Seòmar agus comataidhean

Scottish Government officials meet with Children’s Hearings Scotland (CHS) colleagues on a weekly basis as part of the multiagency Children’s Hearings Covid Recovery Group. The Group last met on 2 February 2021, focusing on winter 2020-21 proposals to add pace and quality to service recovery.

Sponsor officials are in near-daily contact with CHS staff on a range of issues of common interest and concern. Regular public body accountability and finance meetings are also held 3-4 times per year.

8 new posts in total, 3 substantive and 5 fixed term.

6 substantive staff and 4 on fixed term appointments.

The Scottish Government funds businesses through various programmes, some of which are administered by non-departmental public bodies or by Scottish local authorities. As such, data on total funding to individual companies is not held centrally.

The award of non-domestic rates reliefs is a matter for local authorities. The Scottish Government is committed to working with Scottish local authorities to publish lists of non-domestic rates relief recipients in accordance with the recommendations of the Barclay review, and has issued guidance to assist local authorities in doing so.

I understand that there are ongoing commercial discussions between C J Lang & Son Ltd and Post Office Ltd.

As postal services are reserved there is no locus for the Scottish Government to be directly involved in those discussions but I have written to Post Office Ltd to seek assurances about continuity of post office services to any community affected by closure and to CJ Lang & Son Ltd asking to meet with them at the earliest opportunity to discuss the matter.

The Scottish Government has published a series of five research briefings focused around the impact of Covid-19 on children, young people and families. This includes, where data is available, the impact on parents and carers in relation to mental health. The briefings are available on the Scottish Government website.

Specific to parents of young children, Public Health Scotland ran the COVID-19 Early Years Resilience and Impact Survey (CEYRIS) in June 2020, to find out how children and their families in Scotland aged 2–7 years have been affected by the pandemic. The survey collected mental wellbeing data and the experience of parents and carers during the pandemic in Scotland. Survey reports were published on the Public Health Scotland website in September 2020. The survey was repeated in late 2020 and reporting is expected in Spring 2021.

The Scottish Government and SOLACE have jointly established a Children and Families Collective Leadership Group to consider the impacts of the pandemic on children, young people and families especially those in the most challenging circumstances, and the actions that need to be taken by local and national government in response.

The Group has developed a vision and blueprint for holistic family support and recommendations for action which will be progressed by the Family Support Delivery Group and aligned with the implementation of The Promise. This includes the National Family Support Directory which has been developed and is available on the Parent Club website.

We have made support and advice around mental health available for parents, carers and their children on the Parent Club website. This includes free access to Solihull Online, which is a resource which helps parents and carers to better understand their child’s emotional development and supports the development of healthy relationships. In order to support an increased demand for services, we established perinatal mental health services as a priority area for the roll out of Near Me services which increases accessibility of services where face to face contact is not possible.

The First Minister recently announced that we have committed to provide additional funding of £250m over the next session of the parliament, with an additional £5m being made available immediately to ensure priority work is initiated as quickly as possible.

I will outline how the first wave of funding is being spent imminently, however there will be a clear focus at this point on improving treatment services and the imminent need to keep people alive. The allocation of funds for the next financial year and beyond will be considered over the coming weeks.

Work focused on prevention of drug use and awareness raising is taken forward by a number of partner organisations, such as CREW and the Scottish Drugs Forum, who are funded by the Scottish Government. The Drug Deaths Taskforce has also provided funding to a number of projects that relate to the awareness and prevention agenda through the Innovation and National Development Fund, details of which can be found on the Taskforce website (Funding | Drug Deaths Taskforce).

The Supply Chains Development Programme, announced in the Sept 2020 Programme for Government, is a key part of our economic recovery approach. It spans sectors where we see sustainable economic potential to grow Scottish supply chains and will explore how we can better leverage Scotland’s annual‎ £12 billion public sector procurement spend, by aligning strategic supply chains with enterprise and innovation support. The early focus is on identifying opportunities in three broad areas: net zero transition, built environment and health.

Increasing the economic impact of public sector procurement is also one of the actions in the Manufacturing Recovery Plan published in December 2020. A Scottish Procurement Policy Note, SPPN 9/2020, was issued to remind public bodies of practical steps that should be taken to support supply chains and address vulnerabilities to supplies in line with Scottish Procurement legislation. It also includes information on a range of procurement initiatives and a range of business support activity underway across Scotland to support supplier development.

The national COVID-19 Education Recovery Group is overseeing work being led by the General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTCS) and supported by the Scottish Government, the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland and the Scottish Council of Deans of Education, to consider how we can best continue to ensure that opportunities for face to face learning and teaching are maximised for all student teachers over the remainder of this academic year. This work will also help to ensure students across Scotland are provided with additional support, where needed, to meet the registration requirements set by the GTCS by the end of the current academic year.

As set out in the GTCS Professional Standards, it is the responsibility of individual teachers to identify, plan and develop their own professional learning needs. However, the Scottish Government will look to maintain an overview of professional skills and confidence where appropriate. For example, we chose to include Scotland within the 2018 PISA Global Competence Assessment. While the results are generally positive, they do show that Scottish teachers are less likely to cover global warming and climate change in their lessons when compared with the 17 other countries that participated in that part of the assessment.

We are continuing to look carefully at our response to this and other findings from the Global Competence assessment. However, we are already taking action to ensure professional learning around climate change. Since 2019 we have provided £300,000 to support the increased delivery of the Climate Ready Classrooms programme which helps teachers (and learners) gain the skills and knowledge needed to deliver learning in line with the global climate and ecological emergencies. The programme allows educators and learners to become carbon literate and able to more confidently cover climate education. We have also funded the Eco-Schools Scotland Programme over a number of years and in doing so we have seen schools and teachers across Scotland take action to tackle climate change. Furthermore, our Learning for Sustainability Action Plan commits us to working with the General Teaching Council for Scotland to ensure that Learning for Sustainability continues to be a specific requirement within the professional standards for teachers. Revised standards featuring a strong sustainability focus are to take effect from August 2021 and these will help to ensure that teachers continue to undertake professional learning in this vital area of education.