Richard Kerley: New set of masters no aid to education

As THE political parties are gearing up for an election in May, so too are the various interest groups, causes and lobbies that gather around the Scottish state.

Most recently, the various associations that represent teachers and headteachers have argued for changes in the organisation of school education in Scotland. The primary headteachers, secondary heads and, most recently, the EIS, the largest teachers' union, have all claimed that removing education from the control of local authorities would release resources, cut costs, enhance governance and generally improve matters.

Ronnie Smith, EIS general secretary, was particularly exercised about the degree to which, over the past few years, some councils have not followed Scottish government policies on reducing class sizes. The headteachers' organisations in their turn argued that heads of similar schools in different areas receive differing amounts of money to run their schools.

The governance solutions proposed by each of the organisations are broadly similar: remove the responsibility for supporting and running schools from Scotland's 32 councils and place first-line responsibility in the control of "about 12" education trusts or boards.

Although the EIS argues that such plans "warrant consideration", the union does not judge the proposal to be "self-evidently" - as the primary heads say - a better arrangement for the governance of school education.

If the argument is that money is tight in education and this provides one way to spread it further, I am sorry but the available evidence does not actually support such claims. If there is pressure on school education then it flows from wider forces and factors than councils squeezing schools and diverting money into bureaucracy.

School education represents a large slice of the budget of councils in Scotland and therefore a substantial element of the Scottish Government budget. The education spend of councils sits at around 40 per cent of their total budget, almost twice as much as the next largest service, social work. In 2008-9 this amounted to over 4.6 billion, is projected at 4.8bn in this fiscal year, and the figure has gone up in every year that we have records for.

But there is a curious phenomenon at work here, because while the cash value of budgets has gone up, the number of children has gone down. The picture for pupil numbers over the last decade is shown in the table (below right).That is a reduction in overall pupil numbers of 10 per cent in ten years, and the decline in the previous two decades was just as steep. If you wish to know why there are fewer schools than we used to have, and fewer teachers - and by extension fewer opportunities for probationers - then the answer is in the birth rate, the emigration rate, and the immigration rate, the end result of which is fewer children.

Another claim, made by headteachers in particular, is that different councils allow different amounts of money for similar schools and that some form of reorganisation would address this anomaly. It is not entirely clear how 12 or so different organisations would substantially alter the disparities that 32 have created, but that is their hope.

Actually the data shows that education, of all council services, is the most homogenised in both overall delivery form and expenditure. Compared with the wide variations found in services such as culture and sports, the consistency is marked. This is, historically, a "national service, locally administered". Consistency is not surprising: salary scales are set nationally for teachers in a way that they are not for other council employees. Material provisions are much the same in schools the length and breadth of the country, while the only real scope for cost variation is in items such as estates, power consumption, and maintenance.

This broad pattern of homogenisation shows in all data: schooling costs per capita of council population; primary spend per pupil; secondary spend per pupil. The chart (above) shows the pattern of primary spend per pupil in the year 2008-9. Most of the councils' primary spend hovers around the Scottish average of 4,800, and the real outliers are as we would anticipate - in Argyll and Bute, Eilean Siar, Orkney and Shetland . The same names are found amongst the secondary spending outliers. There are other minor variations: East Renfrewshire, with some very successful schools, does not spend much more than the average; North Lanarkshire spends more on primary and less on secondary than the average figures. But any argument that in some way there is a pattern of disadvantaging schools that can in some way be addressed by a reduction in the number of bodies running education is not supported by this data.

Any differences in school spending are not accounted for by support costs either, where the proportionate costs of support are not actually that great. In primary schooling Scotland-wide, support costs amount to a little under 3 per cent, in secondary 2.6 per cent.There is variation, with some of the smaller authorities appearing to incur greater support costs than others, but no consistent pattern, even in the more sparsely populated areas.

When we turn to the specific remedies proposed by the unions, then the argument that their preferred changes might help redirect money towards schools is even more open to question.

If we take a working proposition that "about 12" is the number of bodies that might run education, we can speculate that several of the existing geographies would survive any such cull. Highland, Fife and the three island councils have long historical legacies and would ferociously resist any boundary changes. That leaves 27 to squeeze into seven - a tight fit, and one guaranteed to generate both rivalries and resistance and costs.

It is also highly problematic to argue for a unilateral reduction in the number of bodies responsible for education when other lobby groups are calling for a different scale of reduction in the number of Scottish police forces - to either one or three - and the prospect of an overall reduction of the number of councils in Scotland is a clear possibility post-election.

The pattern of school organisation at a micro level drives the cost homogenisation that we can see across schooling in Scottish local government and the cost pressures that some schools feel. The standard pattern of primary education is essentially the same as it has been for years: one room, one class, one teacher - hence costs that are very similar whether there are 25 pupils in a class or five. The issue is not costs per classroom but the spare capacity within many parts of the schooling system.

Some 20 per cent of our primary schools are operating at under 50 per cent of capacity; 35 per cent of our secondaries are operating under 75 per cent capacity. Redistributing money used to support schools that are operating dramatically under capacity would save money and improve the effectiveness of the remaining schools.

The cause of budgetary pressure on schools is not the structure of education governance, nor the number of education authorities, so the solution cannot be found there either.

For solutions to be found to the problem identified by some teachers' organisations, other changes need to be considered and these will be painful for schools, for councils, for communities, and for teachers. And they will, inevitably, include school closures.

• Richard Kerley is Professor of Management at Queen Margaret University. He will be taking part in a round table discussion at the Scottish Parliament's education and lifelong learning committee tomorrow.