MINISTERS have been urged to reform the way severance payments are made to senior members of staff in the college sector.

The Scottish Parliament's public audit committee has written to Angela Constance, the Education Secretary, after MSPs held an inquiry into payments made to two senior college managers last year.

Ronnie Knox, the former principal of North Glasgow College, and John Gray, his vice-principal, received £471,000 between them under the deal, which followed the college's merger with two other institutions to form the new Glasgow Kelvin College.

Mr Knox, who received a salary of £120,000, was given a payout of more than £310,000, while Mr Gray, who earned £80,000, received more than £160,000.

Caroline Gardner, the Auditor General for Scotland, said there was no evidence the payments were wrongly calculated, or that they were illegal or fraudulent.

However, a report by Audit Scotland raised the matter of transparency over the way they were sanctioned, stating there was no evidence they were subjected to "appropriate approval" or assessed as providing value for money.

Now Paul Martin, the convener of the public audit committee, has raised the issue in correspondence with Ms Constance, suggesting there are "wider lessons" to learn.

He said: "Whilst we recognise the guidance on governance arrangements and compliance activities has been strengthened, there remain areas where lessons do not appear to have been fully learned."

Mr Martin said "worrying" elements of the review revealed that members of the North Glasgow College remuneration committee were "largely unsupported and unaware of their responsibilities" in relation to considering severance arrangements.

The college's remuneration committee also had no specified management support and was unaware of guidance that set out the requirements for documentation, decision making and record keeping.

As a result, the committee has recommended that it should be a condition of funding that all college committees have designated management and secretariat support.

The committee also called for new rules to ensure chairs of remuneration committees could not also hold a position as chair of the college board.

MSPs went on to criticise the role of the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) in communicating what was required of colleges taking part in the merger process.

Mr Martin said: "This was a sector wide merger process - one of the largest reorganisations across the public sector - and as such we would have expected a more proactive approach to engagement would have been undertaken by the SFC to ensure that all college boards understood their duties as well as the relevant guidance and procedures."

A spokesman for the Scottish Funding Council said: "The Code of Good Governance was produced by colleges themselves and endorsed by the Scottish Funding Council as a set of principles.

"We are currently working with the college sector on the practices that support the code and this work will include the points raised by the Public Audit Committee in its letter to the Cabinet Secretary."

The findings come after a raft of mergers in the further education sector since 2011/12 which has seen the number of colleges fall from 37 to 20.

When the plans were announced, the Scottish Government said mergers would deliver £50 million of efficiency savings each year from 2015/16, along with other benefits such as reduced duplication, better engagement with employers and better outcomes for students.

The use of severance payments in the merger process was seen as an essential short-term measure as overall numbers of executive staff were cut, with savings expected in the long-term.