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The Scottish Funding Council’s final allocations to the college sector for 2025-26 provide a 2.6% sector increase in teaching funding compared to last year. Additionally no college sees a reduction in teaching funding in 2025-26 when compared with 2024-25.

Operational decisions, including course provision and staffing, are a matter for individual colleges, who are best placed to respond to emerging trends in skills needs at local and regional level.

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.

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.

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.

In April, the Chief Planner and I required planning authorities to report every six months on their local development plan timelines and actions they are taking to avoid delays and accelerate the process.

We have not yet received the initial formal six-monthly updates, which are to be sent to the Scottish Government by 30 September 2025. We will analyse and share details from the progress updates in due course.

In this year’s Programme for Government, we committed to providing local authorities with additional capacity and expertise, through the National Planning Hub. This includes prioritising action where evidence shows that authorities are having challenges in meeting timescales or where there are delays in producing local development plans. Planning authorities were advised of the support available to them in a letter from the Chief Planner issued in May. Since that letter, the Hub has been working with a number of local authorities to provide direct support at the earliest opportunity in response to their specific pressures and needs.

We are continuing to work with the National Planning Improvement Champion, the Improvement Service and Heads of Planning Scotland to raise the imperative of making timely progress with local development plans, to encourage proactive steps to accelerate timelines, and to provide support to authorities who have identified slippage as a concern.

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.

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.

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.

The Scottish Government engages with Local Authorities on a wide range of education-related issues.

In Scotland, the Fire (Scotland) Act 2005 and Fire Safety (Scotland) Regulations 2006 place a duty on an employer and other dutyholders who have control of safety obligations in respect of non-domestic premises, which includes educational establishments, to carry out a fire safety risk assessment, take adequate fire safety measures and keep the assessment under review. Fire safety measures include formulating an emergency fire action plan with evacuation arrangements for all people likely to be in the premises, including disabled people.

For staff and children in educational premises who may not be able to self-evacuate, a Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan (PEEP) should be discussed and developed as part of their enrolment and subsequently practiced, to ensure any necessary amendments to the plan are made.

Scottish Government guidance on Practical fire safety guidance on the evacuation of disabled persons from buildings is well established and is available on the Scottish Government website for those who seeking further information and guidance on this issue. Scottish Government Education officials have highlighted this important guidance again to Local Authorities through their Scottish Heads of Property Services and Association of Directors of Education in Scotland networks.