Rejecting educational trusts...

I see from today's 'Herald' that Ronnie Smith, General Secretary of the teaching union EIS, is calling for the running of schools to be taken away from Scotland's 32 democratically elected local authorities and given over to quangos in the shape of 12 educational trusts.

Clearly what lies behind this proposal is the view that if schools were run by trusts they would in some way have greater protection from the cuts that local authorities are having to make in response to reduced funding from the Scottish Government. The experience of further and higher education institutions, which are directly funded by the Scottish Government, would suggest that this argument is somewhat naive.

The EIS General Secretary of course tries to advance a philosophical argument in favour of his Union's position.

He appears to be arguing that education is a national service and therefore all schools should operate on the basis of consistent national policies with no local flexibility. I totally reject this notion.

The delivery of education to our communities is fundamental to the role of local authorities and the purpose of local government. Indeed in the case of Inverclyde our whole social and economic strategy is underpinned by our commitment to giving our young people the best possible start in life to help lift many of them out of poverty. We should also not forget that most local councillors have a direct interest in ensuring that the education services we provide are of a high standard since our children and grandchildren are among the recipients of these services.

If you accept the logic of Mr Smith's argument then most, if not all, services would be removed from local authorities.

If education is a national service so by the same logic is social work. Why not therefore transfer social work to be run by appointed health boards?

If we are looking for consistent national standards why not transfer responsibility for local roads to Transport Scotland, which already manages the trunk roads network?

I could go on.

Mr Smith tells us that it would be important to ensure proper democratic accountability within the educational trusts so that local views and priorities are not overlooked, citing health boards as a possible blue print for how such trusts could operate.

Mr Smith would do well to ask the people of Inverclyde how accountable they feel that health boards are before before promoting such nonsense.

The fundamental point that Mr Smith is missing is that local authorities do not exist simply to deliver nationally agreed policies and priorities. We have a system of local government in Scotland not local administration.

Any political party that is considering removing education from local authority control would do well to think again. I am confident that this is something that would be opposed by the vast majority of councillors across the political spectrum.