NORTHERN IRELAND FORUM

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EDUCATION COMMITTEE

Thursday 26 September 1996

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MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

on

EDUCATION ADMINISTRATION

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Witnesses:

Mr R Farrow and Ms G McKinley

(Library and Information Services Council for Northern Ireland)

The Chairman: Thank you very much for coming. You are very welcome.

The Education Committee was set up as a result of a debate in early July. The resolution was that we would invite the Minister responsible for Education to put his proposed directive on hold until the Committee had formulated some form of report.

Please proceed as you wish.

Mr Farrow: Thank you very much, Mr Chairman. I am Russell Farrow, and I am here as Honorary Secretary of the Library Information Services Council of Northern Ireland. I shall call that LISC from now on.

There is a little hand-out which simply explains what LISC is — I do not want to go into a great length here today. My colleague is Gail McKinley. Ms McKinley is our executive officer of the council. I apologize for our Chairman, Mr Norman Russell from Queen's, who is unable to be present today.

I should make it clear at the outset that I am also Chief Librarian of the Western Board, but it is for LISC that we appear here today, not for any individual board. Of course we do have a fair idea of the library needs and structures of the boards, and we will be very happy to answer any questions members have in that field if we possibly can.

I would like to say something about LISC. We did send a short written submission when we thought we would just be talking in general terms about libraries. We did not realize at the time that we would be so focused on the reorganization, but LISC represents and has membership in virtually every library and information provider in Northern Ireland, public, professional, academic, government, special business and voluntary.

There are over 50 separate individual organizations in membership, and our influence we hope is much like that of the Forum. We are only empowered to persuade, to encourage, to warn and to support. We can influence and we do research. As LISC we are not empowered to run library services, or to direct those who do, but we are generally consulted on matters of strategy, co-operation or legislation, and we have panels and working parties in a variety of fields.

We would like to say that we very much appreciate the chance to be here today, and what we would appreciate, if there is more time at a later date and when we have a less hurried agenda, is a chance to say something about libraries in general and the contribution they might make.

The Chairman: Your request is noted and can be followed up.

Mr Farrow: We do appreciate that the focus of your interest today is the proposed reorganization of the education-and-library-board system, so we will simply focus on that and talk about the link between education and libraries through the boards.

First, we would like to stress that the link between libraries and education has generally been a happy and successful one. There have been good times and not so good, but compared with pre-board days library services have improved dramatically, whether we measure them by usage, by staff, by the range of services provided, or even by the buildings and facilities.

So, we involved with libraries do not wish to break away from education. In fact, our statutory duty to provide a schools' library service is held up as a United Kingdom-wide model. Ours is the only part of the United Kingdom which has that statutory duty, and the link with education has been extremely valuable. However, we think that the only reason three library systems are being proposed is simply that three boards are being suggested.

No “library” reason has been advanced or, so far as we can discover, even thought of for having three library systems rather than five. The existing five systems all meet standards comfortably above the minimum required by the international federation of library associations, IFLA is the body. The minimum international standard for a population base for a good library service is one hundred and fifty thousand, and all the boards, as constituted, meet that comfortably. They also fit well with the communities and institutions that they service, and we feel that three, should they come to pass, will not be better than five, only different.

I would like to say something about other local relationships. Over the years close working relationships have been developed between the library services and other agencies in their areas — district councils, the health and social services boards, colleges, schools in particular, hospitals and community homes, and, latterly, enterprise agencies and the business sector.

Now this has involved a series of partnerships based on similar community objectives, and whereas I am sure the proposed new boards would adopt the same principles involved, and would wish to be helpful, there would inevitably be problems for some considerable time. Some prospective partners would certainly be much more geographically remote from each other, and new personal relationships and trust would take a long time to develop, certainly where local working practices are currently adjusted to suit local needs, in other words, practices that do not exactly go by to the book.

These practices would be likely to be restructured in accordance with standard procedures for the sake of administrative uniformity, certainly in the early years of a new, and generally more remote, system. This is not just a library perspective, this is not just something that librarians have made up, if you like. These are the concerns that are coming to us from the public, the users, the schools, colleges, community homes, and certainly from the councils within the board areas with whom we have a happy and constructive working relationship.

They are certainly not demanding a change of areas, and what this gives LISC concern about are the basic principles of accessibility and responsiveness to local needs. We are concerned that these bigger areas will breach several of the local good working relationships that we have.

I want to say something about the current set-up of the statutory library committee within each board. Each board has a statutory library committee which really reflects the board in microcosm. The Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the board are members, the church interests are represented, every district council in membership of the board has at least one representative on the library committee, and the teacher representatives on the board too are all on the library committee.

But additionally each board has three members appointed to represent the community interest in libraries; people with a particular interest in libraries for instance. There are fifteen such people in Northern Ireland at present, three on each of the five boards. Although the Minister is technically correct in referring to them as his nominees, they, to a person, are independently minded people who are properly protective of the library service and do work to try to ensure that libraries are not simply swallowed up within the necessarily much bigger field of education. They do speak out on behalf of users, when appropriate, on matters of particular library concern. Obviously all the members do this, but these people are interested in libraries and therefore more focused.

It is a matter of deep worry to LISC that under the Minister's proposals there would probably only be two such members per board, or just possibly three. It is not absolutely clear because he has said where he will add numbers and percentages on, but he has not said where they are going to come off. But there are not that many places left where they can come off, other than the library interest members. So among the three new boards there could be between six and nine library interest members across Northern Ireland instead of the present 15.

So 10% of the present board comprises library interest members, and we would be seeing that reduced to between 4% and 6%. In other words, roughly half those members would be lost to the system. They would not be there to support the service, and we feel that that would be a regrettable loss of influence and expertise. Also, we cannot see how the committees within the three proposed boards can continue to be representative of all those interests and all the council areas within the new board areas and still be of a workable size.

This is perhaps marginally outside our brief, but when we look at boards with 50 members, we seriously wonder how DENI thinks anybody will get a word in edgeways. Fifty to us seems to be on the verge of being unworkable.

The same concern about disruption applies to libraries as well as to education. Disruption has already taken place and more will surely lie ahead. I am talking about the staff here. Officers are being diverted from concentrating on their ordinary work on planning the services which need to be developed, to worrying about their futures. I have absolutely no doubt that, should these proposals go ahead, the next two to three years will see many officers coping with structural disruption of the system and personal disruption of their home lives rather than concentrating on libraries and their development.

Unfortunately, we have absolutely no information on where the proposed library headquarters will be or on who will be doing what in the new set-up. But the present headquarters officers based in Ballynahinch, Ballymena, Armagh, Belfast and Omagh, in particular headquarters based library officers, are deeply worried about their futures and their families. This is not good for the individuals, it is not good for the communities they live in and it is certainly not good for the service either at present or in the foreseeable future. LISC is concerned about these worried staff and also that this does not even seem to have been considered by the Department in formulating its proposals. The Department does not even seem to have an idea of where it thinks the headquarters should be, and LISC feels that the library staff deserve better treatment than this.

I would like to give you some very brief statistics about the size of the library business and move on briefly to co-operation and economy before I finish. These are only rounded illustrative figures to give you a very broad idea of the size of library output and expenditure. They are of a broad-brush nature. Boards in Northern Ireland spend roughly £20 million a year on the library service.

The Chairman: Twenty million pounds a year each?

Mr Farrow: No, in total. The five boards between them spend £20 million a year. Public libraries have roughly 7,050 registered users, about the half the population, and they issue between them over 12 million items to the public. Now included in the £20 million expenditure is the cost of about 1,000 full and part-time staff, the purchase of stock, and the running of buildings and vehicles. Now this is not just the public service; included in that is the total cost of the service to schools, colleges, hospitals and the house-bound. That is a wrap-up figure for the whole lot, and the cost of the service for all those items works out at under 30 pence per week per head of population.

There is not much wastage in operating at this sort of expenditure level and, in terms of book issues alone, the service represents very good value for money. There is little to be saved within the administrative elements of the library service and I would like to illustrate this with just a few examples of co-operative activity that are already in place, designed to avoid unnecessary duplication.

Section 8 is about co-operation and economy, LISC undertakes — and I spoke earlier of joint research — encouragement of good practice and suitable standards. So I want to point out some practical examples of existing co-operation and sharing among the five boards. When one board seems best placed to provide expertise for a service, the boards collectively have an arrangement jointly to fund and share such a service. The most obvious example is the exchange on loan, with a minimum of fuss and formality, of book stock. Readers' requests are sought from any board and indeed from beyond boards. This is the whole principle of a library network sharing. The Western Board runs the Ulster American Folk Park Library and Database, but all the boards fund this service collectively and all have on line access to it. It is used by schools and the public from everywhere and will form a central plank in Queen's University's new masters degree on emigration studies.

The public service information bulletin is a publication that comes out once a month and it is an index of articles of interest to those in local government and other agencies. All the boards share the editing and production work and costs. There have been battles in the past, but is only fair to say that Belfast Central Library is a precious provincial resource and has, amongst other facilities, an excellent business library. A share of the costings for Belfast Central, currently 35% of the cost, is met by the other boards in recognition of Belfast's special role and to save unnecessary duplication of stock and specialist collections. The services are looking at joint marketing with regard to publicity and how to improve access for disabled people, and they have just completed a feasibility study for a single computer system. The boards are working collectively and running three instead of five will not necessarily save on administrative costs because although the present boards have local variations in their opening hours and types of stock to suit local communities, they do not waste money in doing things five times over.

There is one particular concern that we have, and this is a two-edged sword. The short term need if we have three boards will be to make the computer systems that are in place totally compatible, certainly within each board, and that is likely to cost between £2 million and £2.5 million to achieve. Now that is a two-edged-sword because it is a highly desirable end in itself and something that we have wanted to do for years. It is technically possible to operate with other similar systems simply by sharing but under this new reorganization a very complicated set-up with multiple bits of computer systems from different boards would suddenly be visited on us, and that would have to be put right. We do not know whether this development is going to be funded or not, whether it is planned or has even been costed by DENI at all. We simply do not know.

So, in summary, LISC is saying that we have been given no good reasons for changing the system. We certainly have no economic evidence of any savings and we do have some genuine, deep concerns that library services and their delivery have received no consideration at all in DENI's proposed reorganization. We do feel that the new areas proposed would be less sensitive to local variations where years of good relationships with local schools in particular have been built up, and this is a concern. The proposed structure of administration simply does not flow from, nor is it designed to help deliver, the strategic aims of DENI or the library service.

In our view it would be arbitrary, certainly unwieldy and unpopular.

The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. You have obviously a very detailed paper, and you have given us a lot of food for thought. Your views are very important to us. Good submissions are important to us. Time is less important.

Ms McKinley: I have just one point that Mr Farrow noted at the beginning of his presentation. LISC is a body with a very wide remit which he outlined. I would like to be part of the deputation that comes back to give the broader picture of the influence of library and information services in Northern Ireland. The main reason I would like to do that is that I noted in the DENI strategic plan for education the very important point, bearing in mind where we are today, that it is committed to securing equality of opportunity and equity of treatment for all people in Northern Ireland. Having worked in public libraries for 17 or 18 years I think that the public libraries and the information services generally in Northern Ireland have a very deep contribution to make on this point.

The Chairman: In other words, equality of opportunity.

Ms McKinley: Absolutely.

The Chairman: I have a healthy sympathy for libraries. I use what is in the back rooms, or under lock and key, for research. Could we look at it from the Department's point of view? Down that line you have CCMS on one side and integrated education on the other. You have dealt with some of the sensitivities. Five broad administrative areas: is that a good model, or would you have in mind another model that was even better?

Mr Farrow: It is not a very exact science. To start with, there is a range of good and bad library services of all sorts and sizes across the world and it does depend on proper financing, local interest, the members who have the say, the strategy and the officers who run the service. The initial temptation is the stand-alone, single-library-agency model that you mention. There are concerns about that, it is a temptation. It sounds nice to run your own ship — that is it; we are the library people, and you can like it or lump it, not to put too fine a point on it. You are not dependent on partnerships and sharing and so on. But when we look at it, it is not as tempting as it might appear. It is neat and clean and separate, and libraries can do what libraries do.

But, for a start, that separates a library from all its natural partners, for example, education, health education requirements, linking with local homes, hospitals and, indeed, prisons.

A library is not something that is done to a community. Libraries work with other agencies and with local communities in cultural, recreational, educational and informational fields, and we really need to be part of a system. We would prefer to be part of multi-purpose local authorities with all sorts of functions, but if we have to pick a partner, education is a better partner for libraries than some of the old parks and baths or recreation departments. The wish to stand alone could also be regarded as possible isolation. It is also quite clear to us that a single Northern Ireland agency would not be locally sensitive — and we have seen the model in all sorts of services — or capable of local variations without a series of local rows about why people should be different.

This is possibly just a value judgement of the attention that has been paid over the last few years, but we feel the service would be over-dependent on reporting through whatever kind of board was running it to DENI direct, and our experience is that this would not necessarily ensure any better treatment for libraries or any better focus on them. We feel we have had much more support from the boards and our education friends than we have had from direct dealing with the Department.

Finally, and this is a down-to-earth point: if we did set up such an agency we would also need to set up a whole support mechanism for that agency, for example, a finance department, a transport department, a personnel department, and a property services department, and these are things which incidentally would not make savings on administration here because those are provided for us by the boards. So, we could not count on three library services rather than five to double the savings on those admin things. I have nothing against there being four if four were the proper number, or three if three were the proper number, but what we are saying is that the relationship with education is important to us and it would be a nonsense to say that if education goes down the road of three, we will go to the ditch trying to run five independent library systems because that would just be an even bigger nonsense. There is nothing wrong with the five, the five work perfectly well. They are sensitive and have a good track record and library people are quite happy to go along with five.

The Chairman: So there is no one in the whole library service at the minute champing at the bit for radical change? Appreciation is what carries the fingerprint of public opinion.

Mr Farrow: Absolutely.

The Chairman: What you are saying is that you are confident about the competence of what is happening in the present system?

Mr Farrow: Yes, absolutely.

Mr Hussey: I have just come up from the Chairman's part of the world — West Tyrone. The Western Board has plans for a library in my area. Will that be carried through by the proposed new set-up or by the Western Board?

Mr Farrow: Putting my Western Board hat on briefly, I am not now speaking on behalf of LISC. No, I do not know. I assume Mr Hussey is talking about libraries in Strabane and Castlederg, both of which are required. The Strabane one is a much larger project and is in theory at the top of the Department's library list because it is one of the Western Board's top three projects. Now, I have no idea whether Strabane Library would head the list of a new Northern Board. I suspect it would have a lot of elbowing to do with a lot of other projects.

Mr Hussey: What I am saying is that there is no guarantee of continuity.

Mr Farrow: There is no guarantee of continuity. Absolutely no guarantee. It would be a new ball-game starting all over again.

Mr Fowler: My two sisters and my wife worked in the public and parliamentary library services.

You said that the service had improved wonderfully with the advent of the boards. I am interested to know whether the services, with time, would not have improved anyway. We tend today to co-operate with people in our own field.

Mr Farrow: Well, that is a very difficult one. It is certainly quite possible, but there were a lot of variations even within. I was thinking more of the, if I can use the term, country board, rather than Belfast which had an up-and-developed library service running for a long, long time. But the black areas have gone, and people expect to be networked into modern information and technology. I will just give you a quick example from the Western area because that is where I happen to be from. In the Western area there were bits and pieces of four systems before the 1973 reorganization; on average something like 26% or 27% of the population were active library users. We now have 55% of people using libraries there. We have 175 staff serving the public, the schools and the hospitals, of whom 30 are qualified librarians. Before reorganization there were five qualified librarians in that area, so perhaps I should not have said that everything is wonderful in the garden, rather that the black spots have been eliminated and everybody is running more or less to a standard now.

Mr Fowler: If you were allowed to pick a partner for the library service, would education be the one?

Mr Farrow: If I were given Hobson's choice as a partner, education would undoubtedly be the one I would pick. I would still prefer libraries to be part of a total community of local services that ran all the local services but, given the option of picking one partner, I would have no reservations about education being the one to be associated with.

Ms McKinley: Would it be possible just to make a small point from the ground as it were on that? Talking about the link with education, the library service along with schools is now concentrating very heavily on training programmes and staff development, and it is my opinion that we benefit greatly from being linked with the education personnel department because it gives us a wide menu of training programmes that are available to our staff. As a working librarian I have found it very beneficial, and my colleagues and I have had to develop our own professional standards.

The Chairman: Somebody made a point yesterday on administration. Administrators get a bad name sometimes. Roughly, what percentage of your £4 million will be spent on pure administration?

Mr Farrow: Yes, there are different ways of looking at it. I mean we split library expenditure in very crude terms into three main areas. About 70% of the budget goes on staffing, in general terms, about 20% goes on stock, book stock and videos et cetera, and about 10% goes on admin. Now that admin figure includes the running costs of buildings, vehicles, heat, light, rates and so on. The problem about giving you an admin ball-park figure and extracting some of the staffing costs is that we have very few people who are purely administrators. If, for example, one of the assistant chief librarian of the board is the assistant chief librarian in charge of the schools' library services, it is very tempting to say that that is a senior management post, but in fact that person's time is spent generally going round schools, meeting principals,

meeting teachers, running courses and so on. Also, it is only fair to point out that some of our admin costs are hidden, in other words the personnel costs, transport costs, and finance costs are already accounted for at board headquarters. But the admin costs are extremely small partly because some of the admin is done for us by education and has therefore already been costed, so there are not additional savings to be made there.

The five chief librarians and their immediate support staff you could regard as administrative; the rest are providing services on the ground. I could not give you a percentage, but I could send you in a percentage.

The Chairman: How do you rate yourselves? You have told us that your service generally is very highly rated in Western World opinion.

Mr Farrow: Well I think it is quite slimline; the figures vary very greatly. Figures were submitted to you earlier on the size of education authorities across the United Kingdom, and library services are very much along those lines. On board sizes there is an instant saving in that the current board sizes are in the top three quarters of the average population and therefore have a chief librarian and a cataloguer and someone in charge of your finance. A lot of services in England, Wales and Scotland have around 100,000 or 120,000 of a population. There are two of them for every one of us even as we stand. It is really quite economical.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: I find your submission very interesting. I note that the Department of Education is on the council. I take it that your submission is on behalf of the whole council, that it has sat and thought about this. The Department of Education then is in agreement with your submission that you are not happy with the number of boards being reduced from five to three?

Mr Farrow: Well the Department of Education has representatives on the executive committee. We did have an annual general meeting of LISC where we reported that we had complained last year about the proposal to make five boards into four, and nobody voiced disagreement, but the Department of Education representatives on the executive committee were present at our meeting last week when Ms McKinley and I were told to come here and I made absolutely clear to the executive committee of LISC the specific issues I intended to address. Now I cannot say, hand on heart, that

the Department of Education is in full agreement with them as a Department, but nobody has commented.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: This is the complete list?

Mr Farrow: That was the complete list at the time of that flyer.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: It is fascinating to see the people who are on this council. I find it interesting that you have come on behalf of all the service and are not unhappy to face problems with us. I thank you for that.

Mr Bolton: To get back to administration, the first reason given for the change is over-administration. Could you elaborate just a little more on the physical effect that three headquarters and three chief librarians would have on your service? We have been told by the education and library boards that in some months they might have to have split headquarters and offices in two parts of the new areas. Would you have to go along with that and say six or seven chief librarians?

Mr Farrow: Well, as far as the headquarters go, the proposed new Northern Board has only one existing library headquarters and that is the one in Ballymena which currently serves the present North Eastern Board. The new proposed Southern Board would have two existing library headquarters in it, one in Omagh which is the Western Board's headquarters and one in Armagh which is the current Southern Board's headquarters, and the new Eastern Board, as proposed, would have two library headquarters, one in Belfast Central Library and one in Ballynahinch, so we have a proposed model where of the three new areas, one would have its headquarters in Ballymena and the other two might have split-site headquarters in Armagh and Omagh, in the case of the Southern Board, and Ballynahinch and Belfast, in the case of the Eastern Board. But whether someone intends to pick one of those two or to run split-site operations or to draw for it or see which is the more centrally placed, I really do not know. This is part of the problem.

From our point of view the nonsense is that the decision or proposal — the Minister is not empowered to make a decision, it is up to Parliament to pass the legislation which will make the decision — seems to have been plucked from the air, it does not flow from any way of improving library headquarters or from rationalization. It just seems to have been made, and now we have got to try to shoe-horn everything into it. It would not make sense to have five chief librarians, two within each board, but clearly they would intend to have three for three board areas. The other point is if they do operate between split sites, to some extent, presumably, people's jobs in those sites might be a little bit safer, but on the other hand, if you are going to continue to operate all the headquarters you are currently running, where are your savings?

I just do not know, but part of the problem is that we do not have the information. If the decision to have three library services had flowed from a rational look at the thing. I could perhaps have answered. But it seems to me that the proposal has been made and now we have got to try to shoe-horn things into it, and that is the wrong way to go.

The Chairman: This is a foot that doesn't fit a shoe?

Mr Farrow: It would be made to fit for a couple of years, but very soon new boards, if they come in, will say that this is a nonsense we got into.

The Chairman: In other words, we start to modify the foot.

Mr Farrow: Exactly.

Mr McFarland: This has been a very interesting general discussion on libraries, and quite informative. I understand that the libraries themselves are untouched by this. We are looking here at the management. You said yourself “It's not better, just different.” There has been a great discussion about effects, and obviously there will be effects, because people are unsure about what is happening and, in essence, the folk in the firing-line are the library anagement committees. Is that correct?

Mr Farrow: Mainly so. Certainly branch libraries, for example in towns, would presumably remain branch libraries.

