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The information requested is not held centrally by the Scottish Government. Decisions about the fees for hospital education services are a matter for local authorities and NHS boards to consider as appropriate.

The Scottish Government does not hold this data. The General Teaching Council of Scotland (GTCS) is best placed to advise on how many newly qualified teachers progress each year to meet the Standard for Full Registration, through the Teacher Induction Scheme (TIS) or by the Flexible Route.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-38980 on 23 July 2025. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers.

We are engaging a range of stakeholders and women and girls with lived experience in the development of Scotland’s first equality strategy for women and girls.

The strategy will be co-designed with the First Minister’s National Advisory Council for Women and Girls (NACWG) and the Empowering Women Panel (EWP). The NACWG was established in 2017 to give advice to government on what needs to happen to tackle gender inequality in Scotland. The EWP was started in 2023 and is a group of 20 diverse women and girls from all parts of the country and all backgrounds who don’t normally have the chance to influence policy.

We are engaging widely and the first phase is ongoing, this will include:

• Inviting over 50 organisations to engage with the women and girls they work with to share their views on the development of the strategy.
• Two roundtables hosted by the NACWG with gender equality stakeholders and wider equality stakeholders to seek their expertise on the strategy.
• A round table with members of the Senior Leaders Forum to understand how the strategy can support public leaders to work collaboratively to deliver further progress in equality for women and girls.
• Individual meetings with stakeholders with key roles in the delivery of the strategy such as COSLA.
• A workshop with groups that hold gender critical views to ensure that we hear a breadth of views.
• Peer led research from the EWP seeking the views of diverse women on the development of the strategy.

The views and expertise from these meetings will be considered by the Scottish Government, NACWG and EWP and used to develop the content for the first phase of the strategy. There will be further opportunities to influence the strategy in phase two of its development due to commence later this year.

I was informed of the publication of cancer waiting times, scheduled for 24 June 2025, and provided with pre-release access to the statistics on 19 June 2025.

Scotland should be a place where everyone can participate fully within society, access their rights and thrive within their communities. To realise this vision, we must make bold and sustained progress in tackling discrimination and advancing equality across Scotland.

To support BSL users to communicate by phone in their preferred language, the Scottish Government funds Contact Scotland BSL, a free national Video Relay Service that enables British Sign Language (BSL) users to make phone calls via qualified BSL interpreters, available 24/7. A new contract for this service is currently being tendered, and the Government has engaged with the Deaf and Deafblind communities and their representative organisations to understand their needs and priorities for the future service.

The Scottish Government expects all public bodies to fully comply with their legal obligations under the Equality Act 2010, including the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). This duty requires public authorities to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations between different groups. These responsibilities should be embedded in all aspects of decision-making, including the design and delivery of services.

While enforcement of the Equality Act, including the PSED, lies with the courts and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)—which operates independently of the Scottish Government—the Government supports compliance through guidance, engagement with public bodies, and monitoring how the PSED is implemented in practice.

The commitment to deliver 40,000 additional operations and diagnostic tests was set out in the NHS Recovery Plan published in 2021. Progress reports have been published annually, the most recent being in December 2024: NHS Recovery Plan 2021-2026: annual progress update report 2024 - gov.scot.

In his speech on NHS reform and renewal in January this year, the First Minister announced that in 2025-26 the NHS will deliver of 150,000 extra appointments and procedures as part of the Operational Improvement Plan (OIP). This will be done through recruitment, extended working and regional and national working, including in the National Treatment Centres.

This additional activity will be backed by an additional investment of over £100 million this year. Activity will be targeted at long waits, ensuring that by March 2026 no one is waiting longer than a year for their new outpatient appointment or inpatient/day-case procedure.

As noted within the OIP, SG will report against progress publicly and to Parliament within 2025-26, using published statistics.

Tax code matters such as allowances and reliefs are reserved to the UK Government. The Scottish Government has no plans currently to change the number of Income Tax bands

Projections for social security costs in the coming years are established in the recently published Medium-Term Financial Strategy. Our approach to taxation is established in the Tax Strategy, which has already set out that we will not introduce any new bands or increase the rates of Scottish Income Tax in this parliament.

Good deer management is about achieving balance, what that looks like in different local areas will vary depending on the immediate environment and the impact deer may be having. That is why we have introduced new purposes for deer management in our Natural Environment Bill. We recognise, however, that we need to use both regulation and incentive to support our deer management aims.

Three pilot incentive schemes led by NatureScot and the Cairngorms National Park Authority (CNPA) ran in 2024/25 to financially support deer managers to control numbers of deer in specific parts of Scotland in response to the climate and nature emergencies. Pilot schemes are expected to return in these areas for the 2025/26 season as well as expand to further locales including within Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park.

In addition to this, in the lowlands specifically we are supporting deer management through the Low Ground Venison Supply Chain Project which will explore ways to help low ground deer managers improve the infrastructure for handling and chilling venison carcasses and increase throughput. 13 applicants have been issued grant funding to date.

As set out in our 2025-26 Programme for Government, we are committed to working with stakeholders on “the development of local pilot projects on deer management programmes, including an implementation plan and funding models deer management”.