Handbooks for schools face axe in budget cuts

Local authorities have had to provide parents with booklets every year since 1982, but education secretary Mike Russell says they are out of date and has launched a consultation.

The head of the school inspectorate welcomed the move and described school handbooks as an "anachronism". Headteachers said they were time-consuming and costly.

But parents have hit out at the loss of a vital channel of communication.Eileen Prior, executive director of the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, said: "Information should be available to parents as they require it and request it. It's not good enough to say it is online, because very many parents don't have easy online access.

"They don't have access to printers and even if they do, printer ink is expensive, and it is not realistic to expect parents to print off copies of 20 to 30-page handbooks.

The handbooks contain information on subjects such as transport facilities, meal provision, additional support for learning, school rules, enforcement of attendance, specialist provision and attainment in national qualifications.

Dr Bill Maxwell, senior chief inspector of HM Inspectorate of Education, said the booklets were introduced when the Conservative UK government backed parental choice - a system never implemented in Scotland.

He said: "They were built around a notion of giving parents information from which they could choose which school to send their children to.

"But a lot of the information in them is now needing looked at again. There are some obvious changes; for example they way we talk about exam attainment is going to change as a result of the new Curriculum for Excellence and the way we talk about primary attainment has already changed."

He said there are other ways in which information gets into the public domain, such as Scottish Schools Online, where school exam data is published.

Maxwell said: "For me the future might be a website for parents to log in to find out what they want to know about a school, perhaps backed up with the school printing items off for parents who don't have the internet at home.

"We should be looking at creative ways for making sure the right information gets through to parents as opposed to these rather prescriptive menus of statistics which were designed years ago."

However, he insisted all schools should be obliged to produce the information, but not necessarily in the hard copy format.

He said: "It could be done online. Perhaps the future is taking Scottish schools online.We should be looking beyond the school handbooks alone and at other ways of getting information to parents."

Jim Thewlis, president of headteachers' union School Leaders Scotland and headteacher at Harris Academy in Dundee, said producing 300 copies of the handbook would cost his school 2,000 this year.

With around 2,500 schools in Scotland, the money saved could amount to hundreds of thousands of pounds at a time when councils are facing harsh budget cuts.

Thewlis said: "We have to ask if a paper publication is the best way to communicate with parents given we are in an electronic age."

He said an electronic version, with background information about the school rather than exam results, would provide a chance to update parents more regularly over the course of their children's school lives.

A Scottish Government spokesman said: "Given the changes being implemented through Curriculum for Excellence, now is a good time to review school handbooks to ensure they are meeting parents' needs. We are consulting widely to ensure all views are taken into account."

Liz Smith, Conservative education spokeswoman, said parents must still have access to all the data, even if a hard copy version is scrapped. The consultation will close on 14 March and a report published by next summer with changes recommended in the autumn.