Transforming Children’s Services: All Key Recommendations Approved
Thursday, December 18 2008
Scottish Borders Council (SBC) today approved recommendations that will transform the way it delivers services to children and young people, and their families.
Speaking after the Council meeting, Councillor Catriona Bhatia, Executive Member for Education, said: “The decisions made today will shape the future of education in the Borders for a generation. Positive, but at times difficult, decisions have been made for the right reasons: to ensure that the education and well-being of children in all schools is paramount. Our new structures as they evolve and settle down will provide schools with greater development capacity. This will help us build on our strengths and enable us to maximise on the benefits from the Curriculum for Excellence.”
The most far-reaching of the 133 recommendations approved include:
- Establishment of a new integrated Additional Needs Service, that will bring together children’s services from Social Work and Education’s Additional Needs teams. The new service will report to the Director of Social Work and be led by a chief officer with a social qualification.
- This new service will be delivered through five locality based additional needs teams, with more specialised services delivered through five central teams.
- The integrated assessment framework, developed by SBC with its partners, will be used for all additional needs assessment and provide a more cohesive information base for professionals and remove the need for children to undergo multiple assessments.
- Removal of class commitments for all primary headteachers and a reduction in the number of headteachers to 42 across the authority’s 65 primary schools. Use of shared headships will enable all headteachers to focus on leadership and school improvement.
- Primary and secondary schools will be reorganised into six Learning Communities to facilitate cross-school working and development of the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE).
- A reduction in the number of primary principal teachers (PTs) – to 54 but no reduction in the number of class committed teachers. Each PT will have the equivalent of one day non teaching time a week for management duties in their schools and across their learning communities and to work on the development of a Curriculum for Excellence. This shift from PTs to Leaders of Learning will increase the development capacity of schools.
- Secondary headteachers to have flexibility within their devolved school management budgets to determine their school’s management structures. This could lead to a reduction in PT or depute posts.
Councillor David Raw, Executive Member for Social Work, said: “Our new integrated service will provide children and families with help when they need it and where they need it most. It will enable staff in Social Work and Education to work as a single team, helping every child to reach their potential, while strengthening our capacity to keep children safe.”
Talking about the increased use of shared headships, Councillor Bhatia added: “I can understand many of the concerns raised by parents through the recent engagement process but having seen shared headships in operation, I know that they can operate successfully but as with single headships, they do need to be monitored and managed effectively. We will be supporting schools through the transition stage and using the best practice models we have developed over the past 10 years as the starting point for our more detailed discussions with schools in the New Year.
Implementation plans will now accelerate and proposals will be shared with parents and staff early in 2009.
A number of strategies will be employed to deal with the significant number of changes to staff. These include
§ Job matching
§ Temporary positions (acting-up) and secondments will be reviewed.
§ Redeployment (transfer) of existing staff
§ Voluntary Severance
§ Early retirement
§ General staff turnover
§ Compulsory redundancy will only be used as a last resort
A report on implications for individual staff will be presented to Council in early 2009 once consultations with union bodies have been undertaken on a new protocol to manage the transfer of existing staff to new structures.
Only three recommendations out of the 136 put forward by the Directors of Education and Social Work Services were rejected by Council. The rejected recommendations cover the reintroduction of charges for privilege lifts; a property maintenance helpdesk and production of material to promote school meals.
Work is continuing on the final element of the project which covers the transformation of Community Services and a report will be presented to Council on this area during 2009.
A list of recommendations approved by Council can be downloaded from the Council website: www.scotborders.gov.uk/tcs.
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