Edinburgh Council’s education budget meeting on 22 January: The Outcomes

Harald Tobermann, BhsPC chair, attended the Council’s education budget meeting on 22 January along with some. 60 other PC chairs, two finance councillors, Paul Godzik, the education committee convenor, and a number of senior officials from both departments.

While presentations could have been a bit shorter (or better still: replaced by advance papers), it brought everyone present onto the same page.

Perhaps the most productive part of the evening was the informal opportunity to chat with Cclr Rankin (finance convenor) Cclr Cook (LAB, vice-chair), Hugh Dunn (senior CEC finance official), and Lindsay Law (the new parent rep on the Education Committee). An early version of our budget paper was shared with a number of PC chairs – their feedback helped us to improve the paper further (latest revision is still open for online comments here, before it was sent to our eight local councillors.

In summary: this year’s budget is unlikley to change much from the framework we looked at our special budget MSG meeting on 18 January before it is adopted on 7 February.

Our plans is to persuade everyone who needs to be persuaded of our “free” quick gains; and to follow up with finance councillors after the current budget to look at get the Council to look at our medium term gains.