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The Scottish Government and sportscotland passionately believe that sport is for everyone. We should all feel included, and able to take part and access the benefits of sport.

An ongoing priority for the Scottish Government is to support participation across all groups and tackle inequalities in participation.

Currently available Scottish Health Survey data shows that 11-15 year old’s participation in sport appears to have remained stable since pre-covid levels at 65%. Other data that we use to track participation in sport is published by sportscotland.

Recent data published by sportscotland in 2023 shows significantly increased participation levels in their national Active Schools programme, across the past academic year (2022-23), with over 4.6 million visits (a rise of 34% on 2021-22) made to almost 247,000 Active Schools sessions. The number of Active Schools participants (over 269,000 children and young people), deliverers (over 17,900 with 90% of those being volunteers), and school/club links (over 2,500) also increased from the previous academic year as the recovery from covid continued.

The Teaching bursary advisory group is reconvened at the end of each year’s scheme. The role of the group is to review the implementation of the bursary scheme and provide advice on any necessary changes for the following year’s scheme.

The 2023-24 Teaching bursary advisory group is due to meet in March. Members include the Scottish Government, Skills Development Scotland, COSLA, Universities and the Scottish Council of Deans.

The co-production process through which stakeholders are designing the Centre for Teaching Excellence will conclude in the first half of 2024, followed by a process to identify a suitable host institution(s). We expect the Centre for Teaching Excellence to launch shortly thereafter.

Grant funding to support Scottish Teachers Advancing Computing Science (STACS) / University of Glasgow commenced in 2021 and has continued on an annual basis since that date.

As a condition of the funding support the Scottish Government agreed with Scottish Teachers Advancing Computing Science a commitment to publish annual progress reports which are published on their website where updates and activity are regularly posted. The first year’s report is publicly available on the STACS website and they will be publishing a year 2 update report in the summer of 2024.

The annual report for 2022-23 is available at: https://issuu.com/stacshq/docs/stacsannualreport .

The National Upskilling Plan for Computing Science teachers is a multi-year upskilling programme to support teachers keep pace with this fast-changing subject area. As this is a core tenet of STACS aims and deliverables, the Scottish Government will continue to support this for the duration of the grant funding arrangement with STACS until 2026-7.

Although the number of individual Computing Science teachers visiting the website is not tracked, the STACS website is an important resource for the Computing Science community. 490 Computing Science teachers are members of the STACS website and have access to the full set of resources. Since launching in 2022 the website has had 53,000 unique visits.

Funding was allocated to Local Authorities on behalf of 304 secondary schools for computing science hardware on a demand-led basis. Local Authorities distributed funding on behalf of the Scottish Government, with the total claimed at approximately £730,000.

Scottish Teachers Advancing Computing Science is responsible for developing and implementing the National Upskilling Plan for computing science teachers. The National Upskilling pilot developed over 6 hours of high-quality upskilling material with 71 teachers registering from 27 councils and 50 education authority schools and 11 independent schools. On average, 30 teachers participated in the live workshops with evaluation feedback showing many participants reporting increased confidence and understanding. Utilising feedback from the pilot, the second iteration of the Upskilling Programme was expanded to include upskilling at National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher level and is currently being completed and will be evaluated as part of this next phase of work. STACS will continue to evaluate future phases of the Upskilling Programme.

In the information held by the Scottish Government, teaching posts are classified into three employment types: Permanent, Temporary, and Temporary-Teacher Induction Scheme. For the purposes of this response, teachers on the Teacher Induction Scheme have been included in the Temporary category.

Teachers may be employed on a permanent contract but be categorised as Temporary if they are working in a post classified as a temporary employment type.

The following table shows the percentage of permanent and temporary full-time equivalent (FTE) teacher posts across all sectors (Primary, Secondary, Special and Centrally Employed) from 2010.

Percentage of teachers (FTE) with Permanent and Temporary posts

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-23510 on 19 December 2023. 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 .