Seòmar agus comataidhean

Although Local Authorities, as the employers of teachers, hold the legal responsibility to provide appropriate health and wellbeing support which meets their employee’s needs, the Scottish Government understands the importance of providing additional, national support, for our teaching workforce.

Since October 2020 we have invested more than £2 million specifically in supporting the wellbeing of our education workforce.

In the last financial year, we invested over £120,000 in a free national wellbeing coaching program for all teaching staff and educational professionals in Scottish schools and early learning facilities aiming to address issues such as workplace stress.

We have also worked with the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland to consider how we can continue to support the wellbeing of teachers, nationally, through measures such as the sharing of best practice and resources across Local Authorities.

Section 47 of the UK Withdrawal from the European Union (Continuity) (Scotland) Act 2021 requires the Scottish Ministers to prepare and publish an environmental policy strategy. There is no deadline set in the Act for the publication of a strategy. The Scottish Government published the Environment Strategy Vision and Outcomes in 2021. Updates are in progress.

The Scottish Government does not record this information. The First-Tier Tribunal for Scotland, Additional Support Needs (ASN) Jurisdiction is a separate and independent body.

Yearly statistics Tribunal Forum | First-tier Tribunal for Scotland (Health and Education Chamber) (from 2016 onwards) are published on the total number of applications to the ASN Tribunal in relation to additional support needs following the annual Tribunal Forum, broken down by Education Authority and high-level reason for the hearing.

ASN Tribunal Decisions are published, providing detail of each case, and can be accessed via the Tribunal website: Decisions | First-tier Tribunal for Scotland (Health and Education Chamber). Not all decisions are published, based on permission from the parent / child and the education authority concerned.

Decisions about the use of AI are currently determined by Local Authorities and schools. Guidance for teachers regarding the use of AI is available through Education Scotland: Teaching and Learning with Artificial Intelligence (AI) | Resources | Education Scotland.

Guidance around the use of Generative AI in assessments is available through the SQA: Generative artificial intelligence (AI) in assessments - SQA. This guidance is currently under review and will be updated in the near future.

The Scottish Government is actively considering the role of AI in schools. Following the recent International Summit on the Teaching Profession, we have committed to consider carefully the guidance produced by the OECD and Education International, and to create an equivalent set of guidelines and guardrails for the Scottish context.

Scotland has some of the strongest legal protections from eviction in the UK. Pre-action requirements/protocols for tenants facing eviction for rent arrears are in place in both the social and private rented sectors. This ensures that social landlords have exhausted all attempts to resolve rent arrears with the tenant before taking action to evict and that tenants in rent arrears in the private rented sector are provided with information and sign-posted to support to sustain their tenancy, wherever possible.

In 2025-26 we are making over £97m available to local authorities to spend on Discretionary Housing Payments, an increase of nearly £7m over 2024-25. This includes £79.7m to fully mitigate the bedroom tax, helping over 94,000 households in Scotland sustain their tenancies, 14,000 of which are families with over 20,500 children and over £9.4m to mitigate the UK Government’s benefit cap as fully as possible within devolved powers, supporting around 3,000 families, with almost 10,000 children.

We have also committed to further rented sector reform and the Housing (Scotland) Bill 2024 includes provisions to further strengthen eviction protections in both the private and social rented sectors by placing a duty on the Court and Tribunal to always consider whether there should be a delay to the enforcement of an eviction order granted on rent arrears grounds based on the circumstances of the individual case.

In addition, to help improve housing outcomes for domestic abuse victims and their children, the Bill also introduces a duty on social landlords to fully consider domestic abuse and to support individuals, where domestic abuse is causing financial arrears, in a specialised manner before any legal action to recover possession of a property on rent arrears grounds can begin.

Scottish Government has no plans to make such representations.

As of 3 April 2025, the number of postgraduate medicine training places occupied by individuals who studied as undergraduates in Scotland is 4081, the number of places occupied by individuals who studied as undergraduates in the rest of the UK is 1558. NHS Education for Scotland do not record UK citizen status or permanent UK residency status specifically.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-29131 on 4 September 2024. 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

Takeaway meal containers (lunch boxes) and single use coffee cups in the Garden Level Restaurant are fully compostable, made from a fibrous by product of sugar cane.  Single use coffee cups at the coffee bar are made from paper, paperboard and recyclable materials and are designed for industrial composting.

Compostable items are placed in the food waste bins located throughout the building and are taken by a commercial food waste recycling company to the Anaerobic Digestion Plant at Millerhill just outside Edinburgh.

19 tonnes of food and compostable packaging were taken to the Anaerobic Digestion Plant at Millerhill in 2024/25. This represents 26% of our operational waste stream.

For the period of April 2024-March 2025, 36% of hot beverages sold were served in single use cups. And for the same period, 31% of sales made in the Garden Level Restaurant were in single use lunch boxes.

In partnership with our catering supplier we are implementing many measures to reduce the consumption of single use disposable items such as;

• continuation of the disposable hot drink cup charge to encourage colleagues to use their reuseable cups.
• Removal of disposable cutlery and placing collection caddies at each tea point to return metal cutlery back to the kitchen for cleaning
• Introduction of reusable take away food containers and various campaigns to encourage uptake.
• Actively exploring further options to support reusables and educating users on environmental benefits
• Holding a stock of reuseable hot drink cups for customers on a return basis
  

More information about our Sustainability Plan including waste minimisation is available on our website Sustainability | Scottish Parliament Website.

The Scottish Government is committed to collaborate with key partners across the NHS in Scotland to ensure that relevant information, with the appropriate safeguards in place, is available to all healthcare professionals, including community pharmacists, when and where they need it.

As community pharmacists expand their clinical role, there is an increasing need for them to have read/write access to clinical records to ensure that they can safely assess and agree a clinical management plan for a person and any associated actions or treatments can be viewed by other healthcare professionals involved in a person’s care, without any unnecessary delay.

The Chief Pharmaceutical Officer has commissioned work to explore how read/write access to clinical records can be delivered incrementally.