Cuts to school budgets at Scotland's largest local authority were yesterday condemned by teaching unions.
Cuts to school budgets at Scotland's largest local authority were yesterday condemned by teaching unions.
The attack came after Glasgow City Council wrote to all its primary and secondary schools asking them to stop all non-essential spending until the end of the current financial year.
The financial crisis currently hitting Glasgow - and other councils - throws into sharp relief The Herald's current debate on whether there should be fewer local authorities across Scotland.
Although there are a number of driving forces behind the argument, the greater economies of scale delivered by merging councils has never been more relevant.
At a time when budgets are increasingly under threat, the savings made by removing tiers of local authority management - and through more efficient procurement of services - would allow more funds to be freed up to spend in schools.
However, there are other, more critical, reasons for the proposal to cut the number of education authorities as part of a shake-up of council boundaries.
When the boundaries were drawn up the mid-1990s there was very little support for the new council areas in education circles, partly because they were more a result of political posturing rather than common sense.
Individual MPs and their parties may have supported the concept of reorganisation, but faced with the imminent loss of their own seats there were always those prepared to argue the case for an authority area to be preserved.
The result is that there are clear anomalies. Clackmannanshire Council runs only three mainstream secondary schools, while neighbouring Stirling has just six. Combining the two council areas would still leave them running fewer schools that nearby Fife Council - which has 19 secondary schools. Glasgow City Council runs 29 secondaries.
There are similar arguments for merging the authorities which run the neighbouring areas of Midlothian, which runs six secondaries, and East Lothian, which also runs six secondaries.
Those who support council reorganisation argue there is simply no sense in replicating several tiers of management in small neighbouring authorities when one organisation could quite easily run the number of schools involved.
Recent developments in local government are also critical to the argument - both in a financial and strategic sense.
Under the concordat signed by the SNP government and Cosla, which represents local authorities, more power was given to councils to take decisions about how they spend public money by ending the practice of ring-fencing, where money had to be used for a specific service, such as education.
However, there were fears that some services could lose out because of changing priorities or a shortage of money at local level which would then impact on delivery of national objectives.
In education, the effectiveness of the concordat has also been raised over the delivery of a number of flagship SNP policies, including free school meals and lower class sizes, which some councils do not appear to be pursuing, partly because of financial constraints.
Unions have already warned that cuts across the country are leading to fewer subjects, a shortage of jobs for newly qualified teachers, fewer classroom assistants and no reduction in class sizes.
Taken as a whole, across 32 local authority areas, it could be argued that the result of budget cuts and the concordat is a fragmentation of education services. If this is seen as undesirable - with the Educational Institute of Scotland already highlighting the growing "postcode lottery" of services - then reorganisation could bring a greater strategic clarity.
However, there will always be those who argue that small is good. The exam performance of East Renfrewshire Council, which runs seven secondary schools, consistently marks it out as one of the best-performing education authorities in Scotland. This may be down to the fact that it serves Glasgow's leafier suburbs, but, according to HM Inspectorate of Education, it is also one of the best run education services in Scotland.
In addition, while reorganisation can lead to savings, it is an expensive and time-consuming process in itself. Anyone embarking on such an exercise would have to be certain that the benefits would outweigh the potential for damaging the running of some of the best schools in Scotland.
