Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government has carefully considered Professor Ken Muir’s report Putting Learners at the Centre: Towards a Future Vision for Scottish Education which produced important recommendations for Scottish education. In response to a wide range of reports and evidence, the Education Reform Programme will deliver significant changes for the education system, including a new national agency and a Centre for Teaching Excellence.

Providing equitable support to the profession, including in relation to curriculum and assessment, is a fundamental consideration of all aspects of the Education Reform Programme. Education Scotland continues to deliver its functions while the new organisations are being developed, and continually reviews its support offering to ensure it is effective and fit for purpose.

The co-production process through which stakeholders are designing the Centre for Teaching Excellence will conclude in the first half of 2024, followed by a process to identify a suitable host institution(s). We expect the Centre for Teaching Excellence to launch shortly thereafter.

Table 1 provides information on average gross revenue expenditure in Scotland per child attending pre-school, and primary and secondary pupil alongside allocations (accounting for teaching and tuition fees funding) per college and university place.

Further to question S6W-21835, I can confirm that no further working groups have been established since October 2023 within the Education and Skills portfolio.

I can confirm that all of the working groups listed in that answer are still active. However please note, one additional group was missed in the original PQ response. Therefore the current active working groups are as follows:

The Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy (SSLN) was replaced with the more comprehensive Achievement of Curriculum for Excellence Levels (ACEL) data collection as part of the development of the National Improvement Framework for Scottish education. This was partly in response to advice from the OECD following its 2015 review of Scottish education which said that said the sample approach of the SSLN did not give national agencies enough evidence - “The light sampling of literacy and numeracy at the national level has not provided sufficient evidence for other stakeholders to use in their own evaluative activities or for national agencies to identify with confidence the areas of strength in the years of the Broad General Education across the four capacities of CfE."

The SSLN did not provide any detailed information for local authorities and schools about the progress of individual children. The ACEL data provides the attainment levels of every child in Scotland at key stages in primary and secondary school, and provides detailed data at all levels of the system, allowing schools and local authorities to better target improvement activity. Moving to ACEL data also empowers teachers, placing primacy on their professional judgement as the key indicator of children’s progress prior to national qualifications.

The Scottish Government and sportscotland passionately believe that sport is for everyone. We should all feel included, and able to take part and access the benefits of sport.

An ongoing priority for the Scottish Government is to support participation across all groups and tackle inequalities in participation.

Currently available Scottish Health Survey data shows that 11-15 year old’s participation in sport appears to have remained stable since pre-covid levels at 65%. Other data that we use to track participation in sport is published by sportscotland.

Recent data published by sportscotland in 2023 shows significantly increased participation levels in their national Active Schools programme, across the past academic year (2022-23), with over 4.6 million visits (a rise of 34% on 2021-22) made to almost 247,000 Active Schools sessions. The number of Active Schools participants (over 269,000 children and young people), deliverers (over 17,900 with 90% of those being volunteers), and school/club links (over 2,500) also increased from the previous academic year as the recovery from covid continued.

The Scottish Government and the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) engage regularly with colleges, which, are key anchors for the transition to Net Zero, acting as both community enablers and demonstration hubs in cities and regions.

SFC’s College Infrastructure Strategy , published in November 2022, describes the Scottish Funding Council’s approach to determining future investment in Scotland’s college estate and other college infrastructure. The strategy sets out the collective approach between SFC and colleges to develop an Infrastructure Investment Plan (IIP) for Scotland’s colleges. The plan, which will cover the period from 2024-34, will identify infrastructure investment need including investment for net zero.

The Teaching bursary advisory group is reconvened at the end of each year’s scheme. The role of the group is to review the implementation of the bursary scheme and provide advice on any necessary changes for the following year’s scheme.

The 2023-24 Teaching bursary advisory group is due to meet in March. Members include the Scottish Government, Skills Development Scotland, COSLA, Universities and the Scottish Council of Deans.

Although the number of individual Computing Science teachers visiting the website is not tracked, the STACS website is an important resource for the Computing Science community. 490 Computing Science teachers are members of the STACS website and have access to the full set of resources. Since launching in 2022 the website has had 53,000 unique visits.

Grant funding to support Scottish Teachers Advancing Computing Science (STACS) / University of Glasgow commenced in 2021 and has continued on an annual basis since that date.

As a condition of the funding support the Scottish Government agreed with Scottish Teachers Advancing Computing Science a commitment to publish annual progress reports which are published on their website where updates and activity are regularly posted. The first year’s report is publicly available on the STACS website and they will be publishing a year 2 update report in the summer of 2024.

The annual report for 2022-23 is available at: https://issuu.com/stacshq/docs/stacsannualreport .