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The Scottish Government is investing up to £500 million over five years to anchor our offshore wind supply chain in Scotland. This investment will support market certainty, and help create a highly productive, competitive offshore wind economy that supports thousands of new jobs, including in north east Scotland.

The Scottish Government has also invested millions of pounds via the Just Transition Fund for the North East and Moray, including the development and rollout of a digital energy skills passport (£3.7m), investment in a skills hub within the ETZ Skills Campus (£4.5m), support for the National Energy Skills Accelerator (NESA) (£1m), and funding for Net Zero Bottlenecks in Moray (£210k).

We have also convened a ‘Team Scotland’ short-life working group (SLWG) to develop an offshore wind skills action plan at pace which will identify and address gaps in training provision. The SLWG is jointly chaired by the Director of Offshore Wind in the Scottish Government and the CEO of Scottish Renewables, ensuring collaboration between the public sector and industry.

The consulting process provided for under sections 36 and 37 of the Electricity Act 1989 and the Electricity Works (Environmental Impact Assessment) (Scotland) Regulations 2017 ensures that public bodies, communities and members of the public are consulted on proposals for electricity infrastructure. The decision whether to grant consent is taken only after careful and fair consideration of environmental information, consultee responses and public representations. The Scottish Government is committed to strengthening the pre-application consultation process by working with the UK Government on their proposed reforms to electricity infrastructure consenting in Scotland.

The Scottish Government will be responding to Environmental Standard Scotland’s (ESS) report by 4 March 2025, as requested by ESS. Scottish Water and SEPA have also been asked to respond to the report by the same deadline.

The average class size of primary pupils by local authority and stage is published in Table 6.6a of the pupil census supplementary statistics.

Pupil census supplementary statistics - gov.scot

These statistics are available from 2007-2023, data prior to 2007 is not available.

Primary class size statistics for 2024 will be published on 25 March, 2025.

NatureScot has released correspondence relating to the meetings and discussions through an FOI request.

This information is not held by Scottish Government.

Individual Scottish Government strategies and policies are periodically reviewed, taking account of progress towards objectives. Strategies and policies with environmental goals can be found on the Scottish Government’s website at https://www.gov.scot/environment-and-climate-change/.There are many sources of monitoring data on environmental outcomes in Scotland, an overview can be found at https://data.gov.scot/environment/.Environmental Standards Scotland is an independent body that promotes the effectiveness of environmental law through its work, and information on its investigations and monitoring can found on its website https://environmentalstandards.scot/our-work/.

Any form of violence is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Schools should be safe and consistent learning environments for all.

Since May 2023, we have responded to teachers’ concerns about relationships and behaviour in a number of ways. This includes the publication of new guidance on gender-based violence, updating our guidance on mobile phones and anti-bullying, and providing £900k to local authorities to support training of support staff.

In August 2024, we published a joint relationships and behaviour in schools action plan with COSLA. The action plan sets out 20 actions to be taken by 2027 at both national and local level to help support schools to improve relationships and behaviour. This includes guidance on the use of consequences in schools and updating our national guidance on exclusions.

In addition, in 2025-26 we are providing:

• A further £29 million of additional investment to local authorities for additional support needs.
• £130 million Pupil Equity Funding to schools.
• £186.5 million to local authorities to restore overall teacher numbers across the country to 2023 level, and maximise the number of teaching posts available.

Finally, through implementation of the Violence Prevention Framework for Scotland, we have invested over £4m in the last two years to help prevent and reduce violence across Scotland. Over 2024-25, £2m of this investment has been used to support delivery of prevention activity including action focussed specially towards young people in collaboration with a range of partners.

Latest data published by Public Health Scotland on 25 February 2025 shows total spend on mental health in Scotland has increased by £179.6 million to £1.486 billion in 2023-24. That is 9.03% of total net NHS expenditure, up from 8.53% in 2022-23. Spend on child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) has increased by nearly £19.4 million to over £134 million. This is 0.82% of total spend, up from 0.75% in 2022-23.

We remain committed to delivery of the commitment and the latest data shows good progress is being made, however, as we all know, there are continued and unprecedented challenge to the public finances.

That means that achieving the targets in practice will depend on the outcome of future budgets. It is also dependent on the financial decisions taken by NHS Boards, and their partners, on the continued local investment needed to achieve the targets.

We will continue to closely monitor our progress towards both the 10% and 1% over the remainder of the Parliamentary term.

Scotland’s strong pipeline of renewables projects and growing supply chain will be vital to achieving a secure, affordable and clean power system, and we welcome the measures in the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan to make progress towards this.

In particular, we welcome the signal the Action Plan provides on support for renewable energy – such as actions to speed up grid connections for key projects, and proposed improvements to Contracts for Difference support for renewables developments.

We expect significant growth of Scotland’s offshore wind capacity to play a key role in achieving clean power by 2030. In 2020, the Scottish Government set an ambition for 8-11 GW offshore wind by 2030, which is being reviewed in light of the significant ambition demonstrated by the private sector in the ScotWind and INTOG leasing rounds, with an updated Offshore Wind Policy Statement due to be published in 2025-2026. We continue to work with the UK government, National Energy System Operator, and Ofgem to ensure Scottish offshore wind projects are developed at pace and support our plans for a just transition.