Mr McFarland: So the library service itself will go on as it always has done, in most cases providing an excellent service.

Mr Farrow: In so far as they are branch libraries in towns and villages, yes. I cannot be sure the same could be said for, for example, mobile libraries. I mean, whether a mobile library currently going from Omagh to Newtownstewart, which is about ten miles, would go from Ballymena to Newtownstewart in the new Northern Board I just do not know.

Mr McFarland: I know we do not know that. In essence, what is being examined here is the management of the library system, not the actual system itself. It is easy to get confused about what is threatened. How many headquarters staff are we looking at?

Mr Farrow: Within a library headquarters.

Mr McFarland: No — within the sort of board library headquarters.

Mr Farrow: The library headquarters are in every case in separate buildings, and separately staffed from board headquarters.

Mr McFarland : But there must be a fairly standard manning level, presumably, in terms of chief executive and so on.

Mr Farrow: In terms of top-tier management?

Mr McFarland : No — in terms of the staff. If you have five library boards with the same function, essentially there will be roughly the same number of people in each headquarters. I am just trying to find out an average. I appreciate that there will be some differences.

Mr Farrow: Yes, there will be some difference.

Mr McFarland : But, roughly, how many people are we talking about?

Mr Farrow: I think you would be talking of, based in board headquarters and based in library headquarters, about 400 or 450 people, maybe even more, in each board, but, and I say but, this includes people based there but providing direct services like grounds maintenance people and school meals people.

Mr McFarland: But they are not threatened. Is that right?

Mr Farrow: Well they are threatened in a different way in that they are being, if you like, lined up for a series of regional panels who would do this thing — this was the agency part of the Department's look at the administration. Quite separate from whether there were to be five boards or three boards, their services were looked at.

Mr McFarland: I do not want to get into that. If you change from five to three, how many people on each of those boards will be affected, in library terms?

Mr Farrow: Right. I am happier to answer in library terms rather than education, because I do not have the figures for that.

Mr McFarland: It is the library bit I am interested in.

Mr Farrow: I beg your pardon, my apologies. In library terms I think you would be talking about 100 people in total, perhaps 20 in each board, who would be mainly, if not totally, involved in administration or largely in administration as well as in giving advice. So you are talking about 100 who would have obvious direct concerns, and if you are talking about there being three boards instead of five, clearly you are talking about losing 40 people somewhere along the line.

Mr McFarland: Worst case: a loss of 40. The Department thinking is to phase them out — redundancy, natural wastage, or whatever.

Mr Farrow: But that is a guess.

Mr McFarland: Indeed, but we are not talking about 450 or 500 in each case?

Mr Farrow: Certainly not.

Mr McFarland: So, a relatively small number of people are affected. The management side is mainly in the firing-line here?

Mr Farrow: Mainly management and advisory.

Ms McKinley: I think Mr McFarland did say that the library services at the branches would be unaffected. But it strikes me that if the number of library interest board members is actually changed, is lessened, there would be fewer people around to get the public's opinion of what should be changing in the public library. So basically the point is this: if there are fewer library interest members, we may not get the public's reaction to how we should be changing or, indeed, to whether we should be keeping certain services as they are. So there is a danger there.

Mr McFarland: I would have thought that you find out what the public thinks of your services, and what people want, from the people wandering into a library. Surely the people on a management committee are not your main source of information.

Ms McKinley: No, absolutely not. I appreciate that.

Mr Hussey: Have we identified the fact that there is a threat to potential provision?

Mr McFarland: On the five to three?

Mr Hussey: Yes.

The Chairman: I think we have already identified that and I think we have to follow all this for every board, in other words we can be sure that somebody is waiting in the queue on one board and somebody else waiting in a queue in another board, because everyone has a stacking order of priority. It would be enough to follow the obvious.

Mr Snoddy: Part of DENI's agreement is that there is going to be a £2 million saving. You are indicating that you do not see any savings whatsoever in the library service. If you want to provide the same service at the same standard you will have to update your technology. Any savings will be eaten up. Is that the message?

Mr Farrow: Although there should be a one-off capital payment in order to bring the two diverse ones into line, they can operate at present, because they are OK within a total system, but once you join bits and pieces of three together it simply will not even work across one system. So it is highly desirable that this be done anyway. But the money has never been there before and I am not sure the Department realizes that because it has just finished a working group which has come up with a scheme for doing this. I am not sure if it realizes that this would have to be done to make it work. But it would certainly take £2 million - £2.5 million up front.

The Chairman: Can copies of the working group's report that you have just mentioned be made available to us?

Mr Farrow: Yes, no problem.

Mr Browne: In the case of the Belfast Education and Library Board the weaker areas are the library and the youth services. If there are going to be cuts, that is usually where they are made. You say that the administration people are going to suffer most here. Is it not going to affect the service delivered to schools pretty seriously also? Libraries in the street and administration — will one be affected more than the other?

Mr Farrow: No. This was the point, but I did not want to labour it because I know Mr McFarland was really asking about something else when he said not to worry about the library service. The public library service would be OK, but the services to schools, hospitals, and to house-bound people, which depend on local knowledge and local accessibility, would become extremely remote and distant. Even to get advice, for somebody to pop over, is another hidden cost, and people would be driving miles where currently they are quite local. This service would be certainly remote and probably more expensive to administer. Either that or you would have to set up a series of sub-local things.

Mr Browne: Many things are done that are not seen or maybe even costed at the present time. It is a different matter when you are driving a mile out to see somebody. Now you are going to have to drive 30 miles. If you are going to drive 30 miles, you will have to be paid for it.

The Chairman: There is an impression that only a few will really be involved and that they are quite capable of looking after themselves. What I am talking about is quality. With a three-board model, can you see quality, standards and accountability being maintained?

Mr Farrow: If two chief librarians are made redundant and you have three boards instead of five you will have to pay those who remain that bit more, because you are talking a bigger population base and they will have to do a lot more travelling. To maintain the service you need seriously to look at the geographic areas that the existing two or three assistant chiefs deal with. You also need to look at the geographic areas of the existing divisional librarians on which local mobiles are based. To say that because you have three excellent headquarters instead of five excellent headquarters, the rest of the service will run is not true. It simply will not because those people will not have the span of attention or the senior staff on the ground talking to local councils, schools and hospitals and so on. To maintain the services. Yes, you could shrink the number of systems, but, correspondingly, you would have to give them all more staff each in order to maintain the spread. In other words, it is OK if you happen to be sitting where the headquarters is, but if you are in another part of any area, you could very easily be left behind.

The Chairman: The shape of the slice of bread is changing, but you are applying the same butter.

Mr Farrow: I'll have to think about that.

Mr Bolton: It is hardly as simple as that. There is an increasing demand from small communities to have the criterion brought down from 1,500 per village to spread the service more evenly. These proposals will have an effect on that, surely.

Mr Farrow: The main effect is that it would cost more money to do that. The more remote they are, the fewer votes there will be and the fewer voices will be heard, they will just join the end of a very long queue. It is doubtful if they will even be heard let alone provided for.

The Chairman: We are over time, but it is for us to make sure that we have taken on board all perspectives. Thank you very much.

Witness:

Mr McEvoy (Green Party)

The Chairman: I welcome you on behalf of the Education Committee. By resolution of the Forum we are examining the proposal by the Minister for Education to change the administration system. The proposal is to reduce the number of boards to three.

Mr McEvoy: Good morning. Thank you for hearing this submission.

There are compelling arguments which I am sure have been rehearsed over and over again to you by various internal interest groups for and against leaving things as they are and for and against reducing the number of boards to four, three, or, indeed even to one. More on this anon.

The decision to reduce the number of boards is going to be a political one and any amount of lobbying is unlikely to change what looks like an inevitable exercise in cost-cutting — rationalization, down-sizing — which will affect careers, jobs and areas.

Of far more importance to us is not who is arranging the deck furniture which those engaged in educational administration are involved with, but where the ship is heading.

Education is and has been a political football in the United Kingdom for a very long time, but ever since Jim Callaghan's Oxford speech on the theme of accountability in 1978 the green light has been on and education has been the victim of what Prince Charles has called “innovation fatigue” since the Conservatives came to power in 1979. The changes have been unrelenting since the “reforms” of the mid 80s. I spent 21 years as a teacher in state schools in England — I am now associated with Rudolf Steiner education — so I speak with some experience. While in England I observed a growing demand for the dis-integration of the national service in the sense that religious and ethnic minorities were calling for their own schools. I pointed out that

while Catholic or Jewish schools existed, other minorities had a cast-iron case for special status themselves. If what amounted to sectarian privileges were sacrificed, an appropriate curriculum for all could be worked on.

Since the mid 80s, all manner of reforms have been carried out, all based on a questionable manipulation of education as a vote-catcher. Some of the finest teachers I have known could not tolerate the mania for measurement, quantification and standardization, and left the profession. I say mania because no responsible teacher would question the need for professionalism in what she/he is doing in the classroom and for being consistent in what one teaches; mania, because a school's place in the league tables is now all that matters in the harsh application of market principles to the world of education, singularly inappropriate criteria, as it happens.

In Northern Ireland we have two tribal sectors each vying with each other as to who is more effectively hot-housing the emerging elites. We in Green Politics believe that the educational equivalent of the Mitchell Principles should be devised for education and monitored by an education commission, an overarching body that would have powers throughout the region. These principles would embrace matters such as: community well-being, hidden curriculum, creativity, economic well-being, multiculturalism, the move to comprehensive schools, high standards in all areas, academic, behaviour, sports et cetera.

Community well-being - how does the work of the school contribute to the well-being of the whole community and to society as a whole? How is the school making a contribution to integration?

Hidden curriculum - what are the community's expectations of their local schools and how does one go about finding this out? Is the curriculum of the school one-sided in its presentation of local cultures or sub-cultures? We read that the anti-poverty network has reported that children in Northern Ireland are the poorest in the United Kingdom. That is the kind of league table that concerns us in the Green Party for it is sheer folly to expect children from the ghetto to become enthused about the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” or to worry about which verbs take the dative case. They have much more important survival challenges to cope with.

The league tables dominating schools' lives today result in teachers being plagued by form-filling, box-ticking and children tormented by a testing programme that has little to do with a child's sense of self-worth, self-esteem and innate well-being. In these circumstances only the compliant and co-operative get through — those given to awkward questions are doomed. There just is not time.

Creativity - how does the school nurture the creativity of the young? The intellectual and physical are overemphasized in current educational practice to the detriment of the emotional, heart forces. It is by creativity we survive; the plodding ritualism that mars our culture must be phased out. Schools can play a vital role in this process but a wholly different approach to the curriculum is needed. We need schools of special character to do innovative curriculum work, and over 700 Steiner schools world-wide are doing that.

Economic - schools can foster a healthy attitude to economic activity. Too many of our young people in Northern Ireland at one end of the spectrum have no realistic expectation of a career with an income that will ensure financial independence — yet too many at the other end of the spectrum see education as a stepping stone out of Northern Ireland, in too many cases never to return.

Multiculturalism - education should reflect the broad range of world cultures rather than the somewhat narrower agenda of the either/or syndrome we too often get in this region.

High standards - it almost goes without saying that high standards in everything are the hallmark of good education. These high standards are attainable when children's energies are channelled creatively. Good education is a by-product of good relationships and anything that stands as a barrier to good relationships should be removed. Ask teachers and they will tell you of the kinds of activity that futilely sap their energies.

The education commission being proposed by the Green Party would be an overarching body overseeing the work of schools and monitoring the implementation of the foregoing principles. It would examine the

appropriateness of the common curriculum to the needs of the children of Northern Ireland. It would get away from the reductionist mind-set that has been described as the mentality that would slit a linnet's throat to try to find out how it sings. What was conceived as a means of putting order into the life of the nation's schools has become a monolith, a millstone that is dragging down the work of schools. It is not serving our children well.

On the subject of the number of education and library boards, the education commission could work with the boards as they exist. We have the same number of children, of teachers, of schools. The boards could stay as they are but the commission would assure that they increasingly worked as one.

A new century and a new millennium beckon. We can do something really creative, really novel, in freeing schools to maximize the potential of all our children to phase out labelling, to bring new life to our culture. We in the Green Party exhort the Government to take this opportunity to create a model that might be emulated in the many other divided regions of the world.

The Chairman: I could not help but detect the odd smile round the Committee when they heard “plodding ritualism”. The idea of an overarching commission to study education is very interesting.

Mr McFarland: This is a very interesting area. The Committee is involved particularly in getting an interim report out on the five-to-three reduction, but it is in existence until December, and we might turn our minds to the business of where our schools should be going.

Mr McEvoy: We will have quite a lot to say on expanding ideas on the education of little ones.

The Chairman: This is something that we will certainly take on board. Nobody has come up with the idea of a set of principles to guide a curriculum.

Thank you for your time and courtesy.

Mr McEvoy: Could I say for the Green Party that we wish the Forum well and we wish the Talks well.

The Chairman: Thank you. That is appreciated.

Witnesses:

Mr D McKee, Mr M Kennedy, Mrs G McCafferty, Mr R Lapsley and Mr E McGrade

(Western Secondary Schools)

The Chairman: Good morning. You are very welcome.

We will give you the opportunity of making your presentation, and then the Committee members will put questions. We are, of course, confined by the resolution of July referring to the 25 June directive from the Minister which said that he intends to bring in legislation immediately to change the administration of education from five boards to three. We are obviously aware of vested interests, and we certainly welcome the fact that someone is giving us a perspective from the chalk-face.

Mr McKee: Thank you very much indeed for your kind and warm welcome, Mr Chairman, on behalf of the Forum Committee. Equally I thank you, Gentlemen and Ladies, for your kind invitation to give us this opportunity to address you. We are quite well aware of the need for public awareness on this issue and for people such as yourselves to be taking this issue to the Minister.

Our association represents all 35 secondary schools in the Western Board area. It may exclude grammar and integrated and special needs. Every secondary school has agreed to the submission that we have made to you and I hope that you have a written copy of that available.

We are made up of schools from each of five district council areas, and our delegation here today represents that flavour. We are made up of Protestant and Catholic schools, we are made up of small, large, single-sex schools and so on, so we believe that we are bringing to you a very fair representation of principals at the chalk-face. On my left is Mr Lapsley who will be speaking immediately after me. He is from Limavady High School. Mrs Grainne McCafferty is from St Cecilia's in Derry and on her right is Mr Eugene McGrade from St John's, Dromore. On my extreme left is Mr

Michael Kennedy from St Colman's in Strabane.

Now the decision to scrap the Western Education and Library Board in our view flies in the face of widespread public anger in the Western area. It is viewed as an attack on the West of the Bann and in the words of Mr Hayes in the ‘Belfast Telegraph’ and I quote

“The decision to abolish the WELB flies in the face of geography, lines of communication, local loyalty and identity.”

If proof from the West were needed to support Mr Hayes, 113,000 people have now signed the petition to save the Western Education and Library Board. Each of the five district councils opposes the change. Each of the Westminster MPs also opposes the change. And we would now like to add our voice and professional opinion to that cause.

We as principals have to be critical clients, and I mean by that that we have to act in the very best interests of our schools. It is our responsibility to ensure that we get value for money, are provided with a reliable service and have access to a range of support services. The WELB gives us that and has done so for the last 20 years, and this fact unites all 35 principals. It is also our belief that the WELB enjoys widespread respect and support because its composition reflects the variety of interests which make up our community. The WELB has a long and treasured history of providing a stable influence in the community because it is widely seen as acting fairly and impartially.

I should also like to register our anger at the time-scale set for the implementation. It is unfair, it is unrealistic and it is unrepresentative. We hope we can be forgiven for being cynical when we ask why the review was timed to come out at the end of June and why your own time schedule has been so short. We believe that this all smacks of indecent haste and, further to that, we are not sure that it is fair to have a Government which in Northern Ireland is trying radically to change the education administration when on the mainland United Kingdom it is electioneering to impose its will on our children in the 21st century.

I would now like to hand over to Mr Lapsley.

Mr Lapsley: My name is Ron Lapsley and I am headmaster of Limavady High School. I have been in that position since 1975 and I was acting head in another secondary school in the Western Board area for two years prior to that. That probably makes me the longest serving head certainly in the Western Board area in the province.

Obviously over the 20 years I have had very close dealings with the boards and all its officers at all levels. I can remember the change from the old county system to the board system and the confusion that that caused. Now there was a certain lack of trust at the time of the change and there was certainly some administrative confusion. I have seen the board actually eliminate all these teething problems to develop into what in my opinion is a very highly efficient administrative body. The point I would like to make is a very simple one. In 1973 when the change took place, schools themselves were in quite a stable condition. There had not been a great deal of change, things were going on very smoothly, but nevertheless, with schools in that stable situation, there was confusion. There were administrative problems, there was a lack of trust and there was no knowledge of the officers with whom you were dealing.

The situation now is completely different. Schools for the past number of years have been subjected to many changes. In fact, they are still being subjected to changes. What we cannot afford, and what we would oppose vehemently, is a situation where change would take place and that period of instability with administration return. Schools simply cannot afford that. We have had many major changes. The Western Board has established a relationship with all the schools in this area; it has provided the services that we have asked for; it is accessible to all the schools, and any problems the schools have had have been smoothed over by the board and its very efficient team of officers. Now, I would hate to be plunged into a situation where change was still occurring in school and where the level of administration above us was in a confused state as well. That is the main point that I would like to make.

Mrs McCafferty: My name is Grainne McCafferty and I am principal of St Cecilia's College in Derry. Our school is in an urban environment and in the maintained sector. There are probably just two main points that I would like to make. I would like to take up Mr Lapsley's point about the possibility of confusion and draw specific attention to the situation that is going to arise in Derry next September. It will actually affect people, as I discovered this morning, as far away as Strabane and Limavady.

In Derry a new voluntary grammar school is about to be built. That does not simply impact on the sector to which it belongs, the voluntary maintained sector, it impacts right across as far as Strabane and Limavady. It will certainly impact on schools in Derry. It will be opening next September and already there is widespread anxiety in Derry schools about how it is going to impact on numbers, intake and so on.

The local integrated school has been given an opportunity to increase its numbers, so at the same time as we have an increase in numbers in the integrated sector, a brand new grammar school is opening practically on our doorstep, and combined with that we have the changes in transport which are going to be implemented in September 1997, about which parents are as yet uninformed. Now, I am assuming that your group will have had time to have a look at the implications of the changes in transport. They are going to affect, I recognize, the whole of Northern Ireland, but they will impact particularly on the Western Area Board where apparently there are more children to be transported over larger areas than in some other boards areas. That is an issue which, as I say, is specific to Derry, but it impacts on both Strabane and Limavady.

I would also like point out that it has been claimed that as a result of the devolution of funds to schools, the boards are less necessary now that schools have control of their budgets. I would argue that the opposite is the case. We have had closer links with Western Area Board in the past five years than in many of the years before that in any of the areas that you care to mention — maintenance, purchasing, LMS, transfer, personnel and transport, to name but a few. I would just like to conclude by saying that one other major contribution that the Western Board has made to schools has been in the development of the curriculum and in providing in-service support for teachers.

We know the personnel, we were able to contact them, they are flexible, they come to the schools, they identify our needs and they help to fulfil those in terms of in-service training. The days of in-service training are not over, in fact if anything they are at least as great as they were in the past. Now is not the time to put that very valuable service to schools under threat by changing the entire structure in Northern Ireland. That sums up in essence what I have to say.

Mr McKee: Mr McGrade will deal with the budget issue now.

Mr McGrade: Eugene McGrade is my name, and I am principal of a medium sized rural secondary school in Dromore, County Tyrone. I am a Tyrone man, and Tyrone men are known to be people who demand value for money, and we principals are busy people. We have to take decisions fast, we have got to respond to numerous changes, and the Western Board to my mind — and I speak on behalf of the other 34 principals — has provided that sort of a service. We look for a reliable service, an accessible service, a stable service, a tested service and a quality service, and the Western Board has given that.

Now what has been proposed? We are being asked to accept an unknown package. The figure of £2 million has been mentioned, but this package to my mind has not been tested, there are no figures that we can look at and say that these savings were made here and that sort of thing.

Now we are responsible for budgets and everything that we attempt to do or want to consider is audited and scrutinized. It is only fair that the proposals we have been asked to look at should be in the public domain. We do not know where the savings are coming from. Such radical proposals will cause major upheavals. Consider this: which one of us would invest in a new house or a car without having weighed up, costed the thing out accurately and been at the same time assured or guaranteed of a service? This is the point I want to make.

Is it fair that we should be asked to take this on? I would just finish by saying that we have valued the service that the Western Board has provided. That is value for money. We have better value for money at present, than the anticipated savings that are suppose to trickle down to a classroom.

Mr Kennedy: My name is Michael Kennedy, and I have been a principal of St Colmcille's High School in Strabane for a mere two years. Previous to that I was very proud to work for the Western Education and Library Board as an assistant education officer in the advisory and support services which Mrs McCafferty has referred to. I am now very pleased to be a consumer of the services which you have heard referred to, and I feel that I am qualified to speak from both sides.

I also represent a staff which is very supportive of the work done by the board. They would describe it as efficient, friendly, familiar and reliable, so, for all the right reasons, we wish it to survive.

I would like to refer to question of representation. Despite the claim to the contrary, the proposal to extend the representation from 32 members of the Western Education and Library Board to 50 in the new Northern Board would actually reduce a district's representation in mathematical terms from 6.4 to 5. A larger forum will surely dilute local contributions and influence and, consequently, the representative power of any of the members.

