Education cuts: 'Schools are saved but other areas will pay'

IT will come as a relief to teachers and parents – and, indeed, to all interested in maintaining educational standards in the city – that the council has bowed to pressure and abandoned proposals to trim 2.5 per cent from all school budgets.

As the News reports today, they have listened to headteachers who took the unusual step of lodging a collective protest against the cuts which were recommended by officials last December.

Then, they warned that jobs would be lost and that "serious and lasting damage" would be done to the educational system. Radically, they suggested that they would prefer to see more under-utilised schools close rather than cope with such large across-the-board cuts.

The council's coalition administration appears to have found a way to avoid doing either. No more schools are to be earmarked for closure, and the budget reductions will be restricted to a less onerous one per cent.

But it is not as if new money has magically appeared, so if the budget is to be balanced other areas must pay.

Like all council departments, Children and Families will still have to deliver overall savings of four per cent in the coming year. And the u-turn over school budgets will cost the council in the region of 3 million.

All that money will have to be found from other areas of expenditure, such as closures of community centres and cutbacks elsewhere. These will be no more popular with those who use them.

A sorry scandal

IT is unfortunate for MPs that on the very day Westminster sought to bring a degree of closure to the expenses scandal yet another tranche of claims were published.

While MPs should be reimbursed for costs involved in doing their jobs those in the Lothians have claimed between 32,000 and 79,000 a year, largely for office and staff allowances.

Sir Thomas Legg yesterday asked MPs to repay 1.1m in expenses they were not entitled to claim. Only some appear to be doing so willingly – perhaps in the hope that this might help restore public confidence. If so, that is wishful thinking.

This stain of this sorry scandal will not wash off easily. Many have already fallen on their swords and others will pay the price on polling day.

But the overall perception of MPs continuing to feast from a constantly dripping fat roast will not be helped by Ian Kennedy's Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority proposal for a 25 per cent pay rise for MPs.

With pay restraint being exercised across both the public and private sectors any move to hike up MPs' pay will be viewed as an attempt to compensate them for the expenses they have lost.

MPs must show some unusual restraint and kick this idea into touch.