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It remains an unwelcome reality that our communities experience health, quality of life and even life expectancy differently across our society. Increasing healthy life expectancy and reducing health inequalities across Scotland remains a clear ambition for the Scottish Government.

We know that deprivation is a significant driver of excess mortality and so reducing poverty and inequality sits at the heart of our investment across all portfolios, and remains the best way of improving life expectancy. In 2022-23, we invested £3bn across a range of programmes targeted at low income households, with £1.25bn directly benefitting children. We increased the Scottish Child Payment to £25 per eligible child per week – an increase of 150% in less than a year - and expanded the payment to all eligible children under the age of 16.

We have Community Link Workers and Welfare Rights Advisers embedded into 180 GP practices within our rural, island and deprived communities; who offer advice to patients regarding social security eligibility, debt resolution, housing and employability issues. We are also progressing a range of action to reduce population level health harming activities across tobacco control, preventing and treating alcohol related harm, improving the food environment to enable healthy weight, and improving physical activity.

We will continue to work with our partners to understand what is needed at a national and regional level to support local, preventative action to drive improvements in health, and embed health considerations within wider policy making.

The Scottish Government will shorty publish the Delivery Plan and Workforce Development Plan which accompany the Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy we published in the summer. Thereafter we will set out further actions in support of students.

NatureScot, through the Sea Eagle Management Scheme, delivers a range of measures to support farmers and crofters to manage sheep flocks to mitigate the impacts of sea eagle predation.

These include:

• Provision of one-to-one advice from experienced contractors to land managers experiencing sea eagle impacts
• Co-ordination of recording/logging of sea eagle activity and flock management information at a farm/croft level
• Loan of scaring equipment
• Payments to land managers who undertake management measures which mitigate sea eagle impacts as part of their livestock management, through Management Agreements.

Payments can be made for flock management (including supplementary feeding, tick and fluke treatments), enhanced management (including additional shepherding and away wintering of sheep) and capital measures (including purchase of scaring devices, creation of hill parks and support for indoor lambing).

More details are available on the NatureScot website at https://www.nature.scot/professional-advice/land-and-sea-management/managing-wildlife/sea-eagle-management-scheme

The Scottish Government does not have a formal definition for a “cluster” of farmers. The term has been used in relation to the Farming with Nature programme NatureScot delivers in partnership with the Scottish Government, specifically the Piloting an Outcomes Based Approach in Scotland (POBAS) project. The term ‘cluster’ has been used where there are a number of farms and crofts in a region participating or involved with the project. Further information on the project’s Phase 1 and Phases 2 and 3 is available on NatureScot’s website.

Scottish companies already have a wide range of options when it comes to participating in international trade missions. They can apply to participate in missions hosted by Scottish Development International and the Scottish Chambers of Commerce which are guided by the priorities set out in A Trading Nation, our export plan. Companies can also join trade missions run by the Department of Business and Trade.

Given the wide range of options already available to companies we currently have no plans to participate in joint trade missions with Scotland Office.

We have regular dialogue with our colleagues in the UK Government, particularly the Department for Business and Trade regarding promoting Scotland’s overseas trade links. However, we were not made aware of the Secretary of State for Scotland’s visit to Vietnam.

The current lists of Ministerial responsibilities are provided on the Scottish Government website at Cabinet and Ministers - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) .

Where Ministers have recused themselves from an issue within their portfolio to avoid an actual or perceived conflict of interest, this is recorded on the Scottish Government website at List of ministers' interests - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) .

These lists are kept up to date and reflect changes made since 15 June 2023.

Article 24 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child includes the right to adequate nutritious food. Universal school breakfast provision does have the potential to give further and fuller effect to this right.

The Concluding Observations from the UK’s recent state party scrutiny by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child includes a recommendation that the UK administrations strengthen measures to address child malnutrition, food insecurity and growing trends in overweight and obesity, by expanding the free school meals programme to all children in disadvantaged situations. It is not specific about how provision could be strengthened in Scotland.

The aim of our long-term staffing strategy for education is to ensure there continues to be a high-quality education workforce that is empowered to deliver improved learning and societal outcomes for all children and young people, and has access to a wide range of effective professional learning.

We are supporting the recruitment of teachers by providing local authorities with £145.5m in this year's budget to protect increased teacher and support staff numbers. We also work with partners on the Teacher Workforce Planning Advisory Group (TWPAG) to determine the number of initial teacher education students required across Scotland.

To help support recruitment and retention of high-quality professionals, we have agreed the most generous pay deal for teachers since 2001, meaning that Scottish classroom teachers on the main-grade scale are the best paid in the UK. The impact of this is shown by the fact that Scotland has the most teachers-per-pupil in the UK.

We are also supporting existing teachers with their wellbeing and ensuring that they have access to high-quality professional learning.

To ensure effective and evidence-informed longer-term teacher workforce planning, the Scottish Government has commissioned an external analysis and research exercise that will bring together a range of factors including current teacher numbers, pupil teacher ratios and the projected decline in the number of school-aged children. This analysis will inform decisions on education workforce planning for future years.

The Programme for Government 2023-24 set out major new commitments on childcare, including how we will test, for the first time, what an all-age childcare system will look like for Scotland in six local authority areas. We are working closely with communities, our partners and providers to consider how the early learning and school age childcare workforce can support these systems, and what they will need to do so. This includes regulation, qualifications, professional development and recruitment planning. We are also supporting a sustainable childcare profession by providing funding to increase pay to £12 per hour to early learning and childcare professionals working in the private, voluntary and independent (PVI) sector who are delivering funded provision.