Furthermore, the greater distance to travel will make it less convenient, reduce attendance and possibly good co-operation and thereby make it less efficient, thus failing in one of the most crucial aspects of this reform. In terms of area represented, the Minister claimed that Northern Ireland's education administration is overmanaged. But the Western Education and Library Board includes a population of something like 240,000 people and the new proposals will increase that to something in the region of 420,000. Yet, in England and Wales approximately half of LEAs are smaller in size than the Western Education and Library Board is at present.

It does not make sense that we are actually going to make this even larger. I believe that larger board areas will not give good service for money, and we are extremely satisfied with the services provided by the board. We wish those services to continue. In the past there have been major changes, and the Western Education and Library Board has been resourceful, innovative, reflective and professional enough to take on board all of the changes within the structure. The role of the board has not diminished, but it has changed and it has certainly increased.

The Chairman: Thank you all very much indeed. I sympathize with your point about the timescale, but ours is even shorter. Our report has to be written by next Wednesday.

Surely headmasters and schools are not affected, and we are going to save a great amount of money, which will eventually improve the quality of education. So what is all the fuss about?.

Mr McKee: That is a very fair point but our comment to you is that we of all people in schools have more dealings with outside agencies regardless of what they are, and where they are, and we would be dealing with the board on a very regular basis. That is the point that is coming across from everybody here. There is also another point, and I will come back to Mr McGrade's point about £2 million savings. Where is that money coming from to be saved? It can only come from a cut-back, we believe, in the quality of service that is presently available. Now the Western Board offers us the three As. It is acceptable to all of us, it is accessible to all of us, and it is accountable, and that is the most important thing of all because when we with our boards of governors have issues to raise with the Western Board, we are dealing with people who understand those issues and our points of view.

Now, yes, you can save money, yes, you can say it is going to go back into a classroom. We have been given absolutely no evidence of that £2 million saving. We believe the figure to be largely insignificant to start with, and we do not believe that the overhaul is worth that amount of money. What price is there on relationship, what price is there on trust and reliability of service? We know the way the health service is being affected and the problems that it has had, and we certainly do not want to see an excellent education service such as we have in Northern Ireland being diminished in any shape or form.

The Chairman: My last point is very elementary but obvious. Schools are all about change. Learning, surely, is a matter of change. Surely that is something that pragmatic people like yourselves can handle. Obviously this has nothing to do with the chalk-face.

Mr McKee: Here is a lady who has implemented many changes.

Mrs McCafferty: That is obviously right. Schools have already implemented many changes and will continue to implement many more. But what we argue is that in order to facilitate schools to implement them at the chalk-face, we actually need all the back-up and the support services to enable us to do that. That is where the change should really take place — in the schools. But if change is taking place in the schools and change is also taking place at an administrative level, that, to me, is a recipe for chaos. After all, you have to remember that the people who are really the ultimate clients or customers of a school are the pupils. We have to ensure that if we are going to undertake changes for the good of the pupils, the principals and the teachers should be able to call on a stable set of services to enable them to deliver the changes in the curriculum necessary for the pupils. The last people we want to see affected by all of this are the pupils.

Mr McFarland: This is a very emotive issue. I am a Tyrone man, and I can understand why it is so emotive. What we need to do if we are to get our case over is become slightly dispassionate about it.

You talked about the three As. Which parts of this are most critical to you? On accountability, the Department says that there will be increased local government representation on these boards. They have increased it by 8%, or whatever. In fact, that means only three people more, but, in theory, they are more accountable.

Suppose the Department decided to split-site this and have a satellite of the Northern Board in Derry, keeping Omagh as a satellite of Armagh. Would the increased accessibility take away from this argument? If they split-site would that give you better service? The northern folk, instead of having to go to Omagh, would just have to nip up the road.

There is a number of issues in respect of which they have not produced the figures. I am worried that, while we are hanging our arguments on logic, if they follow a particular course of action, those arguments will fall apart.

Mr Lapsley:I cannot really accept that argument. I do not think that satellite stations work very well. They are disjointed themselves, and communication between the main board and the outlying areas is obviously something which could delay decision making. We have a board which has grown up with many of the schools in the area; the board and the board officers are familiar with the schools and their problems; they can come and deal with schools knowing their background, and they are prepared to implement that help.

We simply cannot afford to have an administrative system now which is not familiar with the schools and familiar with the problems and familiar with the sort of help that we need. Directly after any change there is going to be that period of instability when we need the administration to be particularly stable. We think it is absolutely essential to have stable administration to help us implement the change. It does not matter how smoothly it is going to happen, it does not matter how long it is going to take, there is going to be a period when we will be left with an inefficient administration.

Mr Bolton: Mr Kennedy said he was an administrator. I would like to hear his views on the first statement made by the Minister — that education is at present overadministered.

Mr Kennedy: At present we have five boards and they are very busy places of administration. They are dealing day and daily with requests, sometimes help cries, from schools. Take my own school for example, I can list the services that we require almost every day from the board. There is a good relationship between the two and in a much bigger situation there would be less contact, less familiarity. I do not believe that Northern Ireland is overadministrated, and I cite the situation that most of LEAs in England look at us with great envy. I had the privilege of being at a Society of Education Officers' conference several years ago in Stranmillis, and a number of delegates from England said they wished they had our set-up, they envied us, and they would take the message back to England. In fact in Wales now there is a move from larger LEAs to smaller areas. The Secretary of State for Education in England some years ago said “when it is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change.” This system works very, very well for us. If it did not work well, we would be asking the Minister to fix it, but it works for us so, please, do not fix it.

Mr Smyth: Mr Kennedy has got it right. Why fix something that is not broken? I am impressed by the fact that in the Western Area more than 100,000 people have evidently shown their opposition. Why do Governments continue to force something upon a people that is completely unacceptable? The only reason I can think of is financial. This magical figure of £2 million has been mentioned, but we, like yourselves, have no evidence for it.

Am I right in assuming that a saving of £2 million would work out at about 5 pence per pupil? That would not even buy a rubber or a pencil. Where is the benefit?

Mr McKee: I would not be prepared to say that I accept the figure of £2 million savings for a start. I do not. The failure of the Government to produce a factual audited argument when they presented the review speaks volumes for their inability actually to provide a logical, detailed and reasoned argument. The Western Board is the one board that we know about. We are not speaking against any other area board, and we wish to make that very, very clear. We are saying that the board that we have is user friendly, it has proved itself to be adaptable to change in itself, and I really do not agree with you, Mr Smyth, when you say that the reason could be financial. I honestly believe there must be some other hidden agenda and reason for this manufactured thing that nobody seems to want. I really do not believe it is necessary. All 35 principals here are saying that they do not need this change. We are certain and sure that the Western Board can adjust and adapt to the changes it itself will have to

make.

Mr Neeson: I can accept the argument about opposition to any demographic change, but clearly the Government are determined that there is going to be change. They talk about making the system more efficient, more effective. Do the principals believe that there is an instance in the Western Board area where there could be more efficiency?

Mr McKee: You are asking us to make a judgment on areas that we may not have sufficient information about — we can only tell you how, as end users, the services affect us, how accessible they are for us and how reliable they are. For instance, I do not want to spend my time having to decide that a certain type of desk is safe, durable and of a reasonable price — I want to phone up Willie Montgomery in the Western Board and get a reliable answer from a reliable man. That is my position. I really do not want to see West of the Bann destroyed; it is an entity within other entities and it does not need to have this false line drawn across it. It is changing the whole axis of Northern Ireland and, therefore, I keeping coming back to the conclusion that this is not for educational reasons.

In Wales this year they introduced education authorities with a population base of only 130,000. The Western Board's is at least twice that figure and we believe it to be efficient, so why are they doing it? It does not make sense and you well know, Ladies and Gentlemen, the massive public and professional support there is for the board, and that speaks volumes. Where have you a bureaucracy enjoying such widespread public support and trust? Our board is giving that to us and we suggest that it is maybe the same in other boards. The Government need to go back and look at the architects of the plan and see whether they are doing a service or a disservice to Northern Ireland.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: This is a bit of a red herring being thrown out about Wales. We are told that they have gone from eight to 22, but that is not correct. Originally there were eight regional and 37 local bodies.

Mr McKee: We are not actually bandying that figure, if you forgive me. What we are saying is that at present, now, this year the authorities in Wales have a population base of around 130,000 people. The Western Board's is twice that and we are happy with that service. We believe that the efficiency of the Western Board's service has been proved, and we also find the same thing in Scotland is true. The education authorities are smaller there.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: But you do accept that rather than going from eight to 22, they have gone from 45 to 22, irrespective of the size?

Mr McKee: I am not worried about that quite honestly. I am worried about the fact that the population base that we are going to get will actually increase dramatically and will ignore the geography of the province.

Mr Browne: It is double the amount now, and it is to double again. It is going to be even worse.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: If you take away half the budget of the boards — which LMS is effectively doing  transfer a wide range of functions from the boards to the schools, create a common curriculum and look after exams and assessment you have, in effect, reduced the purpose of having so many boards.

Mr McKee: No. First, the examination system was not within the remit of the boards. Up until 1990 decisions about who staffed what schools and how many were in them were mostly taken on a departmental level. There is a whole range of services that the Department's document suggests went from the boards to the schools — that is not true.

LMS has created a whole change of emphasis and in fact what I am talking to property services people about now is the simple fact that we, the users, are indeed taking more of their time. We demand to know why they are doing something, what they are doing and what they have done, and we check whether the quality of service is there.

The Chairman: I think Mr Kirkland was testing you with the Department's views.

Mr Fowler: Mrs McCafferty stated that in-service training was going to be put at risk. May I suggest that under a three-board set-up, service training provision could be enhanced.

Mrs McCafferty: The first answer to that is on a financial point. I assume that the only way that money is going to be saved is by job cutting — that seems to be the obvious thing. Therefore, if jobs are cut, and they are cut across the board, the in-service people, the curriculum advice service, will obviously be part of that cut too. But, even supposing that the brunt of any financial cuts did not fall on the curriculum advice service, there is evidence, and we all have it in our own schools because of the way the board operates. For example, every year the board identifies in a relatively small area the needs of the schools across the board's area. It then draws up a scheme which it presents to each school showing what its in-service needs are.

We are in touch with those people who give in-service help on an external basis though, if a school itself identifies a particular need, those people will come and do some in-service training in that school. Now if, as a result of what I am saying, the money is going to be cut — and we can only assume it is going to be — then those people are not going to be available, they are not going to have the time to facilitate the schools with all the in-service training that is going on. Across Northern Ireland not only are the boards facilitating curriculum advancement for teachers and in-service training for teachers, but all the schools are undertaking a completely new system this year of staff development and performance review, and the curriculum service is widely involved in supporting all that. That has major implications for everybody in schools and it is something new that schools have never had to deal with before. It is generally called appraisal, so an additional burden is coming onto the curriculum advisory service at precisely the moment that its role is being looked at in terms of the finance that will be provided to enable it to continue its good work.

Mr Hussey: You are highlighting in-service provision in the Western Education and Library Board. DENI emphasizes, of course, regionalization, which brings into play the RTU. Would an expanded RTU not provide services that are currently being provided by the boards?

Mrs McCafferty: My answer is still the same, but, yes, we have used RTU for certain things, and I know you are talking about expanding it. But why replace something that we have and that works with something which is regionalized and further removed from us, something which would have more difficulty identifying our needs? Why, to go back to the earlier point, fix what is not broken?

Mr Lapsley: May I just make the point that the board's curriculum support service has received praise from the inspectors. I have not seen the RTU being praised.

The Chairman: I give each of you a sound-bite.

Mr McGrade: Thank you very much, Mr Chairman. Mine is a general point but it refers to a number of matters. My worry is that these proposals are coming from what I would call a business background, but I think education is different. We have seen how the market-forces philosophy applied to education has forced the Department to do a U-turn, for example, in transport. Now the key to education is stability and anyone who has looked at the worsening situation over recent years — and they have been tough years — would say that the school situation is very stable and that that is due to the hard work of teachers and principals and the board's supporting them. The big word I would always use in education is relationships and, to quote somebody else, "Why fix it if it ain't broke?"

The relationships that we have built up work. However, with a new board we would have to get to know new people, and it takes people months to read into a situation. Why change? Can you apply a business plan to education? We need to answer those questions.

Mrs McCafferty: It has been argued that because of the devolution of powers to schools, less support from the board is needed. I would say that the exact opposite is the case. In a maintained school I could point to any number of areas where five years ago we might not have depended so much on the board but now we actually do depend on the board. We take a lot of decisions for ourselves but the board support us in all sorts of ways. My second point, and I am sorry to localize it, applies to the region around Derry, which is after all the second city of Northern Ireland. Now is not the time for upheaval which is going to affect not only Derry but also Strabane, Limavady and so on. It is not the time for upheaval.

The Chairman: I am tempted to say that it is second after Beragh.

Mr Lapsley: Compare savings of 0.2% of the budget with the upheaval. Is it worth it?

Mr Kennedy: I will also individualize it. In 1965 the Government took our railways away. The changes were to be economical and efficient, they were to be replaced by new, fast motorways, dual carriageway and town by-passes. Thirty years on — have you travelled between Omagh and Derry lately? We were promised a bypass for Strabane, and it took them 27 years to build half of it. So much for the promise of more efficiency.

Mr McKee: Could I just round off by saying that in my view the arguments actually put forward by the Department are essentially flawed and the big problem we all face is whether the Minister has the courage to make an honest decision in the face of what we believe is an unassailable argument in defence of the present system and leave the upheaval, which may come at some future point, to some political forum in Northern Ireland, for the people of Northern Ireland to decide for themselves. That is where the 21st century must go: we must learn to take our own decisions.

May I just thank you very much for your patience in listening to us. As Mr McFarland pointed out, we are quite emotional, about it, but also, I hope, professional.

The Chairman: Thank you very much.

Witnesses:

Mr H Keys, Mr E Bullick, Mr Bradley, Mr D Canning and Mr P McGilley

(Western Primary Principals' Group)

The Chairman: Thank you very much for coming. Our remit results from the resolution of the Forum that empowers us to report on the Government's intention to reduce the number of education boards from five to three. I want to give you the opportunity to make a fair and careful presentation.

Mr Bradley: Thank you very much. I wish to thank you on behalf of the group for your invitation to us regarding the proposal by Michael Ancram to abolish the Western Education and Library Board. You introduced us as the North West principals because I am chairman of the North West Primary Principals' Association, but today I have with me representatives from all the schools and all the areas represented on the Western board.

On my extreme right is David Canning who is principal of Strabane Controlled Primary School and past chairman of Strabane District Primary Principals' Association. Next to me is Paddy McGilley, principal of St Ronan's Catholic Maintained Primary School, Lisnaskea. On my left is Eric Bullick, principal of Omagh Integrated Primary School and chairman of Omagh Primary Principals' Association. And on my extreme left is Henry Keys, principal of the Model Controlled Primary School, Enniskillen and chairman of Fermanagh Primary Principals' Association.

Before I hand you over to our first speaker I would like to convey my support for the sentiments expressed by the secondary principals. We concur entirely with them. We have the full support of the 201 primary principals and the governors of the primary schools in the Western Board area. We also have the support of the nursery schools there too.

Mr Canning: Ladies and Gentlemen, may I begin on a very practical note reflecting my concern for the ability of schools to provide a quality service for our children if we have to undergo more change. The heart of a good education system is its teaching force and teachers are weary of change. The Dearing report in England and Wales stated that the pace of change and the workload on teachers was far too great. Consequently, there was to be a review and, of course, that was carried out. The review recommended that the curriculum be slimmed. We were also assured that after that review there would be a period of stability.

Now may I illustrate what stability has meant to us so far. This is why I have this big, heavy briefcase beside me. Yesterday I picked up details around my office of all the data that had arrived since the beginning of September in relation to this period of stability. There is another briefcase outside which we did not bring in. There is not quite as much in it. I just want to run through very quickly some of the things that are here: a revised programme of study, a new financial manual for the local management of schools, and CCEA's directions for statutory assessment which begins for all primary schools this year. As the class computerized system now moves into the majority of primary schools, we have manuals for it. A major drugs initiative has been launched by the Department, there is the incorporation of boards of governors, there are new directives about open enrolment, there are new responsibilities for governors relating to the transfer of pupils from primary to secondary schools, there are additional demands for the school prospectus and the annual parents' meeting and there have been detailed statistical bulletins from the Department about the transfer procedure. For a significant number of schools there is the initiative to raise school standards which is also bringing far more work to those schools. There is the introduction of the code of practice for special needs and there is the introduction of staff development and performance review, sometimes called appraisal. And, by the way, I am only starting appraisal this year so I do not have the documents for it yet, neither here nor in the other briefcase. That is stability, and that is my greatest concern.

Over the past number of years the Western Board has built up a detailed knowledge of schools and how schools need to be supported. We need that support now, as these documents will illustrate. If this is stability, all I can say is “Help” — and that help will come from people who have built up our trust, as we have built up their trust, people who have an insight into our schools as we have an insight into how they can support us. If new bodies are to be inaugurated around Northern Ireland, teachers will not have that trust rebuilt overnight, but we need the help now. This is my first point.

My second point centres around WELB's cross-community contact scheme. Much has already been said about the quality of the cross-community contact that the Western Education and Library Board has facilitated in its area. I would just like to say as the principal of a controlled school — and I say this on a very personal note — that I have been a principal for over 10 years now in two different schools, and I have always valued the opportunities afforded by the Western Board to participate in cross-community contact. I believe that any attempt to split our board now would damage contacts at a time when we need to be building bridges and not demolishing them. Once again, what we have to recognize here is that it is the development of trust and the growth of tolerance — both of which are slow and delicate things — that are the heart of cross-community contact. If we dismember the board now, we split schools

that have been co-operating for years and years, we split staff and we split pupils. I do not think that this is what is needed in our current climate.

Finally, may I add in the realm of local accountability about which our Government have had much to say in many arenas in recent years: if change is to come about to the administrative part of our education system, we should be looking far beyond the current proposals. It was pointed out some time ago that any changes to the administrative part of our education system should be delayed until the current peace initiatives have a chance to blossom.

A move to change now may eventually lead to one of two things: either any future developments in education will be put on the back-burner because we have just gone through a period of great upheaval and administrative change, or else in a year or perhaps two years' time, or whenever the peace initiatives blossom, we will have to change education administration yet again to bring it under local democratic control. That would be most unfortunate, not unfortunate in its coming under local democratic control, but most unfortunate in that we would have to change yet again. What I am suggesting to you is that the education system should be strongly rooted in local government so that we can have true accountability — that is what we should be striving for, and current proposals fall far short of this goal. So what I would say to you is this: please do not support the removal of a structure which has served and is

continuing to serve us very well just to replace it with a less accountable and very remote body which we may have to change in a couple of years' time anyway. Instead, let us all strive for a more democratic and accountable service even if it takes a little longer to organize in the first place.

Mr McGilley: I will keep my submission as short as possible. I wish to highlight four important aspects of the work of the Western Education and Library Board. These are: the Inset programme, the in-service support for teachers, the EMU (the Education for Mutual Understanding) programme and the small schools policy. Now with regard to in-service support, the teachers in this board have the highest regard for the board's in-service programme for them. The in-service programme has been of immense benefit in enabling teachers and schools to address the overwhelming changes brought about by education reform. Now I could speak at length on this topic, however, I want to refer you to an impartial professional report on this service by the Department of Education's inspectorate, and this was referred to by the secondary principals. I commend this report to you in its entirety and to give

you a flavour of it, I would like to read some extracts from it. Firstly

“School based courses were generally considered outstanding in terms of quality and effectiveness and, with regard to the board's management of the programme, a well defined, efficient and effective structure for the management and co-ordination of the board's Inset has been devised and skilfully implemented by the senior officers in change of inset.”

Now, I could read many more extracts, but to cut it short I would just like to refer you to part of the conclusion.

“It is clear from the evidence that the Western Board has addressed most of the fundamental issues which contribute to a successful effective Inset programme with realism, vigour and a sound grasp of what is needed and how it can be best be provided. The management of the Inset programme at senior level is outstandingly good. Strategies are effective, the quality of the Inset staff is high and the Inset programme is a clear benefit to the great majority of teachers.”

I commend this inspectorate report to you for your deliberations on this matter. Now, with regard to EMU, my colleague has referred to it here and I will be quite short about it. There is a high level of participation in this scheme in the Western area and schools are playing a vital role in fostering effective community harmony. This task is not easy in the present climate. I teach in Lisnaskea in County Fermanagh and that speaks for itself. Our schools have addressed this issue in the past with considerable success. We will continue to promote community harmony but we attribute our past achievements in this field to the support and encouragement of the board. An example of this is the in-service courses addressing this issue by the board, and I have already read to you what the Department of Education's inspectorate has had to say in its appraisal of those courses. If the Western Board were dismantled, I would be

fearful for the consequences on community relations in the period of instability which would inevitably follow. The cost would be very high if the board were dismantled.

Lastly, and briefly, the Western Board has developed a policy of support for small schools, small primary schools mainly. It has considerable expertise in addressing the needs of small schools. There are many small schools in the West and whether they are in the hills of Tyrone or on the borders of Fermanagh, they are not just small schools, they are the focal points of small communities, of all denominations. They may be more costly to run per pupil than their town counterparts, but their closure would further depopulate the countryside as families would have to move to set up home closer to the schools. This is a social consequence that cannot be costed, but it would be a disaster if these communities had their schools closed. It would be like taking the heart out of them. I would be fearful for the survival of many of these

small schools if the Western Board were dismantled.

