Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government is committed to ensuring that children and young people, including those with disabilities, get the support that they need to reach their full learning potential.

The Equality Act (2010) places a legal duty on education authorities, colleges and universities to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to ensure pupils and students with disabilities are not disadvantaged.

Education authorities also have duties under the Additional Support for Learning Act 2004 (as amended) to identify, provide for and review the additional support needs of their pupils, supporting them to overcome barriers to their learning and fully access learning opportunities at school.

The Scottish Government funds a range of services to provide advice and support to children, young people and their families. This seeks to ensure that they are fully informed of their rights to additional support at school and can access support and guidance to be involved in any decisions that are made about that support.

To provide specialised support for individual students with specific educational support needs, colleges can access the Scottish Funding Council’s (SFC) £50.5m Access and Inclusion Fund to help them to achieve parity of outcomes for all students. This allows colleges to provide support measures for students who need extra resources such as staff or equipment.

In order to support universities in making ‘reasonable adjustments’ the SFC’s University funding model includes a Disabled Students Premium to recognise additional costs that universities may face. Further, students can also apply for Disabled Students Allowance, a non-income assessed allowance to cover any extra costs or expenses a higher education student might incur while studying, which arise because of their disability.

Scottish Government continues to work closely with Public Health Scotland on the publication of data related to Test and Protect. We constantly evaluate the balance between public benefit and data protection in our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Publishing data by setting raises potential disclosure questions due to the small number of cases involved in some settings. At this time, the data is not published. Data on cases by Intermediate Zone (areas of roughly 4,000 people) will be published by PHS from 2 September, on their dashboard [ link ].

Scottish Government has previously published data from June and July [ link here ] on the proportions of people saying whether they have followed each aspect of social distancing, based on a national survey, and the latest version of this report will be published when complete.

The average time taken to reach contacts is not published. However, the latest PHS weekly report contains information on the time taken from cases entering the Case Management System (CMS), to being closed [ link here ]. Between 3 August and 27 September, 70.1% of index cases were closed within 48 hours of the case being created in the CMS.

The following table shows the full-time equivalent of teachers with a main subject that is connected to disability from the September 2019 school teacher census.

Further to the answer to question S5W-31200, a breakdown of investment targeted specifically at children living in low income household in financial years 2018-19 and 2019-20 are published in the respective child poverty annual progress reports. These are linked here:

• 2018-19: Tackling child poverty: first year progress report - PDF p99-101
• 2019-20: Tackling child poverty: second year progress report - PDF p69-70

This information is not held for primary and secondary school education.

College - The Scottish Funding Council (SFC) publish data for Further and Higher education enrolments at College for a range of characteristics including disability in the College Performance Indicators (CPI) publication. This release breaks down the cohort by ‘Completed Successfully’, ‘Partial Success’ and ‘Withdrawal’.
‎ http://www.sfc.ac.uk/publications-statistics/statistical-publications/2020/SFCST022020.aspx (Figure 11, with previous years data available in previous releases - http://www.sfc.ac.uk/publications-statistics/statistical-publications/statistics-schedule/statistical-publication-schedule.aspx )

University - The SFC publish data on student characteristics in the Report on Widening Access. This includes retention rates at university by disability status for two cohorts: Scottish-domiciled full-time first degree entrants and Scottish-domiciled Undergraduate entrants.
‎ http://www.sfc.ac.uk/publications-statistics/statistical-publications/2020/SFCST062020.aspx (Background Table 3)
‎ Note: Background Table 6 also includes information on successful completion rates at college split by level and mode which supplements the data from the CPI linked above, but does not include a Withdrawal rate.

Detailed demographic data on end-users is still being collected from the 456 organisations and teams currently supporting end users through Connecting Scotland. However, based on the initial evaluation information we have to date:

• 40% are aged over 60

In terms of status:

• 34% have a long-term condition or disability that prevents them from working
• 20% are unemployed.

We publish updates on No One Left Behind on the Employability in Scotland website - http://www.employabilityinscotland.com/partnership/no-one-left-behind/ . We shared the Scottish and Local Government Employability Action Plan in March 2020 and will publish an updated No One Left Behind Delivery Plan, including an update on progress, in the coming weeks.

The overall budget for delivery of No One Left Behind Phase 1 in 2019-20 was just over £7 million distributed across the 32 Local Authorities in Scotland. No One Left Behind promotes a strengthened partnership approach, with Local Authorities, third and private sectors, and service users identifying local needs and making informed, evidence-based decision on how investment is deployed.

The work of these programmes to support people to engage in employment, education or training is an important part of our Covid-19 response, particularly given the forecasted and unprecedented rise in youth unemployment. The programmes have all adapted the way they deliver support, to ensure that they continue to help those further from the labour market towards and into work during Covid-19.

Community Jobs Scotland has a focus on those most disadvantaged in the labour market – those who are care experienced or are carers themselves, early Armed Forces service leavers, those with criminal convictions and those who have disabilities or other health issues – and has already created jobs for 9,000 young people across the country. At the end of June, there were 527 young people being supported through Community Jobs Scotland across Phases 8, 9 and 10. There were 12 Phase 10 jobs advertised for recruitment with a further 28 jobs being progressed through final checks prior to advertising.

With a strong focus on work experience, the Employability Fund lets us respond to the different needs of each individual, while also adapting to employer demands on a local basis. Evidence of individual achievement and progression is important for everyone involved. The Fund can be used to support people to develop the employability and vocational skills they need to make the transition into a Modern Apprenticeship or job. There were 575 Employability Fund Starts in quarter 1 (Apr – Jun) 2020/21, and a 72% Achievement Rate for this quarter’s cohort of leavers.

Discovering Your Potential (DYP) aims to promote a systemic change to the way employability support is delivered, supporting young care experienced people to achieve positive destinations such as further education, training and employment. The programme is delivered by the Young People’s Consortium which includes Barnardo’s, Action for Children and the Prince’s Trust, and aims to build strong trusting relationships with young people throughout their employability journey. This involves continuing personalised and holistic support during these challenging times, in addition to employability support.

Our Future Now (OFN) aims to ensure that an entire generation of young people have the opportunity and aspiration to thrive in life - economically, socially, and culturally – regardless of the complexity and depth of the challenges that they may face. The programme is delivered by Inspiring Scotland and aims to support young people aged 16-25 to engage in employment, education or training.

During 2019-2020, the fund exceeded the target set for year one and engaged more than 4,791 young people, with 3422 young people progressing onto work, further or higher education .

In 2020-21, Scottish Government has allocated:

• £5 million to Community Jobs Scotland;
• £1.9 million to Our Future Now; and
• £1 million to Discovering Your Potential.

With regard to Employability fund, Skills Development Scotland was allocated Grant in Aid of £224.8m for 2020-21, which is used to meet its commitments as will be set out in their ministerial guidance letter. Included in these commitments are Foundation, Graduate and Modern Apprenticeships, Careers Information, Advice and Guidance (CIAG), Partnership Action for Continuing Employment (PACE), and Employability Fund.

In December 2018 we published A Fairer Scotland for Disabled People: Employment Action Plan . In this, we outlined the actions that we will take forward with partners to achieve our ambitious commitment to half the disability employment gap in Scotland by 2038 .

Within this we also committed to: 1) increasing the employment rate by 1 percentage point every year, thereby, increasing the employment rate of disabled people to at least 50% by 2023 and 60% by 2030.

We review our progress in a regular yearly update, which is published on our website: www.gov.scot