Ross councillor says teachers swamped with 'nonsense'
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COMPLAINTS from overburdened head teachers have sparked calls for a major re-think on the role of council officials.
Highland Council’s deputy leader Alasdair Rhind believes officials should be spending more time dealing with "the bureaucratic nonsense being heaped on head teachers" instead of slaving over council reports.
The Tain and Easter Ross councillor said the energy that went into writing up some reports for committees was "a sheer and utter waste" of officers’ time because some of the data was "no good to anyone".
But Drew Millar, the council’s new education committee chairman, called for caution, saying many reports served an important democratic function and any decision to scrap them would need to be taken carefully.
The call for change comes weeks after the council’s head of care and learning Bill Alexander held emergency meetings with head teachers and concluded that their workload was "unsustainable".
He said many head teachers were working 70 hours per week "just to keep the show on the road" and they still did not believe they were covering all the bases.
Weary head teachers also attended workshops with councillors and some revealed they only spend 20 per cent of their week teaching.
The rest was taken up with administration and bureaucratic paperwork.
Councillor Rhind said it was not practical for officials to be writing reports when they could be providing a vital helping hand.
He takes particular umbrage at reports compiled for the council’s area committee meetings, including school overview reports.
Mr Rhind said: "Some of those reports cost hundreds and hundreds of pounds and are of no benefit to anyone. I will be speaking to my colleagues about this going forward about this because I feel it would be better for the officers to be working supporting the head teachers in those schools that are in desperate need of support because of all the bureaucratic nonsense that’s heaped on them by Highland Council and the Scottish Government."
Meanwhile, overview reports for schools in Ross and Cromarty will no longer be debated in open forum after councillors agreed to discuss their contents in closed meetings.
Until last week, they were dealt with in open forum by the Skye Ross and Cromarty area committee which meets quarterly in Dingwall.
The debates were also broadcast on the council’s website for public scrutiny.
But they will now be discussed by councillors at private ward business meetings after members agreed that while the data was "very valuable" it was more for "local consumption".
However, those meetings are not held in public, journalists are not permitted to attend and will not have access to written reports.
Councillor Millar supported the committee’s decision, sbut suggested that at least part of the meetings should be in public.
The suggestion has been fed into a current review of the council’s democratic processes and a decision will be made in due course.