Mr Bullick: My name is Eric Bullick, and I am headmaster of Omagh Integrated Primary School. As head of a direct grant-maintained school which receives its funding directly from Bangor and for whom the Western Board does not carry any management role, you may wonder why I am speaking on behalf of the board. In fact, the six integrated schools in the Western Education and Library Board receive many services from the board and are highly satisfied with those services. I am talking in particular of curriculum advice and support, the induction of new teachers, the library service, the transport service, help with our undertaking, the administering of the transfer procedure and support with computing. In addition, most of these schools buy their meals in from the Western Board.

Before my move to Omagh Integrated I was head of a controlled school in the village of Fintona for 14 years and in that position I was totally dependent on this high quality service which you have heard described this afternoon. During those 14 years in Fintona, board officers guided our school and our governors through many difficult issues which we could not have handled on our own. People who volunteer to become school governors do not come in with any pre-planning or training or expertise; Board officers took us through redundancies, grievance procedures, tribunals and financial difficulties, while other board officers looked after our school premises and school building and kept them in fine shape.

I have been wondering what on earth it is that is behind this proposal to axe the Western Education and Library Board. I have been trying to discover the reasoning behind it and I have several ideas. I will not refer to those which I have heard mentioned before this morning or this afternoon, just to save on time. Why focus on a board which is already second to none and single it out for axing? I wonder if perhaps the Western Board is being closed because it is an innovative board, a class leader, a trend setting board. I wonder if DENI feels a little bit threatened by it. The Western Board carries out a host of duties and, perhaps, DENI would like to undertake some of those duties itself. Maybe the message that is coming out of DENI is that it cannot beat the board, so it will close it. This is clearly not the wish of the people in the West of the province.

Perhaps the Western Board is being punished because three years ago it led a campaign to slow the pace of education reform. Education reform had reached the stage were it was threatening the good of schools. Principals in the Western Board persuaded the Western Board itself to come in behind the campaign actually to slow that pace of reform. DENI may not have appreciated the intervention of the WELB, but it was clearly the wish of teachers, governors, parents through out the West that educational reform be slowed down.

The Western Board may also be being punished because it is not enthusiastic about the closing of small schools. Many small schools in the Western area have closed but that has been the decision of the governors of those schools and not of the Western Board itself. The Western Board has helped and assisted, when a decision has been made by the governors, the closure process, but the Western Board has not initiated. Maybe DENI feels that the Western Board is an impediment to the rapid closure of more schools. Again, this would not be the wish of the people in the West.

I wonder too if the Western Board is being punished for spending too much money on getting its pupils to and from school. The bill for transport is indeed very high, but in a scattered rural community there is, of necessity, much travelling to be undertaken and many more buses and drivers are required than in any other part of Northern Ireland. The Western Board is fulfilling its requirements to the people of the West.

Then, perhaps, it is being punished because it spends money on keeping its buildings and school grounds well maintained. Yes, the Western Board does spend money on keeping its buildings stock in an excellent state of repair, but again it is the wish of parents and teachers and people in the West that the buildings be kept up to standard. I wonder if it is being axed because the Government desperately needs the elusive £2 million which they claim will be saved. It is possible, yes, but I have to say that in a meeting I had with Michael Ancram approximately one year ago on a different matter, he freely admitted that the reduction from five boards to one, two, three or four was not being made on financial grounds.

I believe that it is not the Minister who is pushing for this reduction, but a handful of senior civil servants who have been going round the boards one by one seeing who will crack first. It is not the wish of the people of the West that the West should crack. I conclude that against the wishes of the people of the West, the Western Board is being axed because it is highly efficient, it is effective, and it is accountable. It is a leading board and somehow maybe DENI feels threatened by it. It is being axed because it is there and a few powerful senior civil servants — and I will not name the three of them — would be happier if it were not there.

Mr Keys: First of all, I endorse everything that has been said previously by the panel of secondary principals. I listened with interest and found their case very well presented. Coming from the primary sector and from Fermanagh — and sometimes in Fermanagh we do feel we are out on a limb and perhaps forgotten about — I want to say that it was with shock and dismay that we learnt of the announcement by the Minister back in June, and since that time we have reflecting upon what the effect on the West would be of the breaking up of the Western Board.

I also endorse what has been said about the service of the Western Board and I base my case mainly on relationships. Over the 23 years, excellent relationships have been developed involving board members, board officers, teachers and principals across the whole sector and also among the schools — controlled, maintained and integrated. The fact that we sit here as principals from the area right across from Derry down to Fermanagh is not just chance. We have relationships, sound relationships, and that has been of great value through many difficult times in the province. I feel the Western Board has been, perhaps along with all the boards, one of those stable factors in our community. The Western Board has led not only with moderation and co-operation but with a great degree of vision and commitment to the youth of our area, and I have nothing but praise for it.

My concern as a principal is that on a day-to-day basis I have a working relationship with officers from every department of the Western Board. I know whom I am speaking to, they know whom they are speaking to. While relationships could be built up under another board, I have no doubt, it would take time. I will simply finish by saying what has already been said: in time of change this is one change too many, and I certainly hope that the case against it will be fought very strongly.

The Chairman: The Department will look at Mr Bullick and Mr McGilley and say “It does not really concern you. You have your integrated system. You have your CCMS, and therefore you are already protected. You can buy in services that you require. We want, as a very good administration team in Rathgael House, to improve the quality of performance at the chalk-face, and boards do not do that.” How would you react to that?

Mr Bradley: My immediate reaction would be to ask the Minister to read the inspector's report on the in-service training programme provided by the board. We have a copy of it here and Mr McGilley referred to the excellent work done by the board on training teachers to perform at the chalk-face. That really answers that question.

Mr Fowler: Mr Canning said that this change to three boards would inflict terrible pressures on the staff in schools, which might have to be reversed two or three years hence. Are you clairvoyant, Mr Canning?

Mr Canning: No, but I am hopeful that our peace process will move onto the right track. Let us all recognize that if we do get relationships established and if we do find that we can move into avenues where we see peace as realistic and have a political settlement that is acceptable to the vast majority of people, we will be looking at a situation where somebody in Northern Ireland, and with whatever connections outside that the people ultimately agree to, will have responsibility for local services, and people will be locally accountable. In that instance education would obviously have to be considered.

Mr Neeson: I was very impressed by Mr McGilley's comments about small schools. Does he think that under a larger board, as is being proposed by the Department, they would suffer? I accept your argument totally about their importance to society in the west of the province, but will they suffer to the extent you suggest?

Mr McGilley: Well, because the Western Board has so many small schools under its umbrella, it has developed skill and expertise over the years in learning to deal with them, administer them and fund them. Another board may not have developed the same skill or expertise in dealing with these issues, and I fear that it could take a considerable time for it to develop. In the meantime, some small schools may close. The funding is different in different boards and the service is different. The in-service provision — and I will go back to it again — in the Western Board is tailored to suit small schools. Its in-service provision is in the schools' not in a central location. The service is brought out into the schools. The schools work in clusters, and there are various schemes to deliver it. The Western Board has developed an expertise in dealing with this because it has so many of them. The other boards may not have the same expertise.

Mr Bradley: Certainly the existence of small schools is at a price, and the price is paid by larger schools, but the large schools in the Western area are sympathetic to the needs of the small schools, and we really can understand if some of our money is being spent to educate a child at a small school. We do not mind so much because this is the ethos of the West — we can work together. I do not know the situation elsewhere, but I know that that is the situation in the West.

The Chairman: So you are really saying that standardization and equalization could be extremely detrimental?

Mr Bradley: Very much so.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: But 28,900 people will still be there — bus drivers and everybody else — so it is not going to affect any school to any measurable degree.

Mr Bradley: Well, where does the Minister hope to save his £2 million then because surely the most immediate way of saving money would be by reducing salary costs? You say that there would only be a loss of 100 people. I am not sure about that and what I am concerned about is a continuity to enable our schools to continue to work as they are.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: There will be continuity with the other 28,900 people.

Mr Bradley: Well we cannot be sure that a new Northern Board would not consider it prudent to rationalize, say, the in-service training programmes that we have and move their offices from the West to other areas. This would place a considerable strain on our schools. I will give you a quick example of the type of strain that primary schools are under at the moment.

There was a job advertised in Londonderry for a principalship — perhaps you are aware of it. The first time the board advertised, there were only four applicants for this principalship. It re-advertised hoping to get more applicants: it got only two. Now this is an illustration of the difficulties faced by principals nowadays and the pressures we are under — and this is with the board in existence. The principal can phone up somebody at headquarters or at the district office and get support immediately from the likes of Billy Montgomery who will help. If the board is abolished and we have to establish new relationships with new people, this will be more strain on the principals, and the children will have to suffer.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: You do not need a board to tell children how they ought to live. It is not the education and library board that gets involved in cross-community matters.

Mr McGilley: Well I know.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: So it is a red herring.

Mr McGilley: The Western Board has been an excellent facilitator for our schools. We cannot do it on our own. We need resourcing, we need in-service provision, and in-service provision has played a very very big part in it. I want to compliment the Western Board on the way it has addressed the in-service EMU.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: But if you have all the other staff?

Mr McGilley: But would they still be able to do it?

Rev Trevor Kirkland: It is the quality of their service that I was emphasizing.

The Chairman: I think Mr Kirkland is maybe enjoying what DENI would do.

Mr Keys: DENI has only recently handed over to the boards responsibility for cross-community schemes. Has the board no role to play then?

The Chairman: Mr Kirkland has probably had his answer.

Thank you all. I enjoyed the freshness of your presentation

Witnesses:

Ms A McClintock, Mr J Flynn, Mr E Connolly, Ms V McDonald and Ms C Devlin

(North Eastern Education and Library Board Staff)

The Chairman: May I first bid you a very warm welcome to the Northern Ireland Forum and its Education Committee.

You have made a written presentation, and this will be diligently read by the Committee.

Please proceed as you wish.

Ms McClintock: My name is Angela McClintock and I am a staff representative of the North Eastern Education and Library Board. On behalf of the headquarters staff of the North Eastern Education and Library Board employed at County Hall, I would like to thank you for allowing us this opportunity to place our case before you today.

Michael Ancram, the Minister responsible for Education announced in June that his decision regarding the review of education administration in Northern Ireland is to reduce the number of education boards in the province from five to three. This came as a shock announcement to everyone involved in education for several reasons.

Firstly, the consultative document ‘Educational Administration in Northern Ireland’ was launched on 17 February 1993 with the purpose of debating how the Northern Ireland education system should be administered effectively and efficiently. The foreword to the consultation document stated that in reviewing the existing system of administration it was important to ensure that it remains fair, effective, efficient and appropriate to the changing needs of education in Northern Ireland. All parts of the education service help to heal community division and promote co-operation and better understanding. We preserve and build on the co-operation which already exists and seek to extend and strengthen these links, not weaken them. The Minister, in highlighting these aspects, commented specifically on the success of the current arrangements for administration particularly in relation to the role of education and library boards where he stated that

“There are few if any other areas of day-to-day life in Northern Ireland where churchmen and laymen from both of the main traditions meet so regularly and work together so constructively.”

The board believes that while the consultative document set out the context within which any discussions on change should take place and the objectives and principles which should underpin any such changes, the opportunity to stimulate real debate has been missed.

A few important points to note include: recognition that the opportunity has not been taken in the document to review the totality of education administration. The review concentrated almost exclusively on the role, function and future of the boards and has, to a large extent, excluded the Department of Education itself. No business case was established for the changes outlined in the models for structural change. In addition, no economic appraisal has been carried out costing the various options put forward at the time. This made an evaluation of these alternatives almost impossible in terms of efficiency and effectiveness and will inevitably lead to an evaluation of

factors without quantitative or qualitative data. The board's response to the consultative document sought to build on the secure foundations already in place to ensure the creation of effective and efficient structures which will contribute to greater unity and integration and promote co-operation and better understanding throughout the community.

The North Eastern Education and Library Board believes that one of the key issues and objectives which must underpin any new system of educational administration is accessibility. Education is a social service which impacts on every household in Northern Ireland. It is a local, community-based service which services and must be accountable to its local community. It is, therefore, vitally important that administrative arrangements continue to reflect this tradition by remaining accessible to all. This should be characterized by a tier of local administration which is close to the customers and clients it serves. It must be flexible enough to be responsive to local needs and changing demands, to embrace and develop community relations and enhance decision-making at local level by the involvement of local interest. Public accountability with any administrative system should involve all interests in the decision-making process, facilitate full consultation with local communities and ensure equality of opportunity and treatment. Financial accountability should ensure that adequate resources are secured and that proper planning and control mechanisms exist. There should be proper financial accounting

procedures and a business-like approach must be demonstrated.

With regard to efficiency and effectiveness, any system of education administration must demonstrate equity and resource allocation which is targeted to strategic priorities and local needs. There must also be integration, planning and delivery of services, value for money, continuous measurement of performance, both financial and non-financial, and a commitment to quality.

Acceptability — this should be characterized by a tier of local administration which facilitates decision making at local level, embraces the Citizen's Charter and the Parent's Charter, is open and sympathetic to individual needs, demonstrates even-handedness and contributes to the development of harmonious community relations.

Other key objectives include creating a more unified system and conformity with educational reform principles. With these key objectives and principles in mind, the board's response stated that the model set out in the document failed to build on the secure foundations already in place or incorporate the key principles which must underpin any new structure if it is to be successful.

One of the greatest strengths of the existing five-board system is its accessibility which contributes to its acceptance and ownership at local level. The three-board model proposed would not enhance the capacity at local level to bring together diverse interests in planning and developing educational services for their communities. Neither would it contribute to a more unified system nor enhance accountability or acceptability at local level. It would also lead to more centralized, bureaucratic decision-making with the inherent danger of organizations serving themselves rather than their clients and customers. With regard to efficiency and economy, no costings of any kind were included to facilitate comparisons with the current system and its associated costs. There was little or no analysis of the complete structure which might be required.

There is nothing to commend the three-board model which appears to disregard the principles and objectives outlined in the consultative document in preference for substantial rather than minimalist change.

For these reasons and the following points, we the staff at the North Eastern Education and Library Board headquarters are totally opposed to the three-board model proposed. There has been no consultation with the local community on this decision. Last year's four-board proposal was at least the subject of a period of public consultation. The same opportunity that was given to the communities in the areas served by the Belfast and South Eastern Boards, in respect of the proposal to merge these two boards, must surely be given to the communities living in Ballymena, Carrickfergus, Newtownabbey, Omagh, Fermanagh, Strabane, Limavady and Londonderry. Public consultation on this issue is a necessity. There is overwhelming support for the current five-board arrangement and very little for the Government's decision. To support this we quote from a overview of responses to the Department of Education's consultative document issued by the Association of Chief Executives of the Education and Library Boards. Some extracts from the responses of schools are as follows

“The more remote the controlling body the less the possibility exists for local factors in social, economic, environmental and morale considerations to be given due weight. The officer's local knowledge and awareness of the small rural school problems have eased the burden of many teachers in remote areas. Why change something that is a success, why not build on that success and go from strength to strength?”

The Government have completely disregarded the results of the 1995 consultative exercise and in doing so have treated the local community and educational interests with contempt. In early 1996 all the political parties were invited to discuss the issue with the Minister and as far as we know they have all conveyed to him their wish to maintain the five boards until a local assembly could discuss the issue. Clearly this has also been disregarded.

The decision announced is therefore undemocratic and dictorial. The decision to reduce the number of boards will result in major upheaval in the support and service provided to schools and the community generally. The Government’s claim that this decision will save £2 million represents less than one quarter of one per cent of the budgets of the five boards. No satisfactory explanation has been given as to how the £2 million will be saved. The Government are moving to implement this decision with improper haste over the heads of the local population and the political parties. It must not be permitted to do so with the strongest opposition. The decision has created tremendous uncertainty amongst the board staff as it will certainly lead to a loss of jobs and resources from many areas, many of which are already suffering from social deprivation and high unemployment.

Furthermore, the decision raised the issue of the siting of new headquarters for the three boards. Staff are of the opinion that any attempt to change the existing locations would not only have major social consequences for many staff, the majority of whom are working mothers, but it would also result in a potentially devisive community wrangle over the site of new headquarters buildings. This would be contrary to the social cohesion presently found in the existing five-board structure. In an attempt to highlight the concerns of board employees with regard to the Minister's decision, staff initiated a campaign under the banner 'United to Win'. One of our tactics was to lobby the nine councils within the North Eastern Education and Library Boards area by way of a staff presentation of our case to each. The nine councils were unanimous in their support for the retention of the existing five-board structure.

Yet again, this demonstrates the strength of opposition to Michael Ancram's decision and the ability of people to unite over this fundamental issue which affects all creeds and classes.

In conclusion therefore, we the staff of the North Eastern Education and Library Board thank you for your attention to this matter and ask that the Forum support the present five-board structure as the most suitable model for education administration in Northern Ireland.

The Chairman: Thank you very much for an excellent presentation very well delivered. How do you wish to proceed from here?

Mr Connolly: We would like to answer any questions that the members of the Committee may have.

The Chairman: One of the things that the Department may say is that this is not about the people who work in education, that education is about children.

They may say that five boards are duplicating what is done in the north and the south and the east and the west. There is a lot of money to be saved. How do you respond?

Mr Flynn: I am Jimmy Flynn from the personnel section of the board. I am sure some of my colleagues will wish to add to what I want to say. We share the concern for the quality of education that is delivered in the schools by the teachers for we have always seen it as our job to support the teachers in their vital task of concentrating on education while we handle the nuts and bolts, the support administration, that is required in order to keep the schools in being. We, for example, have to look after things like the constitution of boards of governors. Somebody has to keep those maintained. We have to look after the architectural services. Somebody has to give professional, legal and personnel advice, and I can speak for the legal and personnel side of our work. We lift the burden of all of those technicalities, transport and everything else from the schools and enable the teachers to concentrate on delivering a quality education service to the schools.

Now the question of duplication has arisen, and very rightly so. There are five area boards but, to pick up a point which my colleague Mrs McClintock made earlier, you know that when a board gets too big, when it becomes too bureaucratic and too centralized, you lose the effective working relations that you should be able to have with people on the ground. We think that the five-board mix in relation to the overall demographic population of Northern Ireland is just about right. We have certainly capitalized upon the fact that we run a local service, that we know people locally, that we have local working relations, understandings and contact. Those things are money in the pocket of the schools and are an enormous support in delivering an effective

service. If you know the people, you can get things done. If you are working 50 miles away and you know nothing about the area where they are living, you are quite likely to be inefficient. Now for that reason we believe that five boards will respect and preserve the effective working relationships that each board has established with principals and governors. To change this would be to take a retrograde step and for that reason we do think you can carry rationalization too far. You can carry it to the stage where, for example, you only have one board, but that would be at an enormous cost in terms of the effective working relations that actually support the schools in an individual way. Perhaps my colleagues would like to add to that.

Mr Connolly: Part of our difficulty also is that those who have figures for the totality of administration, and that includes the Department of Education and the other bodies as well as the education boards, can show that the costs attributable to the education boards have actually been dropping over the last number of years whereas, for example, the costs of the Department's administration functions have in fact been rising. That is one of the inequalities that we are particularly concerned about, and until we see otherwise we can only assume that those have not been taken into account. The boards, I am quite sure, can look at their costs and provide savings themselves by judicial management, and I am quite sure that the North Eastern Board has already got that underway, particularly with its forward strategic planning.

I certainly reiterate Mr Flynn's concern for the service delivered to the schools. I was in a school yesterday in an area which would be considered to have social difficulties and it really was superb watching the staff working in that school and looking at the children and the benefits they are getting, and it made me feel that part of those benefits are a result of the good support that we think we are giving the school.

Mr Flynn referred to lifting burdens off shoulders. That particular school had enough burdens and I can see that it is gaining so much from the service we have been providing.

The Chairman: This is a very simple question that I am sure Michael Ancram will bear in mind — and he may be surprised that you, the workers, are in here worrying about this. It is only a few top managers who are going to lose jobs and, what is more, this personnel service can be delivered from Magherafelt just as easily — is that not so?

Mr Connolly: That is an easily made point. It puts me in mind of something I heard on the radio. Apparently if you ring up to book a British Airways ticket your call is accepted by someone in Calcutta and that someone rearranges the ticket and your ticket arrives. Now you do not know that. No one says this is Calcutta. That is the sort of technical thing which does not require hands-on support. In the school I was referring to a moment ago, the principal knows me and the rest of my colleagues. Our service is vital. He cannot ring Calcutta, the personal service is not there.

The Chairman: Relationships are what you are emphasizing.

Mr Connolly: That is certainly one of the points we would stress.

Mr McFarland: I am quite curious about this. Unlike the Western Board that actually has a fairly serious problem because it is facing complete removal, you, in theory if all goes well, will not move. You will retain — apart from Newtownabbey and Carrick — all your current board area and get some more to the west. Are you seriously saying that you as professionals will be unable to give those schools in the west the sort of excellent service that you currently give those in your own board area?

Mr Flynn: Larne and Strabane do not have a lot in common and what has happened here is that the Minister appears to have decided on a carve up of the province without any respect for the traditional, historical boundaries. These areas have little in common either culturally or demographically and he is assuming that you can simply extend cold administrative structures to people. I go back to relationships again. Without reference to the culture, without reference to the insights of the community, without respect for the traditions of that community, is not a good way to administer anything.

In the past when I first came to County Hall I attempted to work on the principle that it was only a matter of drawing a diagram and setting in place administrative and organizational arrangements. I found out otherwise. I found to my cost that I was treading on people's corns, that I was treading on people's sensitivities. You cannot administer effectively unless you know the people you are administering, that you are serving, and with all due respect, we do not know the people in Strabane all that well.

Mr McFarland: Yet.

