Former director of children and families boss’s £278k pay off

THE head of education at Glasgow City Council, who stepped down unexpectedly from her post, has walked away with a pay off of over a quarter of a million pounds.

Margaret Doran, the council’s former director of children and families, was given a combined redundancy package of £278,000.

A council spokeswoman said Ms Doran was given a redundancy payment of £64,000, as well as £29,000 in lieu of notice and a lump sum of £185,000 from the council pension fund.

Ms Doran’s salary at the time of her departure was £120,000.

Last night, teachers’ leaders attacked the “extravagant” pay-off.

A spokesman for the Glasgow branch of the Educational Institute of Scotland, the country’s largest teaching union, said: “Teachers who are suffering budget cuts on a day-to-day basis will be outraged by the nature of this settlement – it appears to be excessive.”

However, a spokeswoman for Glasgow City Council said: “It is standard practice to compensate people for redundancy and early retirement.”

Ms Doran, who is married to Michael Connarty, Labour MP for Linlithgow and Falkirk East, was originally appointed in 2007 as executive director of a combined department of education and social work services with an £80m budget.

The council’s vision – which she helped to shape – was to transform the fortunes of children from some of the UK’s most deprived communities by bringing together the two services.

At the time, Steven Purcell, the council leader, said: “Bringing education and social work closer together will help us to tackle attainment in mainstream education and improve the outcomes for our most vulnerable children.”

However, in December, the council decided to break up the new department after concerns it was too large and unwieldy.

The decision left Ms Doran effectively in charge only of the city’s education team, which already had its own director.

James Dornan, leader of the SNP council group, said the pay-off was a legacy of poor political leadership by the Scottish Labour Party.

“We warned the Labour Party from the very start that, although there was a need for close working, a department of this size was unworkable.”