Vacancies ‘not impacting’ education service

Perth and Kinross Council’s executive director of education and children’s service has assured councillors a numbr of staff vacancies are not impacting the service.

The staffing issues were revealed as a council committee scrutinised an update to PKC’s 2021/22 revenue budget.

The update projected a £ 613,000 underspend in staffing costs.

At the February 2 meeting of the strategic policy and resources committee, Liberal Democrat Perth City South councillor Willie Wilson questioned the slippage on staff costs in education and children’s services.

PKC’s executive director of education and children’s service, Sheena Devlin, told councillors £66,000 of the underspend related to primary schools and £77,000 to secondaries.

She added: “We have been able to recruit swiftly and routinely to almost all posts and so there is no issue there around recruitment and not being able to spend the budgets in relation to primary and secondary.

“The largest part of the slippage amount actually relates to work in early years where there are a number of vacant posts but they are vacant posts that are not impacting on service delivery at this time.”

A spokesperson for the council said afterwards: “The underspend associated with early learning and childcare staffing is due to a number of factors, none of which have impacted on service delivery – for example, the impact of Covid-19 meant there were delays in the recruitment process during lockdown.

“We had previously over-recruited into our early years settings in preparation for the expansion of the service; this included recruitment through our own programme of ‘Learn to Work in Early Years’ – a programme which afforded PKC employees the opportunity to retrain as early years workers.”