Mr Flynn: There is one other little point I would like to make, picking up something that the Chairman said. Yes, we do gain areas and we do lose areas with whom we have long been associated in the past. You can move the headquarters but you cannot move the young men, and particularly the young women, who are married and have families at school. You cannot tell them to go and work in Londonderry because people have built their lives around where they are actually working in County Hall in Ballymena.

Mr McFarland: We have strayed slightly. I would argue that there is little in common between Benone and Roslea yet the Western Board will tell you that its board is all at one. You are saying that areas have got to be similar. They are not at the moment, so the logic that they have to be so in the future does not necessarily hold water.

Mr Flynn: That is right. We have a locally administered system of education and locally means that you exercise local knowledge and insight in the way you actually organize and do things, in the way you conduct your business. It is not respect for local knowledge and insight if you simply divide the country up on an organizational chart such as you have shown me.

Mr McFarland: We heard this morning that when the current system was set in place people complained but very quickly settled down and got on with it, and now it is the best model in the world that nobody wants to change. The Department's argument is that if this goes ahead, in a year and half's time, you, like all professionals, will have made it work. You will have got to know schools in the west, and those relationships will be as cosy as with Dalriada.

Mr Flynn: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to reflect upon my experience. I joined education administration, the North Eastern Board, in 1973, so I was there at the beginning and I have had some personal experience of the way things work. That argument was a perfectly valid one. The one thing on which everybody agreed about in 1973 in Northern Ireland was the importance of providing a quality education service for all our children, irrespective of the community divisions. But, speaking from my experience in 1973, it took us until about 1978 to settle down and what I am saying is that history is going to repeat itself. We are going to get demoralization, a lack of contact and new arrangements to be made. We lost a lot of expertise the last

time because with reorganization a lot of the staff simply disappeared. It took about five years to settle down and during those five years the schools were anything but the beneficiaries of what we were intending to deliver them.

It is going to demoralize staff, it is going to disrupt relationships. It is not just the board officers looking after their jobs, we are thinking ahead and trying to estimate from our experience the impact upon the schools that we support because, and there is no doubt about it, there will be a severe knock-back in efficiency when you make arrangements or when you change arrangements in the order of magnitude that has been set out here, so the schools will suffer, coming back to the Chairman's point. We are concerned about the children as well as about our jobs and we see clearly that in the end this disruption and demoralization will feed through to the schools and they will be less capable of doing their job.

Mr Hussey: I teach in Castlederg. I would ring Willie Montgomery or Jackie Walls in the Omagh Office. If this new situation arises, eventually I may be ringing up somebody in your offices. The two people I named happen to live in Castlederg, so I have a personal relationship with them. But there are other board officers who do not live in the same locality as myself. I am carrying on from Mr McFarland's point. Eventually I would expect that when things settled down, however long it took — I suppose this could be a crux issue — I would be able to ring your purchasing officer. I would be able to contact your youth service department. I am asking the same question as a practitioner. What difference do you see its making to me? The number of times that I see board officers coming into school are not that many. I am just a teacher, not a headmaster. If I want to contact my business studies advisory person, I contact the board. She is probably out on the ground, and someone contacts her and she contacts me from Clondermott or Lisnaskea, or wherever she happens to be, and we make an appointment, and she eventually comes to see me. So how is it going to affect me to my detriment?

Mr Flynn: I have actually been a member of the advisory service and I prided myself, as do my colleagues in the advisory service, on knowing the principals, on knowing, for example, if I were in charge of a particular area or specialism, my colleagues. I know everybody who is in charge of each of the departments, and they know to whom they can turn in order to get help with anything. They can use this network of personal relationships, personal working contacts, to deliver answers to problems quickly and efficiently.

Mr Hussey: I have worked under three advisory people, and I have got to know each one of them.

Mr Connolly: I am on the architectural side of the business and it may better illustrate the point we are trying to make if I tell you that my knowledge of your school is zero. My knowledge of the schools within the board is a lot greater and if I do not have the personal knowledge, there are others who do have it. That personal knowledge goes way back to the history of, for example, extensions which have been done to a school over a number of years, and that intimate personal knowledge is a vital part of the service we provide. I have great difficulty in seeing how I could replace that sort of intimate knowledge that I have of a series of schools.

Mr Hussey: Surely the plans are still available.

Mr Connolly: Yes, I am loath to quote examples but I was on a site yesterday where we were digging up manholes, for example, that were not on plans. But something triggered off something in someone's mind about two previous extensions that were done on that site, and that is the intimate knowledge that that person has of that particular school. I would have great difficulty getting access to that sort of intimate knowledge in other areas.

Mr Fowler: I spent two nights last week talking with Jim Stark, asking him to tell me some of the things that would be going through your minds. I worked under a four-board arrangement and it worked very adequately. Do you think it is open season for cutting up boards?

Mr Connolly: This is probably the case. It is happening across other Government bodies as well — in the Health Service there are changes happening everywhere. That is why I was referring to the business of booking tickets. I do not think you can clinically cut off a chunk of the service that we provide and expect it to be replaced by better technology or fax machines or whatever. I do not really think you can do that.

The Chairman: What you are telling us here is that in the people industry, as compared to a product industry in the inanimate sense, it takes a different skill, different working and a different set of contacts. In other words, the models for the ruthless efficiency of manufacture are not applicable in this case.

Mr Connolly: That is the point I am trying to make with this analogy of the tickets. You said that only one board is closing down and asked why we care. I think that most of the staff feel that two boards are closing down or being relocated.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: I want to ask one question of the ladies. What effect, in a couple of senses, have the proposals had upon you in terms of morale? Could you give us, in a couple of sentences, the details of how it would affect you if the headquarters were to move to Londonderry, or wherever else they might plonk it?

Ms McClintock: I am a working mother. I have two children who go to schools locally. Morale in County Hall has gone down. Michael Ancram announced this at the end of June when the schools were closing. No board meetings were scheduled until the end of September. Other staff members were going on holidays, and Prince Charles was in the province, so it was getting very little profile. Morale fell, and I, as a working mother, together with five other girls started this campaign ‘United to Win’ because this affected everybody on the ground. Ms McDonald, for example, is a single girl. This affected her. Where was she going to work in the future? Did she want to stay with education? Now, if I go out of work, my childminder goes out of work. I would have trouble finding a job that would give me the same satisfaction. I work in salaries and wages, and we have to keep very tight time schedules. We have a service to get to the people. When we were getting up our petition, the caretaker from Carnlough thought that he was going to have to go to Londonderry to find out about his pay as he was on low income. So at the grass-roots level there is a great ground-swell of opinion that the five boards should be maintained.

Mr Snoddy: Recognizing the difficulties that you have, could I turn the argument back. The argument is that in Rathcoole, which is a part of your board area, there were two schools, one with 300-odd pupils, and another with 280-odd pupils. Because of LMS your board took a decision to amalgamate them on the basis of finance. People out at work who had childminders close to one of those schools were all going to be disrupted, and your board did not listen. Why do you not accept that the Department can use exactly the same argument? This is not what it is all about; it is all about children's education.

Ms McClintock: That is why, as a working mother, I can see it from two angles. I see it as an employee of the board, but I also see it as a parent of children going to school and the service that has to be provided in the schools. My daughter goes to Gracehill Primary School which has been high up the list to get a new building - it has not got it because the money is not forthcoming to do that. So I see it from two clear angles.

Ms McDonald: My name is Valerie McDonald and I work for the transfer department of the North Eastern Education and Library Board. I am single so I cannot say that I can see it from a mother's point of view, but I am seeing it as a member of staff. I have been working for the board for eight years now, and it is a specialized type of training that you get in all the offices. Our office has very specific functions and we have a lot of contact with the small rural schools. Now we have a working knowledge of all the schools and the transfer system. Each school has different needs. We deliver test papers et cetera and we have, you know, like the other departments, a close working relationship with them. That would all be lost as would the specific training that people have received to work in offices to do those jobs. Although the Western Board has been told that it is basically out of existence, we have not been told that, but we have not been told that our jobs are safe either. We have been left in limbo, and staff morale is very very low at the moment.

Ms Devlin: My name is Cora Devlin. I work in the Finance Department and like Ms McClintock I am a mother of two young children who attend the local primary school. I can tell you that if the headquarters were relocated to another part of the board, whether there be three boards or five, I would find it extremely difficulty actually to travel. I would have to uproot a young family and leave the rest of my family and, indeed, my friends behind. I would be very reluctant to do that.

The Chairman: Thank you very much for giving us your time. I wish you a safe journey home to Ballymena.

Witnesses:

Mr R Dallas, Mr S Shields, Mr S Gault, Mr J O'Kane, Mrs A McGinley and Mr J McKinnney

(Save the West)

The Chairman: Welcome, Gentlemen. We are delighted to have you here. I presume that you wish to give a submission first.

Mr Hussey: I declare an interest and ask not to be called for questions.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Mr McKinney: Thank you very much for receiving us. I know you are under a bit of pressure of time, so first of all I will introduce the deputation and start with the lady on my left, the Chief Executive from Fermanagh District Council, Aideen McGinley. On my right is Cllr Seamus Shields, Chairman of Omagh District Council. On his right is Cllr James O'Kane from Strabane District Council and Cllr Dallas from Derry City Council, and on my extreme right is Cllr Gault from Limavady District Council. My name is John McKinney and I have asked to have this deputation. Some members may wish to make a short presentation after Cllr Shields makes the main presentation.

Mr Shields: First of all may I thank you and your Committee for giving us this opportunity to address you. The Chief Executive has indicated the composition of this delegation which represents the entire spectrum of the western region. We have representatives of the five district councils and they represent the various party interests which are represented on councils.

The Western Education and Library Board enjoys 100% support from the entire community in terms of the people who are the providers of education and the consumers of education, and the general public throughout the Western Board area have indicated a magnificent sense of support for the retention of the education and library board in its present form. Over 100,000 signatures have already been collected in a petition for the retention of the board, and that represents about 50% of the entire adult population of the Western Board area.

Why does the Western Board merit this volume of support? Firstly, because the Western Education and Library Board is widely regarded as having provided a quality service from its inception right through to the present time. That is acknowledged not just by the people in the Western region but by the DENI inspectorate itself. The provision of education services by the WELB is second to none in Northern Ireland.

Beyond that the board itself has a deservedly high reputation for promoting cross-community contacts in all aspect of life which it funds through the promotion of various activities through schools and youth clubs to involve people in cross-community contact. Perhaps more significantly in the conduct of its own affairs, the Western Education and Library Board has always ensured that all decisions taken by the board are taken on a collegiate basis involving all the various interest groups, and it is widely acknowledged by everybody in the Western Board area that the board itself has been a role model for co-operation and collaboration between all the various interests there.

These are some of the reasons the board is so highly valued and esteemed and there is such a volume of support for its retention in its present form. Let me ask the question: what would be the consequences of the abolition of the Western Education and Library Board? Well, first of all, in the political context last year the Prime Minister convened a meeting of all the chief executives and chairmen of the 26 district councils in Northern Ireland. The objective of that particular exercise was to encourage local elected representatives to take some responsibility for decision making themselves. Here in the Western Board area is an example of that in actual practice. Local people make decisions for the local area, and the significant thing about those decisions is that they are widely accepted, respected and regarded. So here we have the very thing that the Prime Minister himself is attempting to encourage in actual practice on a day-to-day basis. The very thing that the Prime Minister appears to be wishing to encourage is fully esteemed and highly regarded by the people who are the actual recipients of this service, and surely this is what the Government in Northern Ireland and Michael Ancram in particular, as Minister for political development, should be seeking to encourage. When you have a role model such as this, it is sensible and right that that role model should be encouraged and built upon and should be looked upon as a model for further extension.

So we believe that the abolition of the board itself at this present time would run contrary to professed policy with regard to Michael Ancram's other responsibilities in the Northern Ireland Office. The abolition of the Western Board would also increase the feeling of isolation and alienation which is already evident in may aspects in the West at the moment. We suffer from, perhaps, the worse roads in Northern Ireland. We have the most thinly spread and the most rural population in Northern Ireland. We do not have an airport, we do not have a port, we do not have a railway system apart from the railway that goes into Derry and the small airport at Eglington. But that vast region south of Strabane has absolutely no communication system whatsoever other than a single road, so already there is a significant feeling of isolation from the centre of decision making.

To abolish the Western Board at this time would significantly increase that feeling of isolation, the feeling that we are removed from things, the feeling that we are marginalized and distanced from services.

Increased easternization of services is evident in many other areas of the public service at the moment. You will be aware that recently there was an announcement by the Department of Health that the future of the health service, for example, will be based on six acute hospitals, four of those acute hospitals being in the Greater Belfast area. That type of announcement tends to make people feel uneasy, isolated and that they are being further downgraded and disregarded. To remove the headquarters of the Western Education and Library Board from their own area and from the West general would only further exacerbate that feeling of neglect.

One of the most commendable features of the structure at present is its accessibility to the people who need help. I am principal of a small school and I can vouch for the quality of service in terms of accessibility when the need arises. The people who provide the service in the Western Board at every level from chief executive down to the 7,000 employees of the board are there to help, and they make that the principle on which they operate — they always make themselves available. I can lift the phone at any time and almost guarantee that I will be helped within an hour. Now that is the quality of service that the Western Education and Library Board is renowned for, and when Michael Ancram declares that this proposed restructuring would provide an even better service, I contend from my experience that that would be a virtual impossibility.

What of the economic implications? Well the West, as I have indicated, is already felling very isolated and marginalized. Beyond that, it is the area which has the highest unemployment in Northern Ireland, and if this decision is implemented we will undoubtedly have further redundancies and reduction in staff numbers et cetera, maybe not in the short term but certainly in the longer term. That is something the Western Board can ill-afford. If the headquarters of the Western Board is removed from the Omagh area and from the West in general, we will have further downgrading in the status of the area. Now, we find it particularly difficult in parts of the Western Board to attract inward investment. So we feel that any reduction in the status of the area will only militate against the possibility of inward investment so we are really in the worst possible situation compared with other areas in Northern Ireland with our lack of communication systems and our poor road services et cetera. Anything that further downgrades our area and reduces its status and image will have a very detrimental and devastating effect on the community.

One of the arguments made for the restructuring at the present time is that the education service is overadministered, that too many people are doing the same kind of work and that fewer people could deliver the same service up to the same standard and perhaps even to a better standard. I have already said that I contest that.

It has been said that in recent years, since education reform was introduced in 1989, there has been a reduction in the type of service that the Western Board is required to deliver to schools. People in the education service and those who are involved in day-to-day contact with the education and library boards contest that view. In fact, some people maintain that the number of services that the boards are now providing to schools is greater than it was in the past.

If the argument is that education reform has reduced the amount of work that education and library boards have to do, why then is there not a similar reduction in the number of education and library boards across the water? The very same reforms have been implemented on the same basis, LMS and so forth, across the water. Yet what we find there is that the opposite is actually happening, and that education administrative units in Great Britain are being sub-divided at present.

We are also told that the units in Northern Ireland are too small in terms of population. Again that is a lie, because in Wales, for example, where there are something like 20 different administrative educational units, only one is bigger in terms of population than the Western Board area. The Western Board area serves one of the widest geographical areas in the entire United Kingdom because of the thin spread of the population. Because of the rurality of the Western area the people in the WELB, because of their understanding of far-flung communities with small schools and so on, have an affinity with the needs of those people.

The Western Board has been the champion of the small rural school. Unfortunately, we have examples from other board areas that show that the type of sympathy which exists in the WELB does not exist elsewhere for the small rural schools and the small rural communities, and people must understand the important role that small rural schools pay in rural communities. They help to keep communities together and give communities their own strength and their own identity. If the Western Board were to be abolished, we would lose something which is extremely valuable. Small schools would come under threat, small rural communities would come under threat, and our whole way of life would certainly be in jeopardy.

So, with regard to the consultation which Michael Ancram claims was carried out prior to the decision, from all research that we have done, and from all contacts that we have made, we are certain that practically every interest that was considered about this matter came out against this decision. If consultation means anything, it means that the people who consult must respond to that consultation. The members of this delegation have no doubt that the consultation that took place was nothing more than a charade. If consultation is to have any effect and be of any value, it has to be acted upon. It must be listened to and it must be responded to.

The only certain outcome of restructuring the education and library service at this time will be a great increase in the democratic deficit in Northern Ireland. We are already very short of decision-making bodies with decision-making powers in Northern Ireland. The education and library boards do have some powers over the spending of their own budget. They do have some impact on local communities and on local people's needs. This is due to be removed at this time. The £2 million projected savings that this restructuring is to make will be totally insignificant given the alienation, the upheaval and the damage that the restructuring will cause.

Many people feel that this proposal is not just about the education services. It is really the thin end of the wedge. If this proposal succeeds and gets through, health services may be next — a reduction in the number of health and social services boards. We know that they have been emasculated in many ways already because public representation has been removed from them. We fear that if this decision goes ahead, these other services will similarly be reduced. Perhaps even the 26 district councils themselves will be reduced to three. Why is this happening? Michael Ancram has said that this proposal is not about money. He said that if it were about money, he would have abolished all the boards and have had one. If it is not about money, what is it really about? How many people have talked about the hidden agenda? I do not know but we have certain fears about that.

That is the essence of my presentation, so finally I thank you. I beg the Northern Ireland Forum to convey in the strongest possible terms the views of this delegation about the esteem in which we hold the Western Board, the reasons we feel it must be retained, must, in fact, be spared and encouraged. We think that is absolutely essential for the image, status and well being of the Western Board. If Michael Ancram pushes ahead with this decision now, he will leave behind a legacy of bitterness unparalleled in the history of Northern Ireland.

The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr Shields, and thank you for your original submission of the 9th of this month

First of all, I will be the devil's advocate and do what the Minister would probably do. The board has given away a lot of powers. We are not really talking about safeguarding jobs. We have a few very highly paid people, but the vast majority of people in the education boards will not be affected. Surely you want the money saved to go to improve the quality of education. Here is the Minister trying to help you in the west to join up with the fat, rolling, opulent east.

Mr Dallas: Both Cllr Shields and I are members of the WELB. The board itself has not been challenged in any way to improve its efficiency. The board would be quite prepared to look at its efficiency — indeed, it is always doing that, if that is what you are getting at. We are quite prepared to be supportive if the board wishes to look at efficiency. If it can provide the services in a more efficient manner we will be very supportive. If Michael Ancram is talking about putting money in at the coal-face, why does he not then turn that about and challenge the boards themselves to provide a £2 million saving out of a £1 billion budget, which would be minimal savings. Now £2

million at the coal-face — certainly, we would welcome that. Why does he not say “If we are not going to touch the boards, I still want that £2 million saving” and challenge the boards to come up with that. I am sure he would not find the Western Education and Library Board wanting in trying to improve its efficiency, which it is doing at the present time.

Now, even though Michael Ancram is talking about putting more money into the coalface — £2 million through the reorganization — at the present time there has been no financial appraisal. These figures have been plucked out of mid-air and we challenge him, first of all, to prove to us that he is going to save money by this reorganization and by the education reforms. Secondly, if he wants to restructure, why on earth does he not first of all challenge the boards to be more efficient, to be more effective? Now you would probably find that the Western Education and Library Board is one of the most efficient and effective boards in Northern Ireland and we say “Why on earth are you penalizing the Western Education and Library Board for the other boards in Northern Ireland?” That is where we would be looking for a reply

from the Minster.

The Chairman: Excellent.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: There was a statement made — I think it was by Mr Shields — that the Western Board has to serve the largest geographical area in the United Kingdom. Can you back that up with fact?

Mr Shields: I cannot say that it is the largest geographical education unit in the United Kingdom. It is certainly the largest in Northern Ireland, but that is something which I will certainly research and respond to you on. There may well be an area more extensive than it in the highlands of Scotland; I cannot say, but I will certainly get the facts on that matter.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: It would be good if you could look at the geographical spread and compare it with some of the other parts of the Kingdom. There is a complaint that has been made too regularly: there has been no consultation. Surely there has been consultation ever since this document came out. All the options were put in it. You have had a couple of years to look at all the options. I know there was a lot of talk about the five/four option, but all the options were there, from keeping the five, right

down to scrapping all but one.

Mr Shields: When that document was first produced it was brought out as a consultation document. That document suggested that the Department would look at a number of possible models starting with the five-board model. It said there was a possibility that it would reduce the five boards to four. There is also the possibility that it would reduce the five boards to three, and it gave a very useful model in that document. As a result of that particular consultation, the Department decided to have a four-board model, that it would combine the South Eastern Education and Library Board with the Belfast Board and reduce the number of boards to four. After extensive objections to that particular proposal, that document and that consultation process were abandoned and the whole process was suspended for almost two years. Then we heard absolutely nothing at all until the bombshell was dropped that the Department had decided that it was going to have a new three-board system.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: Can the Department not argue that it has set it all out before?

Mr Shields: What I am saying is that that consultation had nothing whatever to do with the decision it came to about three boards because the outcome of that particular consultation was four boards. That proposal did not go ahead; it and that document were abandoned.

Mr Dallas: What we are saying is that there is no consultation now. This is a major submission today because of what it represents. It represents the five district councils in the Western Education and Library Board area crossing the party political sphere and coming out and saying with a united voice “Don't tamper with the Western Education and Library Board. If it is not broken, don't fix it.” That is what they are simply saying. They are saying they are pleased with the service. It is one of the best services in the whole of the United Kingdom and we do not want it tampered with because we can save the better services to our schools.

Mr Fowler: The written submission states that the board has been an outstanding success which has crossed party, religious and cultural affiliations. The loss of the Western Board would radically disrupt this. It would mean a loss of identity for communities in the west. Can you explain what that means? Does it mean a loss of identity for the communities?

