Chamber and committees

Our Teaching Bursary Scheme offers a £20,000 payment to career changers who are looking to undertake teacher training in hard-to-fill STEM subjects – physics, maths, technical education, computing science, chemistry and home economics. The scheme was also extended to include Gaelic as a secondary subject, and Gaelic medium across all secondary subjects and in primary.

In addition, the Strategic Board for Teacher Education (SBTE) is considering issues around the recruitment and retention of teachers in Scotland in detail, together with work to improving the promotion of teaching as a valued career.

The Scottish Government and Scottish Funding Council have also offered to work with universities to develop alternative routes into subjects which have traditionally been difficult to recruit to.

The provision of education and training of audiologists is being considered as part of the National Audiology Improvement Programme. In addition, there is a review underway of Healthcare Science Education in Scotland to look at education and training provision in healthcare science more widely.

The Board agreed its workplan in September 2023. The most recently published version of the workplan can be found on the Scottish Government website. https://www.gov.scot/publications/strategic-board-teacher-education-meeting-27-thursday-1-february-2024-10-00am-11-30am/pages/2/

The workplan contains three workstreams:

• Workstream 1 – Workforce Planning and Increasing Diversity of the Profession
• Workstream 2 – Improving the Promotion of Teaching as a Valued Career
• Workstream 3 – Continuum of Teacher Education

The Board has held meetings in November, February and March to progress these workstreams. The agendas, minutes and papers from these meeting are published on the Scottish Government website at https://www.gov.scot/groups/strategic-board-for-teacher-education/

The Board last met on 15 May 2024, and the agenda, minutes and papers from this meeting will be published on the Scottish Government website following the next meeting of the Board, which is scheduled for 27 June.

The Scottish Government does not routinely collect data on mothballed schools in Scotland. The Scottish Government does collect data from local authorities in order to collate a list of schools regarded as rural for the purposes of the Schools (Consultation)(Scotland) Act 2010. The most recent rural schools list was published on 25 October 2021 - Rural schools in Scotland - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) . The rural schools list includes those schools the relevant local authority has mothballed. The 2021 rural schools list shows that 21 schools were reported as being mothballed. The following table shows how many rural schools are mothballed by local authority area.

We are committed to ensuring that all children and young people get the support that they need to reach their full learning potential.

Our national guidance on exclusion, ‘Included, Engaged and Involved Part 2’ makes clear that exclusion should be the last resort. Where exclusion is used, it should be as a proportionate response where there is no appropriate alternative, and the wellbeing of the child or young person should be the key consideration. The guidance makes clear that the practice of “sending home” or “informal exclusion” is illegal and denies pupils and parents their rights. Following an incident where the decision is made that the child or young person cannot remain in school, for one of the reasons specified in regulation 4 of the Schools General (Scotland) Regulations 1975 as amended, this must be recorded as an exclusion. This will ensure transparency, allow for appropriate monitoring and enable support to be put in place through the education authority’s staged intervention system.

We recognise there is a challenge around the recruitment of teachers in certain geographical areas and in certain subjects. It is for this reason that we have manually allocated Preference Waiver Payment (PWP) probationers this year. Manually allocating PWPs will ensure those probationers are placed in the areas who have the most difficulties in securing probationers.

I recently met with Aberdeenshire Council to discuss their concerns about teacher recruitment and probationer allocations. The Council indicated that they welcomed the approach taken to probationer allocations this year, which has resulted in an increase on the number of PWPs allocated compared to last year.

The Scottish Government provides policies, frameworks and resources to NHS Boards to deliver services that meet the needs of their local population. We are providing an increased investment of half a billion for NHS boards in 2024-25, taking funding to over £14.2 billion - an increase of almost 3% in real terms. An investment of £30 million is also being provided and will target reductions to the national backlogs that built up throughout the pandemic, including audiology.

However, it is NHS Boards and healthcare professionals locally who have responsibility for service delivery and patient treatment. Therefore details of the funding NHS Boards have allocated to audiology services is held locally.

We remain committed to reducing class contact timegiving teachers more time out of the classroom. Any changes to terms and conditions for teachers, including how this time will be used, are matters for agreement through the Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers.

To inform this work, we commissioned an external modelling and research exercise to help inform discussions which was published on 7 May. This contains a number of high-level future scenarios and assesses their broad compatibility with any changes to teachers’ contracted class-contact time.

These scenarios will help to facilitate our discussions with SNCT partners on how we can best deliver this commitment.

We are offering local authorities £145.5m in this year’s budget to maintain teacher numbers. This will assist in delivery in the reduction of class contact time.

The Scottish Government does not hold information on waiting times for hearing aids centrally.

Statistics on audiology waiting times are included within Public Health Scotland’s (PHS) 18 weeks referral to treatment (RTT) publication but this does not include specialty-level data. This publication is based on a dataset that collects information on waiting times for complete patient pathways from initial referral to first treatment.

Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) do not undertake any road upgrades, or build new roads, for the purpose of windfarm development. FLS include the right for a windfarm developer to upgrade roads or build new roads, at their expense, within a lease agreement. FLS will only enter into a lease and permit civil engineering works relating to windfarm construction once the development has received planning approval.