with very small numbers of pupils. They still need a building, a headteacher, visiting teacher support, administrative support, telephone links, Internet access etc. In one such school, the costs per pupil were over £13,000.

We have also been able to employ a lot of young, enthusiastic, newly qualified teachers who bring a great deal to our children, but who also cost less to employ.

This does not explain the situation fully. The Council, like any other, makes choices about its spending. Stirling Council has chosen to invest heavily in improving its secondary schools. This is a huge investment, but it will result in Stirling having one of the best secondary school estates in Scotland. It has also invested significantly in early education where it has tended to spend above the Scottish average.

One of the comments made, suggests that the fabric of our primary schools is poor. I don’t think that this is borne out by the Inspection reports on our schools. We do have schools that are a priority for improvement, but these are being addressed. We also have excellent examples of rebuilt and refurbished primary schools and early years centres. Balfron, Buchlyvie, Killearn and Newton are good examples of these. The new campus at Raploch will provide two new primary schools, a new early years centre and a state of the art special school. There is much to be proud of here and that is reflected in the recent inspection report on Stirling Council. It is also reflected in many of the school reports that we receive.

Inevitably, I would like to have more money to spend on Children’s Services. What Director would not? If we had more funding, I would like to be able to direct it to give schools more flexibility and support in addressing the needs of individual pupils. I think that schools are usually the best judges of how that could best be done, so the priority would be to get more funding into their budgets. We also need to make provision for the very youngest children. We can make a huge difference if we can support families from the earliest possible stages. We are often spending money to contain problems and difficulties that could have been prevented by much earlier intervention.

This is very much an initial response to a very genuine concern. I would be happy to continue this discussion.

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The proposals for A Curriculum for Excellence came largely from the National Debate on Education that was held around 2003. In that debate,  people argued that the curriculum that schools and young people had to cover was too crowded. They also argued that it did not really give young people the skills and abilities that they needed for life in general and employment in particular.

This led to a review of the curriculum and a set of recommendations. The most important of these was that the curriculum should be based on developing four “capacities” in learners. These were the capacities:-

- to be successful learners,

-to be effective contributors to society,

-to be responsible citizens

-to be confident individuals.

Most of the discussion that there has been about this major change has been within the teaching profession. While that is important, I think that it has tended to miss out other key partners in education. In particular,  it seems to have missed out parents.

In Stirling, we think that the nature and quality of the experience that learners have is the most important factor in determining their success. In other words, how they learn is more important than what they learn. Knowledge is expanding and changing so quickly that the vital skill is learning. We are trying to build on the best practice that we have in our schools and to create more space and flexibility in the curriculum. We want to give young people a more varied experience and try to ensure that the curriculum is tailored to individual needs to a greater extent. We want learning to be more active and for students to have more independence.

I could go on and say much more about this and would be happy to do so, if you wanted that. I hope that I have said enough to start a discussion.

I am aware that many parents want a more traditional, academic curriculum. Some are afraid of change and hate the idea that their children might be guinea pigs for new ideas and untested programmes. Some are concerned about their children getting the results that they need for higher education and want very focused teaching that pushes them through that process.

What do you think?

This seems to me to be a really essential debate and, if it is not being opened up nationally, I would like to see it being opened up here. Please let me have your views or requests for more information.

I look forward to hearing from you.

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Hello

This is my first attempt at a blog. As the Director of Children’s Services my aim is to use this blog as a means of communicating with different stakeholders involved with children and young people.

I intend to initiate various discussions/topical debates through the blog. Through time there will be various sections relating to different aspect of Children’s Services.

Children’s Services provide education, care and support services to meet the needs of children, young people and families.

The services are co-ordinated and integrated where possible, designed around the needs of children and families.

The core of the service is the statutory provision of education for children and young people and the promotion of care and welfare services for children and their families as required by the various Education, Children and Social Work legislation.

Around the core are clustered other services designed to make statutory provision more effective.

I look forward to the various online discussions that will occur.

David Cameron 

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