Mrs McGinley: I can possibly answer part of that question on behalf ofFermanagh which is the only area in the British Isles that still has its townlands; indeed many other areas are now regretting that they did not hold out for postcodes. There is a very very strong sense of pride in the Western Board area, mainly because it is such a rural district (with the exception of the City of Derry itself), and local people genuinely feel beleaguered. Twenty-five years ago, before local Government reorganization, there was a very strong them-and-us attitude to the East and West of the Bann. That was partly political and partly the result of deprivation and various other disadvantages which had led to the political situation that we were in. It is the work of the boards such as the Western Education and Library Board that has actually helped the community to come together. That sense of having a giant chip on our shoulder, that we are the poor west and on the periphery et cetera is starting to be eroded; we are starting to have a self-confidence about the fact that the west is somewhere to be proud to live in and work and to bring up your children. We are seeing this, as a community in the west, as a total erosion of all that has been done since the pre-local government days when there was a very definite east/west divide. The carve up seems to be on a north/south basis so the strong identity created over the last 25 years will be seriously eroded. Some people would say to you that when you look from Lisnaskea to Kilkeel, you see two very different areas. There is a different ethos. It is not that we are trying to create kingdoms, far from it, but there is a cultural identity that exists in the west that is very different to that in the east. It has taken many years to become a positive thing as opposed to a negative one, and we see this as the start of an erosion of that identity.

Mr Fowler: Would that not survive in a new arrangement? Will the drawing of the line and the presenting of a new name change that?

Ms McGinley: It will. Just this morning we were at a local government conference, and we were talking about the need for district councils to work together. In the west, the five councils are working together on health, education, and issues like fluoridation, because the thoughts of working together exist. It has taken a long time to build that on the common ground that has been identified. There is going to be upheaval and it will take many years to re-establish different relationships.

Also, has it been proven that anything will actually change in terms of the economics of this case? There seems to have been an arbitrary drawing of lines with no taking into account of the cultural identity of the people who live there. We are a very rural population, very different to Belfast. If anything, the four-board option which was previously consulted on and put forward, is a far more sensible option because two boards would be amalgamated that actually service the Greater Belfast area and that, politically and culturally, would be far more appropriate than what is to happen now.

Mr McMichael: Out of all the representations that have been made there is one common theme which is high on the priority list in the arguments against the proposals and that is the upheaval and the impact upon employment of relocation. In the submission presented to the Committee earlier this month that was a significant part of the economic argument against the proposals. But the board or the education service argues that 80% of the jobs under the control of the Department of Education will not be affected at all, that this would affect a small percentage only directly within the service and mostly at the administration level. So, are the arguments about upheaval and the direct impact upon jobs, which the Department has said may be fewer than 100 province-wide, as serious as people say?

Mr Shields: As already indicated, the Western Board employs 7,000 people. Now, that is very significant.

The Chairman: The bus drivers will be there, the groundsmen will be there, the teachers will be there. In reality, only a few administrative professionals may lose their jobs. What does matter is the chalk-face and the future of education. I am being deliberately warped here.

Mr Shields: But the point I am trying to make is that the Western Board does employ 7,000 people. If you take 20% of 7,000 people you are talking about 1,400 employees of the Western Board. Who are those people going to be who will be affected by this restructuring? It is going to be those people at the top tier of management who actually administer the service.

It is not going to be the people who deliver the service on the ground, I accept that. It is not going to be the people in the school kitchens or the people in school transport. Yes, those people are going to be retained as long as those services exist and as long as those services are necessary, I accept that. But it is going to be the decision makers and, perhaps, the administrators and the managers who are going to be affected, and let us apply that to a town like Omagh.

Omagh has already, in recent years, as the Chairman very well knows, lost the regional office of the Housing Executive. It has lost the regional headquarters of the Northern Ireland Electricity Service and it has lost the maternity unit from its hospital. Now, if it were to lose people, high profile, highly qualified, high earning people from the education and library board under this restructuring, it would have a very significant effect on the Omagh district and, of course, on the Western Education and Library Board. It is not simply located in Omagh, it also has headquarters offices in Derry and Fermanagh. Those are the people who would be affected by this reorganization and I have no doubt at all that if this proposal goes ahead, the effect of redundancies and

job losses will be very sorely felt.

The Chairman: Look at a school on the edge of Benone and another one down in Ms McGinley's part of the world, Magherafelt. What have they in common?

Ms McGinley: They have a lot in common. There is rurality for a start. The east of the province is much more urbanized, so even the city of Derry is a very different city to the one of Belfast. A very strong culture identity does exist and a lot of inter-school and cross-community work has been done. In fact, the Western Education and Library Board is a leading board given its innovative work in that field and, indeed, it is sharing that with other boards which are now learning.

But there are definite differences, not just geographic ones, and we have a lot to learn from people at the opposite end. We are not saying that we are drawing a line down the Western Board area, but why not spread and change from within? We do not need to dissolve the west. There is also the psychological effect of having a board in the north, south and east but not in the west. It is just a simple human thing: the west has disappeared, and that is what the ordinary man or woman is actually finding, it is as fundamental as that.

The Chairman: DENI would argue very strongly “But we have increased accountability. We have given you a few more councillors. We are trying to equalize out. We have the whole thing equal. There is the same number of schools, free school meals in the north as in the south and in Belfast. Everything is equal.”

Mr McKinney: I do not think you have measured accountability just by giving extra elected members, although that is one way of doing it obviously, and that is what we are trying to argue. You are going to have a board of 50 members and you have to think about the practicalities of actually managing and operating that system. For example, we are operating on a 32-board system or a 35-board system and what actually happened was that an exercise was carried out by the designers of this document. To try to prove mathematically that we are being given accountability by having an increase in the number of councillors. But what they have actually done in my opinion is create a system that will be very difficult to manage. We all know how difficult it is to manage a 21 or 25-council-type situation; no doubt you Gentlemen know the difficulties involved in a larger grouping and what will happen with 50 people. I do not think accountability will be improved; I think it has been a mathematical exercise to try to justify accountability.

Mr O'Kane: Councillors are totally irrelevant to this argument. As a representative of Strabane District Council I would like to state that our council in conjunction with Derry, Fermanagh, Limavady and Omagh Councils condemn in the strongest possible manner and cannot and will not accept the decision of the education Minister to reduce the number of education and library boards from five to three. It is ironic, and indeed insulting, to the integrity of the five councils that the Minister has blatantly ignored the views of the councils, schools and local communities who took into account what the Prime Minister said to the Chief Executives and the Chairmen.

We now call on the Forum to tell Michael Ancram to reconsider and indeed reverse his decision in the light of the multitude of concerns expressed about the serious consequences it will have for the population of the Western Boardarea who have the united support of the chambers of commerce and all the church leaders, without exception. Indeed, to dismantle the Western Board is totally contrary to all the principles of effective and efficient management when cross-community relations in Northern Ireland are being stretched actually to breaking point. Surely, this is not the time to abolish the Western Board which is seen as an outstanding example of good practice. Northern Ireland needs more of this type of co-operation not less. Schools which, it has been said, would stand to gain from the alleged savings have indicated clearly and forcefully that they place much greater value on the service provided by the Western Board than on the possible financial benefits.

The Minister's argument that a saving of £2 million per annum can be achieved has no bearing against the upheaval and the inconvenience, worry and uncertainty which his proposals have brought. There does not seem to be any compelling argument for abolishing the Western Board. Why wipe out all the effort and enthusiasm of the last 20 plus years in the face of total opposition from all the communities and districts. To make such radical changes for so little and bring down the wrath of the people of the Western Board area is neither logical nor creditable. Therefore, we implore you not to ignore but rather take heed of the voice of the people which has been ignored on previous occasions by the Minister. Chairman, may I throw in a few clichés: unity is strength and knowledge is poor; united we stand, divided we fall. Members of the Forum, we seek your support to save the west.

The Chairman: I note what you saying, Mr O'Kane, that you have the churches supporting you.

Mr O'Kane: That is correct.

The Chairman: Every church in your area is supporting you?

Mr O'Kane: That is correct.

The Chairman: You have all the political parties supporting you.

Mr O'Kane: That is correct.

The Chairman: How many councils?

Mr O'Kane: Five.

The Chairman: Those all more or less support the line that Ms McGinley has put to us that we need to recognize a cultural identity and a community spirit.

Mr O'Kane: That is correct and not only the churches and councils, but the chambers of commerce.

The Chairman: There is one thread here that is coming through.

Mr Gault: Limavady Borough Council has 15 members across the board and though we are divided politically, we are all in agreement that the West should be retained. We got an extension to our local high school this summer and we are very pleased with the service that the board provided in erecting, extending and fitting out this school and we are frightened that we would lose that service if this board were done away with. If we become part of such a big area, we do not think we will get the same service in the future. We are very much in favour of the board's being retained.

The Chairman: Just to go back to Mrs McGinley, why demolish the five? Why not retune all five, make them function differently and thus enhance performance?

Mrs McGinley: Yes, there is an opportunity to rationalize the existing system especially with things like the incorporation of the further education colleges next year. It is very much a time of change and the boards would be open to looking internally at their own structures. Indeed, the two councillors who are on the Western Board have already said that there are opportunities within the existing system to improve the situation, yet it would appear that that has not been considered or looked at in any way. If this is a simple cost exercise, why not do that instead of radically altering something that is working well?

The Chairman: You have the CCMS, you have the integrated schools, you have the voluntary grammar schools — more or less original roles. Why not let the board administer their affairs, yet let each retain its identity and ethos?

Mrs McGinley: There is a number of models that could be suggested and there is a feeling that a lot have not been explored.

The Chairman: Is that one that your campaign would consider?

Mr Dallas: Do you mean internal reform of the Western Education and Library Board?

The Chairman: Not only an internal reform, but —

Mr Dallas: More powers for the board itself.

Mr O'Kane: We have no argument with streamlining or anything else. We are here today totally incensed at the Minister's attitude. We are not just some of these Johnny-come-latelys, we are elected by the people for the people. The Prime Minister has said that the district councils should take decisions yet when they do take decisions, and are very forthright in their decision taking, the Minister of the day comes along and rules that out “You're not on, I'll decide.” That is totally contrary to the Prime Minister's advice, but our sole aim here today is to ask for the support of the Forum in its entirety. What we are asking the Forum to do is come out united to save the West, and we are here pleading with you for that today.

The Chairman: I recognize the earnestness of that plea, and it is certainly on the record. I am delighted that you said that. That is why you were provoked.

Mr McKinney: I would like to thank you once again for receiving us. I think most of the points have been covered. To reiterate, on the consultation aspect we do not feel that we were properly consulted. The district councils certainly were not consulted and the education boards were not consulted. The three-board option was what we would call in Tyrone sneaky, putting in the three-board option when it had not been set out for proper consultation.

The Government uses three measures usually to determine policy — accountability, accessibility and acceptability. This is not acceptable, and you have heard that from all the different parties throughout Northern Ireland. We do not think it matches up on accountability and it fails the accessibility test as well. And finally a quote from John Major

“We need proper Government. No Irish politicians (that includes yourselves) for several generations have taken any decisions, not even local government decisions, that is appalling.”

That was John Major speaking in Manchester in the summer of 1996 - I think that says it all.

The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed for your courtesy in coming here and for the excellent manner in which you presented your case.

Unfortunately we had to put pressure of time on you but I hope you feel you have made your case. Indeed the feeling around the table is that you made it very succinctly. I wish you a safe journey home.

Witnesses:

Mr F Bunting and Mr P Hanna

(Irish National Teachers Organization)

The Chairman: Good afternoon, Gentlemen, your are very welcome.

Our remit is very simple. The Minister made his announcement on 25 June, and in early July the Forum decided to form an Education Committee to look at the effects of reducing the number of boards from five to three. Obviously your union has an input.

You are a very important contributor to this whole consultation process. You represent those who are concerned with education standards and improvements. We view your input, as one of the larger unions in Northern Ireland, as very necessary.

Please proceed in your own way.

Mr Bunting: I do not think I will take up too much of your time since you have our submission. Just to show that there is consistency on our view on education administration we have brought along copies of the previous submission which was made in response to the initial proposals of the Minister regarding the South Eastern Education and Library Board's demise and the campaign that was organized about that time.

The Chairman: Just to put it on the record, we have received a copy of another submission from INTO. This represents your views when the five-to-four was under discussion.

Mr Bunting: I will just outline our position. First of all, irrespective of the problems which are there in education administration, the view of our organization is that any review should be a full review. And when we went to the Education Minister to put this view to him his response to us was unacceptable in that there were parties in education administration who were not prepared to be involved in any discussion or dialogue with the education and library boards about a future basis of education administration on the basis that they were exempt.

There are a number of main players in education administration. They are the education and library boards, the Governing Bodies Association for Grammar Schools in Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education and the largest employing authority of all, the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools. Now, there cannot be a partial review of education administration. There has to be an overall review of education administration, and indeed this matter was basically examined during the first series of responses which were brought forward to the Department of Education's proposals, and I do not mind acknowledging that some of the more informed comments came from the Western Education and Library Board.

The Western Education and Library Board brought forward proposals to the other partners in the education process and to the teachers' unions saying that a format could be devised whereby all the other main players could have their ethos and their integrity respected under the auspices of the existing education and library board structure. We found a lot of merit in that proposal, and we thought that would have given the opportunity for proper rationalization to take place. Indeed, the rationalization could also have taken on board the interface between the main education players and the Department of Education itself.

There are a number of main players that I have not mentioned such as the CCEA and others which are all part of the education administration structure in Northern Ireland. On the basis of consistency and coherence you should have a review of education administration which takes on board all the main players.

The second point that we would make — and I am not saying this to curry favour with you — is that this is a major proposal in terms of local government: it goes to the very heart of the democratic process in Northern Ireland. Our view has always been that this proposal should be taken after full discussion and dialogue with the democratically elected parties in Northern Ireland because you are in the best position to make an informed decision. Now, I am talking about all the democratically elected political parties in Northern Ireland. That process has not taken place and the proposal by the Minister to give additional Council representation on his new boards is basically a sop. I have been talking to a number of education and library boards and district councils and they, like us, were not consulted before this decision was taken. That is not the way things should happen in Northern Ireland. You should not be coming down a motorway listening to the 1.00 o'clock news and suddenly finding that a major decision, which is going to affect the life and education of every child in Northern Ireland, has been taken.

To summarize, we are talking here about coherence and democracy. That is not an idle concept and we have always had faith in the ability and the ingenuity of our local politicians in Northern Ireland to resolve a situation quickly. I have to say that those initial feelings which are outlined in this document here have been somewhat dented during the course of this summer. But we still have confidence in you and we implore you to inspire confidence in the ability of local people to take decisions which affect all our lives.

As well as being a professional organization of teachers, we are also a trade union and we have a genuine concern for the rights of all worker's and trade unionists in Northern Ireland. We are talking here about a decision whereby every worker's job from the chief executive down to the bus driver or lollipop person is on the line. They will have to reapply for their jobs, what jobs are there. You are talking about a situation of tremendous upset and disruption and having already been through a tremendous period of disruption, caused by this Government's policies of education reform, what we crave most of all at the present is continuity and stability in the education system in Northern Ireland to enable it to develop. If we are serious about dealing with education administration, the various players in education administration in Northern Ireland should be given a time limit to sort out the most effective system that can be introduced, and that should be done under the guidance of our locally elected politicians. That is the view of this organization and we will be very happy to answer any questions that you may have.

The Chairman: You may be delighted to know that there is sympathy for that idea. What you are saying is significant because you represent a significant number of affected people, but people who have not a vested interest.

Mr Bunting: That is correct.

The Chairman: You represent the people at the chalk-face who are trying to create the standards and who are looking for the money in the right place rather than somewhere else. You are advocating a complete review of education and are adding that this is probably best done by elected representatives in Northern Ireland getting down and forming a consortium to take it from Michael Ancram's desk right to the chalk-face?

Mr Bunting: Well, we take the view that you are going to form the Government here pretty soon. If everything goes well, and there is going to be some form of local assembly here in Northern Ireland, education is actually going to be one of the main areas of your responsibility. If that is the case — and that is what we trust and hope will be the case — then taking major decisions now is premature.

Mr Benson: When you spoke of the review that you wanted and listed the boards, CCMS and all the rest, did you include DENI?

Mr Bunting: Yes - an interface between them and DENI.

Mr Benson: I wanted to be clear, because I think DENI is one that we really need.

Mr Hanna: While we recognize that in the period of 25 years or so education administration cannot stand still, it should be noted that the system that we currently have has served all our communities very well. There have certainly been a minimum of complaints, let me put it that way. We were disturbed about why there should be a reorganization now, why it is being done in this way and why it is being done to save £2 paltry million. I do not want to be dismissive of that sum of money, but in terms of the overall education budget £2 million is not very much, especially when the Government are prepared to spend £40 million on school transport policies. To cause such a major social upheaval for £2 million. We who are outside Belfast and Derry, who are made up of small local communities think the Government are just being heavy-handed and if the rationalization goes on in the way that is envisaged — and I am talking now from a trade union point of view — there are bound to be redundancies. There are bound to be changes of personnel and disruption with people working on unfamiliar areas.

I am not an advocate for the Western Board alone, but one has to question what balance-sheet has been drawn up. You know the pros and the cons within the existing five boards. The officers have provided a service to the teachers, the schools and the general public on a local basis, and there has been local accountability. Some advocate that the £2 million saved will be put back into the education budget and do all sorts of weird and wonderful things. But £2 million is not a lot of money. There are other ways of saving £20 million, £40 million. The scheme seems to be ill-conceived. It does not seem to have been thoroughly thought out and there has not been a proper consultation process with all the interested parties. Above all else, it would be better if local representatives devised a scheme for local people.

The Chairman: Somebody followed more or less the same thesis earlier: if we are going to have to review, we review the whole administrative thing from top to bottom. That does not mean we want to stand still. A churchman said to me “I don't change the parish boundary because someone is annoying me; I deal with the problem inside the parish and make it work better.” Next week we have to put pen to paper and write a report which has to be ready for the first day of October. You might think it is an unreasonable time — we think it is — but that is the best concession we could get. Are you happy to say that that is it?

Mr Bunting: There are essentially two points. I do not think anybody would say that the present system is ideal. There are some very serious problems, some of which have been identified and some of which have not. I could give you one example in terms of the size of the various education and library boards. In the Belfast Education and Library Board, for example, because of population changes which have taken place since the establishment of the education and library boards, there is a much smaller number of controlled schools, particularly in the secondary sector, than there was beforehand. The problem of the selective system has not been tackled. This Government has run away from that problem. Now what happens is that a Protestant teacher in the controlled secondary sector is not given equity of treatment with a Catholic secondary teacher in the same board area because in a situation of declining rolls and redundancies, that Catholic teacher has more chance of being employed through his or her employing authority which is the Council of Catholic Maintained Schools. In the Greater Belfast area a Protestant teacher in a controlled school has only got a very limited number of schools in which he can be redeployed, and the likelihood is that that teacher will be made redundant. That is not parity of treatment. There are obviously problems which need to be identified particularly in relation to the employment of teachers.

The second point I want to make is that when you are trying to get things done you go to the people who actually know how best they are done. We have a certain expertise in developing the curriculum for children in Northern Ireland, and we sat down during the 70s and worked with our employers to develop new curricula which we thought were relevant to the people in Northern Ireland. All our efforts were thrown out the window by a previous Education Minister, Dr Mawhinney, and, without any consultation with us, he foisted new curricula and assessment arrangements on us. The cost of those to date has been £94 million. The main effect of this has been the felling of forests to print publications. Very little has been done actually to improve or enhance the quality of education in Northern Ireland. This has created a tremendous amount of ill-will among the teaching profession. So, the lesson to be learnt from that is that if you proceed to make decisions without

consultation and without dialogue with interested parties, you are likely to get it wrong.

Mr Benson: You mentioned the £2 million. Despite its having been asked to produce some documentation on how it arrived at that £2 million, the Department has not yet been able to give us that.

The Chairman: In fairness, yesterday afternoon we did have some effort, but —

Mr Benson: It may give it to you on the one hand, but it does not give you the balance-sheet — the redundancies, the change. I am associated with the South Eastern Board and we reckon it will be probably five years before they even get to a saving — if it ever reaches that stage. It will be a cost exercise rather than a saving exercise. We agree with you that at this stage it is ill-conceived.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: How many teachers are in your union?

Mr Bunting: How many paid teachers do we have? We have 5,340. There is a major recruitment exercise going on. Teaching union figures in Northern Ireland are subject to a great degree of massaging. But I would say that we are one of the larger teacher organizations in Northern Ireland.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: In terms of the chalk-face, I know that the curriculum changes did have a tremendous effect on teachers, but administrative changes would have very, very little effect.

Mr Bunting: Is that your belief?

Rev Trevor Kirkland: No, I am saying that the Permanent Secretary has told us that the estimated number of jobs lost would be about 100 out of 29,000.

Mr Bunting: Well, from the perspective of the various boards and the advisory services and the job that they do for school teachers, relationships have been built up there which are based on trust and professionalism, and they are certainly much admired by teachers.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: But relationships are not the basis on which you argue for keeping the present system. If Joe Bloggs changes to Mrs Peacocke, or whoever, it is not going to make any difference to the professional carrying out the job. “We must keep these boards because we have built up this wonderful relationship. I only have to say to this person and they know the whole situation.” — that is not really a rational argument for their defence.

Mr Bunting: Well I would take issue with you and say that it is a rational argument. I said to the Western Education and Library Board that with the expertise that we have got on both the teaching side and the administrative side there is no doubt that any proposal that this Minister comes forward with, be it for three boards, be it for one board, be it two boards — and given the quality of people that we have in both sectors — it could be made to work, and work very effectively. It might take us seven or five or eight years to get to the same degree of quality that we currently have. But are we prepared actually to sacrifice our children's education for 10 years to accomplish this?

