Chamber and committees

It is for Community Planning Partnerships to generate these data as they move toward implementation of Getting it Right for Every Child. As Getting it Right for Every Child is implemented Community Planning Partnership organisations will begin to build up a better picture of the needs of individual children which should inform their local planning.

The aim of the Scottish Government’s early years change programme is to break the cycles of disadvantage which blight successive generations. Within this programme, there is a strong role for parents, early learning and childcare and play in breaking these cycles.

The learning journey starts before birth, and the home learning environment is of key importance. We are developing a parenting strategy to provide support to parents in providing a nurturing and stimulating environment for their children. We are also currently rolling out another phase of our hugely successful Play Talk Read campaign, emphasising the importance of positive parent-child interactions from the start.

Early learning and childcare practitioners have a strong role in providing support to children and families, using the recently published Pre-Birth to Three guidance with the youngest children, and implementing A Curriculum for Excellence from age three.

Curriculum for Excellence offers the opportunity for learning to be tailored to the individual needs of the child or young person, to meet their learning needs, ensuring that they are engaged and involved in their learning. The entitlement to support in Curriculum for Excellence ensures the additional support that a child or young person may need.

The Growing Up in Scotland study has collected information about the cognitive ability of children by using assessments of vocabulary ability and problem solving ability from the British Ability Scales II (BAS-II). This information was collected once when the birth cohort children were three years old and once when they were five years old.

The Scottish Government is currently considering the continuation of the Growing Up in Scotland study, including whether this will include assessments of cognitive abilities at ages three and five.

Routine data is not yet collected nationally as the Getting it Right for Every Child approach has yet to be fully implemented by Community Planning Partnerships.

Reports on the impact of the Getting it Right for Every Child approach can be found at:

Changing professional practice and culture to Get it Right for Every Child (November 2009) (Scottish Parliament Information Centre, Bib. number 49772)

Children affected by parental substance misuse (CAPSM) in Angus (March 2011), including a baseline report from April 2010) (Scottish Parliament Information Centre, Bib. number 53038).

Since 2007, the Scottish Government has allocated the following grants to Sustrans for developing the National Cycle Network and other active travel projects; and Local Authorities for Cycling, Walking and Safer Streets projects:

The vast majority of patients are treated locally in their local hospitals. For the very few cases were patient are offered treatment outwith Scotland the current guidance clearly states that these patient are covered by waiting time targets. Indeed New Ways of Defining and Measuring Waiting Times guidance applies wherever the patient is treated.

There is not a centrally held definition for preventative and anticipatory care, and both can take many forms. It is generally accepted that anticipatory care should target health improvement action and resources at specific, identified areas, providing early interventions that prevent escalation of care needs.

Anticipating care needs and providing preventative interventions should reduce longer-term care needs, particularly at crisis points.

The Scottish Government’s spending plans are designed to support a transition across public services away from dealing with the symptoms of disadvantage and inequality towards tackling their root causes with a focus on improving outcomes and averting future costs to the public sector.

As set out in our response to the Christie Commission report, the government expects prevention to be built into the design and delivery of all public services. It will be for those responsible for design and delivery of services at local level, including community planning partnerships, to decide how best to achieve that taking into account local needs and priorities and the guidance that will be made available by the relevant joint groups.

The Scottish Government recognises the good work of the West Lothian criminal justice project and the impressive results that it delivered locally.

While local initiatives are designed for local purposes, work is underway to build on the lessons learned from the lean systems thinking approach introduced in Aberdeen, West Lothian and Edinburgh.

Under the Making Justice Work programme the Scottish Government is working with criminal justice organisations to develop the summary justice system model with a clear purpose to reduce procedural churn and ensure that cases are disposed of appropriately and at the earliest opportunity. This work will be tested before being introduced nationally in 2012.

The Scottish Government welcomes Audit Scotland’s overview of Scotland’s criminal justice system. As the report recognises, Scotland’s summary criminal justice system has seen significant improvements following recent reform but there is still much to do. Nationally, in 2010-11, 74 per cent of summary criminal cases were dealt with within 26 weeks which is an increase of eight percentage points since 2006-07.