Rev Trevor Kirkland: But it is not going to affect the children. You are not sacrificing one child in Ulster.

Mr Bunting: Well, the teaching profession as a whole is under tremendous strain and stress at the present moment. Many are retiring on the grounds of ill-health. The board's curriculum advisory service, to give you an example, is providing in-service training for teachers which is valued. That is a factor which helps to give stability for the teaching profession which will be reflected in the classroom teaching of the children. If that is taken away I believe that the education of the children will suffer. I do not think you can have a change, particularly an imposed change like this, without its actually cutting into the fabric of the community.

Mr Fowler: Does the INTO recruit teachers of all religions and none?

Mr Bunting: Yes.

Mr Hanna: In a word, yes.

Mr Bunting: We have an historical problem in Northern Ireland and we have a major problem with sectarianism as well. During the foundation of what are now called the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, ie during the war of independence, a large number of INTO members broke away from the Irish National Teachers Organization over their affiliation to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions at that time and their recognition of that state and they formed themselves into another union called the Ulster Teachers Union. Now you have a situation where the majority of members of the Irish National Teachers Organization come from a Catholic background and the majority of members of the Ulster Teachers Union come from a Protestant background. They are separated brethren going back to the 1920s and while we have a very good working relationship with the Ulster Teachers Union in particular, we regard them as soul brothers and soul sisters to ourselves. Once people break away from each other it is very difficult actually to get together. It is like a row inside the family house. The silver has not been stolen, mind you, and we are still hopeful.

Mr Fowler: I would like to ask your opinion on these figures presented by the Department. It states that in the new boards, based on the 1994-95 figures, the percentage of pupils entitled to free school meals will be: Eastern Board: 26.2%; Southern Board: 27.6%; and Northern Board: 35%. Do you think there has been any juggling with deprivation in the drawing of new board boundaries?

Mr Bunting: One of the direct or indirect consequences of the Minister's proposals for three boards is an attempt to bring forward a harmonization of the local management of schools' budgets and schemes which are produced by those particular board areas. My colleague Alderman Benson will confirm that some of the boards rob Peter to pay Paul instead of putting money actually to address the social need. An indirect effect of what the Minister is doing will be harmonization of the budgets. The district council boundaries for the new boards and the community backgrounds have been significant factors in their composition

I have to say that I have very little sympathy for the view that some people in parts of the west may not have a relationship or empathy with other people in the east. I do not like that argument at all. Once I hear that argument I am inclined to go to the opposite extreme and say that maybe they should have. To answer your question specifically, in the drawing up of those board boundaries deprivation and community background were certainly factors.

The Chairman: Would it be a view that if Northern Ireland had priority 1 status and you could equalize poverty or show deprivation at a certain level, there could be extra funding?

Mr Bunting: Well, if that degree of ingenuity has been shown by the Department of Education, I will throw my hat in the air. At the same time, though, that will not undercut the basic premise of our argument which is that if that is one of the proposals which has come forward, or one of the objectives, that does not take away from the need for dialogue and consultation with the democratic parties in Northern Ireland.

The Chairman: It is one of those sneaky things that happen to us, coming at a bad time.

Mr Bunting: That is not a bad idea actually.

Mr Hussey: Are you suggesting social engineering?

Mr Bunting: Well, there is social engineering involved in everything, is there not?

Mr Hussey: As being the priority of this particular review?

Mr Bunting: Well, I do not know what the priority of this particular review is.

Mr Hussey: Does anyone?

Mr Bunting: Our view is that there is ample justification for the continuation of the five education and library boards as at present.

Mr Hussey: Initially your main attack was on the sort of operation-overlord way this has been put through. Which is your main objection — the fact that five have become three or the way it was done?

Mr Bunting: The process of decision making is a factor but that is not the main argument. The main argument is that the problem is not being addressed. There is a problem in education administration which needs to be addressed by those involved in it. Those involved in it are not participating in the solution.

Mr Hussey: Are you saying that if the process had been different but the result had been the same, it would have been more acceptable?

Mr Bunting: No, I am not saying that.

Mr Hussey: I teach in Castlederg and I deal with the board office in Omagh. I can ring up and get my answer quite often down the phone. I am not involved in senior management; I am slightly below that. Being in my chalk-face position, I may want to get in touch with my business studies adviser. What difference would it make to me if I had to ring Ballymena to get in touch with my adviser, who is probably out on the ground anyway?

Mr Bunting: Assuming that the board headquarters is in Ballymena, nothing much as you have described it. But in direct response to that, there will be no difference.

Mr Hussey: And any of the other support services?

Mr Bunting: I contend that there are in-service training days being organized in primary schools throughout the Western area, throughout the North Eastern area.

Mr Hussey: Could that not be done by RTU?

Mr Bunting: RTU is only involved in senior management training.

Mr Hussey: Could it be an extended role of RTU?

Mr Bunting: I am not sure whether it could be. It can be most effectively delivered by the people who are in the existing education and library boards. There is a tremendous response from schools in your own board area for the in-service training which is given and a very high degree of confidence from the school staff. Very few reservations have been expressed and there has been very little demand for the service to be removed to another agency. That would be cause for concern.

Mr Hussey: So that is an expression of satisfaction, assisted by staff on the ground.

The administrative impositions over this last while which have been put on teachers and, indeed, managers through LMS — can you see this lightening the load on teachers? Teachers are not trained as managers.

Mr Bunting: No, I cannot. I have consulted with our members at various levels, principal and senior management in both primary and secondary schools, and I have to say that there are different views depending on how people perceive what is actually being done. But I think there is a tremendous satisfaction rating with what is actually being devised for them and with the sensitivity of service which is there. That could also be delivered by the new three-board structure, but it would require time for it to happen. There is potential for it, but the cost of its actually coming about and the "savings" which are there do not justify it.

Mr Hussey: The perceived instability which could result from a five-to-three — how would that affect the administrative ability of senior management? You said it would be for a time, until things settled down.

Mr Bunting: What we are dealing with here is really a decision which has been forced upon people, not one which is generically happening. You are talking about the dislocation of staff and the dislocation of offices. You are talking about the appointment of an entire new education and library board from chief executive down. The staff will no doubt team build with each other and in the process of time will form themselves into an effective unit no doubt provided with sound leadership. And, no doubt, after the demoralizing experience of having been declared redundant and then re-appointed, having sacrificed a number of their colleagues en route, the staff will be full of the joys of spring and wanting to get involved in the whole process of education again. It will be a sobering experience for them and the people who are teaching who watch this process and see people who have given their lives for the education of children being sacrificed on the whim of a Minister's decision.

In those circumstances what is likely is that the uneasiness which is already there, the demoralization which is there, the workload which is there will combine and people will ask why they should put it all in when it can be so selfishly sacrificed.

Mr Hussey: You are suggesting that it could come about. If it were to come about, is now the time for it?

Mr Bunting: A lot depends on you. It could be if you were to accept this as a rational structure, as one which tackles the problem of education administration comprehensibly. Then, if you were to find yourself a member of an administration next year, three years or five years down the line and you were to give guarantees that you would not look at education administration again, that the problems that had not been addressed would be addressed, it might be. Well, when is the right time? I think the right time is when the people who are actually living and working in Northern Ireland, the people who actually know what the problems are in education, all get together and say that this is the way forward.

Now you may take that decision in two or three or four years time and we will be back to you saying we do not like what you are doing.

Mr Bunting: Thank you for your time.

Witnesses:

Mr T McKee and Mr R French

(National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers)

The Chairman: Good afternoon. I realize that you represent a very large body of people who deliver the necessary goods, and therefore your views are very important to us. We welcome you to the Forum. The only remit that we have is the result of the debate in early July — a resolution giving us permission to examine and report on changing the five boards to three.

Mr McKee: Thank you very much for the welcome. We are pleased to note that our elected representatives are now taking a serious interest in education — that has been long overdue in Northern Ireland.

I assume that a summary of our written position is available to you and that we need not read through it in detail. I will try to be brief because I am aware of the volume of work that you have this afternoon. We take the view that anyone who argues at the moment for the retention of the present system is saying that the McCrory Reforms in the early 1970s were perfect. At the time, I was aware of the problems in moving from what was then an eight-board system, the old education committees, to the education and library boards and, as politicians, you will be aware of the controversies that surrounded the setting up of the district councils. Anyone who says that the present system is working very well is agreeing, therefore, that the McCrory Reforms were perfect.

Our view is that they have worked in certain respects — there is no point in knocking them all — but there are striking deficiencies and, at a time when the total education system in schools and further education colleges has been turned inside out, no part of the education system should be above review and scrutiny to make certain that we are all getting value for money, particularly the children and students who are served by that system.

A lot has happened since the early 1970s. I do not have to tell you in Northern Ireland what has happened politically, but from an educational point of view there have been changes that are no less profound within the system.

There has been the emergence, for example, of the CCMS, the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools. More recently we have had the emergence of the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education, and both of these now sit on the management side of the teachers' negotiating machinery. Then, of course, there is the rather strange decision to hive-off further education from the education and library boards. Mr French will touch on that briefly in a moment.

However, the most profound change has been the introduction of formula funding in the school system of LMS, Local Management of Schools, and LMC, Local Management of Colleges of Further Education. That has introduced a destabilizing element into education. It has led to serious disparities, and those are touched upon briefly in the paper. It has put in question the equitable provision of education for children and students regardless of their religious persuasion in Northern Ireland and regardless of which area they live in.

The system works in such a way that different amounts of money go through to schools of the same type, and that is a very, very serious problem and one that is being perpetuated by different boards because each of the five boards strikes its own LMS formula. It has, if you like, its own LMS currency. This year the losing board in the reshuffle of money was the North Eastern Board which was given a crippling allocation of money, less than 2%, whereas one board, the Southern Board, got an increase in its budget for the financial year of 4.9%. Some of these discrepancies have been touched upon in the SACHR reports this summer. I refer in particular to the SACHR report on Targeting Social Need and in its education section you will see some striking inconsistencies in how money is worked through the system.

The other point that we make in our opening paragraph relates to whether the Department of Education is indeed best fitted to carry out a convincing review. The Department of Education is a player in the education game. A very significant one. To our mind it is not fitted to carry out this review. There should be an independent review which would look not only at the various education authorities, but at the role of the Department itself. Now we are not suggesting that everything that the Department is doing is bad. That would be untenable. We would not want, for example, the Department not to have its role as paymaster for teachers or to change the way it operates the teachers' pension scheme unless there were very convincing arguments for that. But there is a lot of conflict with the role of Department in a number of fields, and that puts a serious question mark against the validity of Michael Ancram's exercise at the moment.

In the second paragraph we come to the kernel of our position. In our submission to McCrory we argued for one education authority for Northern Ireland. We felt that Northern Ireland, even in those days, could be administered effectively in a united way. That, in our view, is preferable to the present system where there are eight employer bodies. The bodies are the five boards, the CCMS, the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education and the Voluntary Grammar Schools body, the Governing Bodies Association. We believe that all those schools are funded out of state funds; they are state schools and they should be administered centrally without division, without certain children in some schools appearing to get a better slice of the cake than others.

In the third paragraph we refer to PAFT and I am sure you have dealt with that yourselves. We believe that Michael Ancram is deficient in not having published that, and we certainly support the early-day motion by the MPs identified. We ourselves wrote to Mr Pat Carvill, the Permanent Secretary, on 27 June, and we have still had no reply. Our view on PAFT is quite simple, and we use the analogy of the head teacher. If a head teacher is going to introduce something new in the system, he should explain clearly to the staff of the school what is wrong with the existing arrangements and how the new arrangements will work better in the interests of the children and staff. That is something that Michael Ancram has singularly failed to do.

In the fourth paragraph I outline some of the particular problems. There is overlapping administration. The original paper produced by Michael Ancram actually pinpoints a serious weakness in the system. Controlled schools attended by Protestant children, generally in Belfast, have three education authorities in the Greater Belfast area, the North Eastern, Belfast itself and the South Eastern. The parents and children do not understand the boundaries between them, the boundaries are quite arbitrary and they mean nothing to them. There is no rationale or justification in the Belfast area, and that is one good example of the overlapping and inconsistent nature of the present system.

Then over the page we refer to the variations in budgets. I have touched on that already. At (c) we refer to less financial accountability. In my office I can show you the pile of documentation that we get from the education and library boards, the outturn statements, LMS outturn statements — they are colossal. They give us useful information not only on the budgets that come to schools but on how the money is dispersed and how it is spent, whether the schools are overspent or underspent. It is a colossal amount - it would stretch from here to the ceiling quite easily in the few years of LMS. A similar pile dealing with voluntary grammar schools and integrated schools reach no more than an inch or so. All we get from the Department is the money given to those schools, we are not told anything about how the money is spent and, when we ask questions, we are rapped over the knuckles, we are told, like naughty little boys, that it is not part of our business.

That is not acceptable. These schools are funded out of public money, the integrated sector and the voluntary grammar, and they should be accountable. This raises a further issue about voluntary grammar schools, and that is the strange way in which they are given exemption from rates. Ordinary Catholic maintained schools and controlled schools are subject to paying rates. The typical rates bill for a fairly average secondary intermediate school is about £100,000 a year. Why is it that the voluntary grammar schools are given that exemption allegedly on the grounds of their having charitable status? If a voluntary grammar school can be given voluntary status and exempted from rates, why not the secondary intermediate school or the primary school?

I have already touched on (d) to a certain extent, and (e) touches on the argument about unfair redeployment arrangements. The redeployment arrangements for teachers are restricted to the authority in which they are employed, and teachers in a voluntary grammar school can only be redeployed within their own school. There is no effective central authority for the 50 grammar schools, so if there is a redundancy in your school, and it is a compulsory redundancy, your chances of redeployment are virtually nil. If, however, you are in a controlled school, the variation in the situation is amazing. For example, Belfast has 11 secondary schools on its list including controlled grammar schools. So if someone is faced with compulsory redundancy in a secondary school in Belfast, the number of schools in which he can be redeployed is no more than 10, 11 minus his own school. In the

North East there are 28 controlled schools so a teacher faced with compulsory

redundancy in that board area has the possibility of being redeployed in any one

of 27 schools. But look at another example in Belfast. Take a teacher in Castle

High School faced with redundancy — hypothetical I assure you, I am not going to quote names. If he is going to look for redeployment, what are his options? On one side is Mount Gilbert in Ballygomartin and on the other side is Ashfield. That is the extent of the redeployment available to him. The same teacher in a Catholic school, say Corpus Christi on the Falls Road, because his education authority is the Down and Connor Diocese of the CCMS has a possibility of redeployment from as far north as Coleraine to as far south as Kilkeel. Where is the equity and fairness in that?

I will skip over the duplication of support services for the moment — you may wish me to come back to it. We believe that a central education authority would be stronger and able to resist the Government much more effectively than the present system of eight authorities which is an open recipe for dividing and conquering. As far as the ethos of schools are concerned, by coming under one overall umbrella, they would not suffer. The voluntary schools and the Catholic voluntary schools were given 100% funding for capital expenditure about two years ago. Has that seriously affected their status? In no way do I think would their status would suffer from coming under the umbrella of an overall authority on which there was adequate representation of the various interests, the elected councils, the nominated representatives and so on.

Point 7, touches on the divisions. No matter how you redistribute in Northern Ireland, you end up with divisions. We believe that an overall authority would get round all of them. Just think of the controversy identified by SACHR two or three years ago in that respect. It would deal with the feeling, or the perceived feeling of discrimination that controlled and maintained schools have regarding voluntary grammar schools at the moment, or indeed integrated schools. The feeling is that integrated schools are put to the top of the queue, if you like, for capital expenditure. And it would also deal with any perceived discrimination that those west of the Bann feel about those east of the Bann or that those in the rest of Northern Ireland feel about those in the Belfast area.

We do not believe that the argument advanced for having local authorities close to the area is a really convincing one. If you argue that you would be arguing about going back, with respect, to what the situation was before McCrory because eight authorities would be even closer to the ground. And why not go beyond that to 10 or 15? In the age of information technology, with sophisticated communications now, computer, e-mail, fax, and sophisticated telephone systems, it is possible to co-operate effectively within the Northern Ireland area on a split-site basis. Schools have demonstrated that they can do that. FE colleges have introduced very effective communication systems to show that the new colleges can operate on split-site campus. Finally, schools and FE colleges have shown that they can rationalize and streamline in the interests of the education of the children. Why should administration be over and beyond that? The one issue that should unite all of us is having the best system so that we can to give our young people the best

education and training to equip them to compete fairly with their colleagues, their counterparts from whatever part of Europe or indeed the world.

Mr French: I would like to deal with further education. I should explain that I was in further education for over 30 years and I was made redundant as a result of the rationalization that has taken place. The boards started to divest themselves of administration work when they introduced LMS and LMC. With LMC the colleges and, indeed, the schools, of course, had to manage their own budgets. They had to arrange their own purchases, make their own appointments, handle hiring and firing, and a lot of local management has resulted in work being devolved from the boards. The report of the Stewart review group on further education recommended a rationalization of the colleges and as a result of that rationalization the number of colleges was reduced from 24 to 17 by a series of mergers. There were no mergers in the west, but in the other board areas there were several. For instance, in the North East eight colleges were reduced to four.

Over the three years since Stewart, between 250 and 300 full-time lecturing posts have gone out of the FE system. Many of these have gone, like my own, through redundancy or through not replacing staff on resignation or retirement. Now, there is no doubt that that has led to greater efficiency in certain areas. But the unions, not only ours but the other recognized unions, entered into these mergers on the understanding that greater funding would be made available to the colleges. Stewart identified some 10 areas in which the colleges were underresourced. I have a statement here that lists the funding areas that Stewart acknowledged. He said that conditions in most colleges were extremely poor, not at all in keeping with what is expected of a tertiary-level institution. Additional recouped capital resources are urgently needed. He saw poor and inadequate maintenance work in colleges, painting and repairs neglected, dampness, dull and dreary decor, out-of-date, or non-existing, name boards and school type furnishings and fittings — an image of FE being run down and making do.

The Chairman: We are all aware of the state of FE colleges.

Mr French: Well, I am trying to make the point that the colleges have been pushed out on their own. A lot of the responsibility for the administration of the colleges has been devolved from the boards. In fact, we are now coming up to the imminent incorporation of the colleges where the colleges are going to be made independent corporations for which the boards will have no responsibility at all. Now we are opposed to incorporation and we made representations to each of the boards and sought their support for our view on this. But the boards would not co-operate with us. The boards were quite happy to see the colleges being taken away from them. That reduces the amount of funds that the boards have, it reduces the amount of work that the boards have and it pushes the work of personnel, accountancy, marketing, wages systems, computerized systems, legal processes, estate management and so on away from the boards and out to these 17 colleges.

Now, part of the argument for the incorporation of the colleges was that the rationalization process would save in costs and make management more efficient and so on. Well, our attitude really is that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If this work is taken away from the boards and there is a honed down administration system there, it should be possible for the boards themselves, along with the other education administration bodies, to rationalize. For instance, the purchasing function could be dealt with by one board, the accounting function could be dealt with by another board and the personnel, pensions and salaries and so on could be dealt with by another. We could have a central administrative system and still retain the five or six offices which we are concerned about in Omagh and Ballymena et cetera. The personnel involved there could be redeployed so that with a honed down system one administrative body could perform all the functions.

It would make life a lot easier for us, it would make life a lot easier for the schools, if we were dealing with one central body which had one set of policies instead of, as at the moment, having to deal with eight different sets of policies. There would be much more money available for the actual education of your children and our children, your grandchildren and our grandchildren. It is a shame today that so much money is sliced off to provide for what are essentially non-educational purposes.

The Chairman: You are for the regionalization of services in various locations round the province?

Mr McKee: Yes, that is our view.

The Chairman: This whole rationalization process — you said this incorporates all the players on the scene. In other words, it involves CCMS, the integrated schools system and the voluntary grammar schools — the whole works. Its starts from DENI, from Ancram's desk, right down to the chalk-face.

Mr McKee: In our view the Department, being a player in that game, is ineligible to carry out the inquiry.

The Chairman: In other words, DENI is involved from Permanent Secretary downwards, the whole way.

Mr McKee: One simple overall approach. To repeat what I said, the most important issue in this, more important than administration, jobs or teaching jobs, is the service provided to the children and students. That is why education was set up — it was not set up to perpetuate empires or to demonstrate political points.

The Chairman: You are aware of the working parties that have been set up to attempt regionalization of some things and the surprising figures that came up — whether deliberately or otherwise. As Churchill said, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Were you amazed at what the regionalization working parties produced?

Mr McKee: We have not been consulted at all about them. We are aware of the working groups which are working quite hard. We would like to see some services operated on a Northern Ireland basis urgently. We believe, for example, that legal services and staff welfare services do not have to be operated by separate authorities. If they were operated right across Northern Ireland, you would concentrate resources in a meaningful way. Take the welfare scheme at the moment. It is operated by the five boards and there is a separate one for the CCMS.

The Chairman: What you are saying now is that there is duplication with so many school systems and everybody doing their own thing.

Mr McKee: Yes, and the resources made available are thin, as the North Eastern Board is attempting to operate it. But, as I understand its scheme, it is only able to offer four hours of counselling for staff who have serious problems. That is much too thin and if they were to concentrate their resources centrally and operate a central system it would work effectively.

The legal system for the area boards has been regionalized for some time — is

it any weaker for that?

Mr Bolton: The Minister's proposals, you will accept, are controversial. Yours are equally controversial. Do you think the time is right for any change of a controversial nature?

Mr McKee: The answer to that is that the time is not right until the Minister engages in a proper policy appraisal exercise, which he has failed to do. Now, we understand that some documentation may have come to you in the Forum. We are certainly not aware of it. Remember, we wrote to Pat Carvill asking for that. The consultation, or the exercise that Ancram is carrying out, is like that of a head teacher who believes that consultation simply consists of telling the staff what is going happen. That is not good enough.

Mr Hussey: The actual management structure — what are your proposals for that?

Mr McKee: Well, the exercise in the boards, in that sense, has proved to be a very useful one, with the caveat that we do not think that the Minister's powers to nominate should continue to exist. The proportion of representation at the moment would appear to be workable, but we would like to see people coming on as of right, in other words, elected representatives should come on without having to be nominated by the Minister and, equally, interested groups like recognized unions should have seats as of right without having to put forward names so that the Minister can pick the Minister's men and women.

Mr Hussey: You are aware that the present boards have 32/35 membership. The three-board model is to be 50/50/50. Are you suggesting that the management tier for that would be in the range of 100 to 150 people?

Mr McKee: No, we think that the numbers for the boards at the moment are sufficient to operate the system in Northern Ireland. Simply because there is a bigger area does not mean to say that you need a bigger board. The biggest school in Northern Ireland is St Louise's; its board of governors only has nine members, and it operates effectively. Simply because you make your board of governors bigger when you are managing a school, does not mean to say that the school is better managed.

Mr Hussey: So it would be a board or a —

Mr McKee: We would use the term education authority, yes.

Mr Hussey: An education authority representative of the entire district council areas of Northern Ireland. Containing how many people?

Mr McKee: Well, we do not have figures for the precise number that would be needed, but we would not seriously quibble with the breakdown of the representation on the boards at the moment.

Mr Hussey: The present representation is 69. I think it is proposed that 72 councillors should service the three boards.

Mr McKee: The point I am making is I would not want it to become unwieldy. Obviously you would have to make arrangements for the new interests which would be the voluntary grammar, the integrated schools and the CCMS. There would have to some provision for those. But we would certainly not want it to be an unwieldy body by any stretch of the imagination. The only point we would make strongly is that we are against the principle of nomination by the Minister to education and library boards.

Mr Hussey: The present boards allow elected representation of around 42%, I think. They still allow for a high degree of local accountability. That could be lost in the sort of set-up that you are talking of. What is your view on that?

Mr McKee: The difficulty about local accountability is that when you come close to the grass roots, there is nowhere closer than boards of governors. And here is another worrying development, and that is the apathy shown by parents in the elections of parents governors. That is a profoundly worrying aspect of the scheme. Do you argue that because you bring administration down to a particular area you get better local administration?

It may appear in theory to be a sound argument, but in practice we are finding that parents are not coming forward to the elections. More and more parents are reluctant to come forward and serve on boards of governors. We do not devalue the argument, but we would say that the crisis in that respect is already being experienced at individual school level. I think it is appalling that so many parent governors are selected not by election, because there is no quorum at the meetings called to conduct the elections, but are put on by some peculiar sort of nomination. We are not quite certain how it works, but these parents turn up. To be quite honest, they do not have the same credentials in the eyes of the staff of the school that a democratically elected parent governor has.

Mr Hussey: Do you also agree that there is a problem getting teacher governors in some cases?

Mr McKee: Yes.

Mr Hussey: Because of the responsibilities that are put on governors?

Mr McKee: Yes.

Mr Hussey: If we take that up to board level, at least there you have people who are representatives of other bodies. Therefore, it is the body that they are representing, rather than they themselves, who can carry the can if something goes wrong. Is there not a need for that slight distancing?

Mr McKee: Yes, I agree fully because an individual who comes on without the protection of a representative body is in an exposed position and must feel that it is not worth the candle to continue with the increase in degrees of responsibility.

Mr Hussey: So it is a question of how far you distance yourself.

Mr McKee: True. The local accountability issue is one that we are aware of. We still believe that it can be exercised within the Northern Ireland structure, but if you are going to tackle it, we would respectfully suggest that you look also at the way in which democratic accountability is developing at a board of governors level. There are disturbing trends there, Mr Chairman.

The Chairman: I could not agree with you more. Thank you sincerely for coming and also for the content of your presentation. At least someone is prepared to take a different route.

Witnesses:

Mr B Campfield and Ms E Duffy

(Northern Ireland Public Service Alliance)

The Chairman: Thank you very much for coming.

We have been charged by the Forum to examine and report on the administrative changes in education from five boards to three.

Mr Campfield: My name is Brian Campfield. I am an assistant secretary with the Northern Ireland Public Service Alliance. Thank you for the opportunity to make an oral presentation. You have a copy of the submission.

I want to concentrate on some issues and to try and focus on them a bit immediately. Firstly, in NIPSA, we organize and represent the vast bulk of administrative, clerical, technical, executive and professional staff within the five education and library boards. It is the main trade union covering that area. NIPSA is opposed to the Minister's decision for two reasons: the decision itself, and the basis of it, and the manner in which the decision was taken, and that relates to the consultative process and the history to this. I would like to deal firstly with the decision itself.

The point of departure that we take is whether there is any educational justification for the Minister's decision. Since the Minister announced his proposals for change in 1995 relating to the reduction to the number of boards from five to four, we have been asking the Department of Education and the Minister to provide us with the educational rationale behind his decision and for him to demonstrate how his new system that he proposes to implement is going to provide a better system of education for the community in Northern Ireland, and particularly for young people.

Now it is our view that the onus and the obligation really rests with the Minister to do that. Our view is that the current five-board system has worked relatively well and has been fairly successful over this last 20-odd years. It has been fairly successful in a situation which has not been easy. We have had a lot of community tension and a lot of violence, and I think that the one thing that can be said about the five education and library boards is that they have got on with their business irrespective of the political affiliations of people who sit on boards, or, for that matter, people who work on boards.

Given that the system has worked relatively well, the onus, in our view, is on the Minister to justify his decision. If he can demonstrate that there are educational benefits which will be translated on the ground to young people and others who are recipients of education in Northern Ireland or who are involved in the educational process, then, I think, anybody, including trade unions, who may stand to lose members or whose members may be redundant, would have to examine those. If there are overwhelming arguments then, clearly, we would have to defer to the argument. But, in all the documentation that Mr Ancram has provided, we have not detected any educational justification for his decision.

The two arguments that have been used to date by the Minister have been financial and developments over this last number of years in the education and library service. In relation to the latter he has argued that with the advent of local management of school and local management of colleges, with the creation of CCMS and with the planned incorporation of further education, that really, given the remaining functions that boards have to carry out, there is no reason or justification for having five boards to do that, and that three boards can do it just as well.

Our view would be that that argument is superficial. There is a superficial attractiveness in it, but really it is a formal type of argument. There is no real content in it. If you apply the same logic, if boards were to have more functions, then the logic of that argument is that there should be more than five education and library boards. It does not automatically follow that because the functions of a board are reduced that you need less boards in order to administer what remains. While there may be a superficial attractiveness in the argument, I think there is an obligation on the Minister to spell out in a real, concrete form exactly how his changes are going to benefit the system.

It seems to us that his decision on further education colleges, and for the

incorporation and the establishment of what will be 17 distinct independent corporate bodies with the ability to run their affairs, in fact undermines his argument that he is trying to rationalize and cut back on administration and bureaucracy, because each individual further education college — in theory anyway — is going to have its own personnel function, its own accounts function, pay its own salary and wages, look after all its own affairs and particularly it will need to have access to legal advice.

A lot of these functions are currently provided and pooled through the boards and the further education colleges use these. So we believe that there is a gap between his plans for further education and the rationale for that, and that with his decision to reduce a number of boards in corporation of colleges he will be creating a bigger bureaucracy. From our point of view, as a trade union which organizes administrators and clerical people, we may say that is fine because we stand to recruit more members. But the reality, in our view, is that you need a proper balance between the teaching and the non-teaching roles within further education colleges. Our view is that it is quite likely that the balance of resources within further education colleges will be shifted to some degree towards the administrative and support ends as opposed to the direct teaching ends.

So we see there being an inconsistency in the approach that the Minister has taken in further education and in respect of the number of boards.

The second argument that he has made relates to the financial savings that are likely to be made.

We have asked the Department, on a number of occasions, for the economic appraisal upon which the decision was based. We know that the Minister has stated that it is likely that by moving to a three-board model there will be savings in the region of £2m per annum. As you will be aware from our submission, this represents less than one quarter of one per cent of the budget of the five education and library boards. Even if the £2m were to be saved, the degree of upheaval that is likely to be created by the abolition of five boards and the creation of three boards is much more destructive than the previous four-board proposal because that involved really only two boards, and to some extent the Southern Board because of the proposed move of the Down District Council area to the Southern Board.

But this is a complete disruption of all five boards, and the work of all five boards. In balancing the upheaval and the disruption that is likely to be caused against the suggested savings, we think there is a judgment to be made there, but that it is not really worth it, and that it does not make sense to proceed on that basis.

But we will also take the view from our experience of public service reorganization over the years that, in the first number of years, it costs money rather than saves money. We have not any figures because the Department is the body which has access to the figures. We understand that they have been in front of the Committee and they have provided some documents to the Committee. They are not, as far as I am aware, in the public domain.

On that issue may I could say that if the Department had provided at the very early stage during the consultative process the sort of information that may have been provided to yourselves, both in relation to the economic appraisal and in relation to the policy appraisal fair treatment guidelines, then it would have been quite possible for a much more public debate to have taken place. We now have a situation where people are working to an eleventh-hour deadline for your interim Report. The Minister needs to publish the Draft Order in Council by some time in October. I think mid-October is the last deadline by which they need to publish the Order in order for it to go through the last section of Parliament of this particular Government anyway.

I think it is completely unsatisfactory that the Department can provide detailed information to yourselves which still, in some respects, is not in the public domain for public discussion, and expect yourselves and everybody else to analyse and assess the implications and the authenticity of the information that it has supplied. An analysis of that information cannot necessarily be done very quickly. It would have been much better, and I think much more democratic, had that sort of information been placed in the public domain at an early stage so that everyone with an interest in this issue could at least have been working on the same basis. It is unfortunate that this was not the case.

As far as the £2 million is concerned, I understand that the Southern Education and Library Board expressed the view to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions at a meeting that we had with it that it will cost them £2 million each year for the first three years to implement this decision. I not sure whether or not that information is in the public domain but that is what we understand the Southern Board view is that this decision will cost it, and, given the recent publicity about British Airways and the downsizing and restructuring that it is involved in, together with the cost of redesigning the logo and repainting the aeroplanes and all the different equipment, there is also the whole issue of new logos for new boards. It is going to cost many thousands of pounds to repaint buses, vans and other equipment and redesign the logos. A question also arises about the cost of the whole exercise that the Department has undertaken over the last number of years. All of that has yet to be appraised economically and we remain to see the economic appraisal that the Department has produced if, in fact, it is available. The second element of the decision that we are unhappy about is the manner in which it was made.

Last year we all know that there was public consultation on the proposal to move from five boards to four boards. The people those proposals would primarily have affected were those in the South Eastern Education and Library Board and the Belfast Education and Library Board. The people in the communities in the Belfast and the South Eastern areas were given an opportunity to consider the proposals and to feed into the Government's decision. A campaign was organized in the South Eastern Education and Library Board area, and a lot of people with an education interest became involved and the Minister deferred making a decision on the number of boards.

The people in those areas had an opportunity of engaging with the Department. That cannot be said about the people in the Western Education and Library Board area or the people in the North Eastern Education and Library Board area. If you lived in the Western Board area or the North Eastern Board area, and I suppose to some extent in the Southern Board area, it would not have been unreasonable for someone in those areas to have laboured on under the impression that as the four-board proposal was up for consultation, the integrity and the continued existence of those boards was not in question. The people in those areas would have had a legitimate expectation that they were not going to be affected by the Minister's decision. The initial anger and shock and the feelings which followed reflect the fact that people in those areas were sitting there and not making much noise about the Minister's four-board proposal because they did not see themselves as being directly affected. Then, out of the blue, came this more extreme decision to reduce the number of boards to three.

I think the way in which that decision was made without giving the people in the Western, North Eastern and Southern board areas an opportunity to consider the proposals, to be presented with what looks very much like a fait accompli, says a lot about the way in which the Department and the Minister have handled this decision. There was a legitimate expectation by people in those areas that they would not be touched and that their boards would remain intact. That has not materialized and it is up to the Government to go back to the drawing board and provide for a proper period of consultation on their decision.

As a trade union we would also take the view that it is legitimate to look at education administration because, while we organize people in the administration end, the way in which education administration must surely be dictated and determined is by reference to what is best for the people who require education. We do not, as a matter of principle, have any hard and fast notions about the number of boards that are required. What we would say is that the five boards have worked reasonably well and no public administration is perfect and really the obligation is on the Minister to justify and demonstrate how his decision is going to result in additional resources and a better education system for people in Northern Ireland, and he has failed to do that.

We have very strongly taken the view that there should be no major changes to the organization of public administration, including education, until such times as the local political parties can agree to some political structures for the future of Northern Ireland, and while a number of months ago that may have been a more optimistic view to take, we still take the view that that is not unreasonable. The Minister in many ways has the choice of demonstrating that he is either operating as a colonial master and disregarding completely the views of all the political parties or that he is a statesman, by accepting the vast bulk of informed opinion in Northern Ireland on these issues. I think he has the choice.

Unfortunately, at this stage he is intent on proceeding to implement his decision irrespective of the vast bulk of opinion in Northern Ireland, and we find that regrettable.

I will just leave it there. You do have our document and I hope it is a synopsis as opposed to an elaboration of what we have said.

The Chairman: I have read your document carefully, I find it extremely interesting and it makes a very important contribution. You are really saying that it is for the Minister to be a statesman and let the people of Northern Ireland sort this out. You are not against a review or anything like that provided it is a proper and detailed review?

Mr Campfield: Basically, that is our position.

Mr McMichael: I have a quick question about regionalization. Is it not sound to have this service in a central location rather than having offices duplicating the business?

Mr Campfield: The Department originally identified six areas for regionalization as you are aware, and concluded that savings were only to be made in respect, possibly, of three and that further work has to be carried out even in those three areas. The three areas that they will proceed to do further work on are purchasing, student awards and architectural services. Now the best example, I suppose, from our point of view is student awards. We take the view that student awards is a function which is based in each board area and which requires there to be people on the ground to deal with the public. It is important that the public, students and their families, have direct access across the counter with the public servants who administer the grants system; we think there is a lot of value in that. Even if they were to move to a centralization approach, it is our view that they would inevitably have to have people out in the localities to deal with communities and individual students who have queries because there is no substitute for people being able to go into their local public service office and deal with a public servant directly. It is much more satisfactory than a telephone call to, say, Belfast or Ballymena or wherever a regionalized function might be located. We see major drawbacks in a regionalized service for student awards: it would reduce the service and reduce the direct access that individuals have to board officers who are involved in processing and working out their student grants. That is one example.

In relation to architectural services and, possibly, purchasing, I understand that local schools take the view that close access to people dealing with the architectural services and boards being locally available is preferable to their being more remotely based. There is more work to be done on purchasing, student awards and architectural services and we are certainly very much of the view that student awards should not be regionalized. We are certainly not happy with the proposal for architectural services and purchasing. However, I do not think it is for us to defend the current set-up — if the thing is not broken, we generally take the view that it should not be dismantled and something else put in its place.

There is an obligation on someone to say “Look, this is the better system. This is why it will be better and this is what it will mean in real terms to people on the ground”. The unfortunate thing in this debate is that last year Michael Ancram and the Department produced a document for all the political parties in which he threw the ball back into the political parties' courts and asked them to tell him how to do it more efficiently or better. That was grossly unfair and it represented in some ways a political sleight of hand. He was not able to justify what he was proposing and he wanted the political parties to come up with an alternative system.

It is certainly your responsibility to look at these issues and develop alternatives but not within his timescale or with the restrictions that he was working with, and that is the unfortunate aspect.

The Chairman: Maybe the working parties did come out with those with lowest cost figures, but there is no proof that goods or service could be delivered in accordance with them. Even on purchasing, an expert opinion is very doubtful whether you become any more effective because you become a certain size. There is still a great deal of uncertainty. In other words, there is a fair old difference between theory and practice. But the other point is that quality of service was not really the ball-park figure.

Mr Campfield: A point worth considering is this: if the Minister is saying that the reduced functions that the boards now have justifies his decision to move to a reduced number of boards, and he decides to regionalize or agentize a number of the services within the boards, that assists his argument. It gives his argument additional weight, and there may be some suggestion that the identification of services for regionalization and possibly agentization was part of an overall plan to strip the boards of their functions so that the Department could come along at a later stage and ask whether, since the boards do not really do that much, there is a need for five boards in Northern Ireland to administer the remaining functions.

Mr Hussey: What is your view of the fact that, according to what we can gather, not all the players in education administration have been included in the Minister's deliberations — for example, CCMS and, specifically, the Department itself?

Mr Campfield: Well, we as a union have members within the staff of the Department of Education as well. Our view is that initially, when the Minister announced his complete review of education administration, it was the intention to include everyone, the Department as well, but as it developed the Department of Education was conveniently omitted as were CCMS and some of the other sectors. Our view is that if a comprehensive review is to take place of education administration in Northern Ireland, it has to include everybody and every aspect of it.

It is only by including all the players that you can come up with some balanced and worthwhile decision, because if you do exclude a part, you are inevitably going to come up with answers which fall short of being the proper solutions, so we basically concur that a proper review should include everybody.

Mr Hussey: If the Minister's proposal becomes a decision and is enacted, obviously the five boards will go, and three will be reconstituted and all your members in the system are going to be affected. Have you calculated the potential job losses for your membership?

Mr Campfield: We have been very reluctant to identify a particular number.

Mr Hussey: Would you be prepared to guestimate?

Mr Campfield: Initially we met with officials from the Department of Education at the time the proposals for change were made, and they indicated to us that the number of people working in administration who would be affected would be relatively small. If in fact this decision is implemented, which we hope it will not be, we will be happy to remind the Department that that is what we were told.

From our point of view there is a danger in identifying numbers of posts or people who might be made redundant because that then sets an agenda, and we do not want to become victims of our own propaganda or our own view on these matters. Over time substantial numbers of people would be affected but we are very reluctant to say exactly how many — 100, 200.

Mr Hussey: You would dispute the Department's claim, then, that it would be a small number? You say it would be substantial.

Mr Campfield: We do.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: If it is demonstrated that the effect will be minimal — it is only going to affect the top tier of management — will you be happy with the change from five to three?

Ms Duffy: I am Emer Duffy, the seconded official for the South Eastern Board. We have had a long trip on this, longer than the rest of the boards, and I hope none of the other representatives minds my saying that.

No, the members of my branch would not be happy with that at all because this is not just an issue about the loss of jobs, it is about education and the right to free and properly resourced education. This is not just going to affect the members of NIPSA or any of the other unions involved. This is going to affect every house in Northern Ireland. It is a much bigger issue. Obviously we are concerned about jobs — we would not be trade unionists if we were not concerned for our members — but this is a much much wider issue than that, and there is a danger in being seen only to be looking after our own. We need to take it much more seriously than that.

We do not want anyone to have to lose his job at all, whatever his grade.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: Your union has a specific viewpoint. You would not be happy with the reduction from five to three. But there is a union which would like to see all the boards scrapped. So here we have division even among the trade unions. It is very difficult for the Government to take on board what the unions are saying if all the unions are not agreed about the way forward.

Mr Campfield: The Irish Congress of Trade Unions and the vast bulk of unions in education that are affiliated to ICTU take the view that they are opposed to this current decision. We have had our differences with the NASUWT over the years on some of these issues, but I think I can say that we are both opposed to the Minister's decision. I understand that the NASUWT also accepts that it is up to the Department and the Minister to justify his current decision, irrespective of what the views of NASUWT or some of the other unions like the association of teachers may be.

The obligation and the onus is on the Minister to justify his decision. If other people think that a one-board model is preferable, that is a matter which should be the subject of proper public debate with all the information on the table. But the fact is that all or the vast bulk of unions in the education area are against the Minister's decision. In fact NASUWT is also against the Minister's decision. It does not accept the three-board decision.

Rev Trevor Kirkland: If the Government come to the union and say “Here are all our tables, graphs and statistics to demonstrate the validity of our case”, will you accept it? Your complaint is that you were not consulted.

Mr Campfield: It is not that we were not consulted — it is a much broader issue than just the question of consultation with the trade unions and the impact upon our members. While it is our primary interest to defend our members, we also have social policies and views on public issues like education. We have our annual conference which deals with the wide range of social and public interest issues, and the primary reason we are opposed to this decision is that it has not been justified to date. If the Minister comes to us with overwhelming arguments, we will be overwhelmed. But he has not done that and, therefore, we have to take the view that he really must justify what he is doing. It is not up to us to justify it. The current system speaks for itself.

The Minister is quite adept at moving from the financial arguments when it suits him. Because people are saying that the savings are not going to be as much as £2 million, or they might not materialize for a number of years, he is quite able to move and say that it is not primarily the financial arguments that he is interested in. It is not a matter of redirecting resources to the coal-face or to the classroom, it is more to do with getting a rational structure. Now that is all very fine linguistically, but what does it mean in practice? What he is required to do is demonstrate how the system is going to be better. If it is only going to be the same in educational terms as the current one, there is no point. So he has to demonstrate that the new system is going to be an improved one, and from the information that we have, he has failed to do this.

The Chairman: I thank you again for the thoughtfulness of your presentation. Perhaps what has shocked some members was that it was not along some of the traditional union lines — you were mindful that education is a very valued asset.