Chamber and committees

The Digitisation of records is an operational responsibility of individual Health Boards and GP practices. At a national level and building on the existing use of electronic patient record systems, we are focussed on allowing medical records, including cancer, to be stored, linked, and shared securely. This will support our ambition set out in the 2021 Digital Health & Care Strategy 2021 Strategy - Digital Healthcare Scotland % (digihealthcare.scot) to make the right information available to all appropriate staff, when and where it is needed.

Education Scotland provides a range of professional learning opportunities for school leaders, which focus on anti-racism. These include Into Headship, Connected and Collaborative Systems Leadership, Aspiring to Middle Leadership, and Middle Leaders Leading Change, as well as the award winning Building Racial Literacy Programme (BRL) and the Anti-Racism Mentors project. All Professional Learning resources are subject to review and, as part of the evaluation cycle, updated based on participant feedback.

In addition to this, the recent external evaluation of the BRL programme concluded that as a national anti-racist professional learning opportunity, it achieves its goal in supporting participants to become racially literate, with them feeling more confident in challenging discrimination and racist incidents. While the programme has welcomed a wide range of school leaders across Scotland, the evaluation identified the need for enhanced anti-racist professional development for school and system leaders. This in part led to the development of Education Scotland’s new Anti-Racism Mentors project being piloted this year.

Beyond Education Scotland’s offers, a range of local authorities and third sector organisations have different levels of professional learning available as well. These are not subject to formal Scottish Government review processes.

The Scottish Government is clear that there is no place for racism in our schools. Discrimination or prejudice of any kind is unacceptable and must be addressed quickly whenever it arises. All staff are expected to be proactive in promoting positive relationships and behaviour in the classroom, playground and the wider school community.

The Racism and Racist Incidents sub-group of the Anti-racism in Education Programme (AREP) is focussed on the support to schools and school staff to improve understanding of racism and to ensure that these issues are properly identified and addressed. It is currently developing guidance on a whole-school approach to preventing and responding to racism and racist incidents in schools. Further information about the workstream, including minutes from their meetings can be accessed here: Racism and Racist Incidents subgroup - gov.scot (www.gov.scot).

The RRI workstream is currently developing practical guidance for schools to support them to respond to racism and racist incidents, including strengthening approaches to recording and monitoring.

It is anticipated this guidance will be published in Spring 2025.

While the Scottish Government provides the overarching guidance/framework for patient travel expenses reimbursement, NHS Boards are responsible for developing local policy to best meet the needs to their populations, and for assessing eligibly for financial support and level of that support.

The cost of reimbursement is met from Boards’ budgets and all Boards must balance value for money with patient need, ensuring that patients are supported in identifying and accessing available support and that patient care is at the centre of all decisions.

It is recognised that transport to health is a key enabler to ensure equitable access to healthcare, and work to bring travel/transport and health planning closer together is in progress. This work will include bringing local bodies together at a regional level to consider the options for transport to health. This work will also inform how and when a review of the overarching patient travel expenses reimbursement guidance is taken forward.

Community cohesion stretches across a number of policy themes and outcomes. For example, our Vision for Justice three year delivery plan remains to deliver a just, safe resilient Scotland. This will see us living in safer, more tolerant and inclusive communities, free from inequality and hate. We are progressing with delivering on our three year plan, and key milestones. We also continue to promote the use of the Place Standard Tool as an effective tool for community engagement, including within community planning and spatial planning. It includes themes and prompts relating to exploring community cohesion, and its use can in itself promote trust and increased participation in decision making, as well as drive improvements in neighbourhood quality. We don’t have formal measurable objectives regarding use of the tool.

The report Social Capital and Community Wellbeing in Scotland (published on 1 October 2024) provides a measure of social capital that includes ‘community cohesion’ as one of the four domains, and it provides a range of measures to track community cohesion over time and broken down by geography and population subgroups.

The current See Hear Strategy which was published in 2014 still exists to support children and adults who have deafness, sight loss and dual sensory loss to access the support and social care they need.

See Hear Leads, within local authorities, are in place to help drive progress across priority areas within each local partnership.

Since March 2023 policy officials have been engaged in extensive discussions with stakeholders, delivery partners and people with lived experience to hear what has been working well and any challenges people with Sensory Loss were facing in living a good life. Discussions are taking place across Scottish Government to identify other areas of policy work which can help resolve some of those challenges. The publication date of the refreshed strategy will be announced in due course.

The Scottish Government has provided funding to Connect for this financial year to establish and host the Scottish Assembly of Parents and Carers. This new model will enhance the diversity of parental voices to help inform policy and provide advice and challenge as we drive forward reform of our education system.

Additionally, our Anti-Racism in Education Programme (AREP) brings together education bodies and organisations and individuals with anti-racist expertise and lived experience. The AREP contains a number of ambitions which seek to support teachers, school staff and leaders at all levels in the education sector to embed antiracist approaches.

Scotland’s Digital Inclusion Charter is delivered by SCVO as part of an annual grant of £308,000. This funding supports a much wider programme of activity delivered by SCVO to tackle digital exclusion. SCVO estimates that around 10% of the annual grant covers staff time and costs directly associated with development and promotion of the Charter.

The launch event in August 2024 was hosted as an in-kind contribution from Standard Life plc, a Charter signatory, which covered the costs of the event.

Table 1 presents the estimated gross cost of setting the Higher Property Rate equal to the Standard Multiplier in England, updated to include 2024-2025.

In England, in 2021-2022, 2022-2023 and 2023-2024, the Standard Multiplier was 51.2p, or 1.3p above the Small Business Multiplier of 49.9p.

In 2024-2025, the Standard Multiplier is 54.6p, or 4.7p above the Small Business Multiplier of 49.9p.

In Scotland, the Higher Property Rate in 2021-2022, 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 was 2.6p above the poundage, which was 49p in 2021-2022 (having been temporarily reduced from 49.8p in 2020-2021 in response to the ongoing impact of COVID-19), and 49.8p in 2022-2023, 2023-2024.

The costs therefore represent the impact of setting the Higher Property Rate at 51.2p instead of 51.6p in 2021-2022, and 51.2p instead of 52.4p in 2022-2023 and 2023-2024.

The Higher Property Rate in 2024-2025 is 6.1p above the poundage, which remains at 49.8p from 2023-2024. The costs therefore represent the impact of setting the Higher Property Rate at 54.6p instead of 55.9p.

The figures for 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 are presented after General Revaluation Transitional Relief is applied.

The figures are gross estimates and are not adjusted for any other relief. Figures are broken down by property class, a classification used by Scottish Assessors to describe the type of property, which may not necessarily accurately reflect the use of a given property.

This table is based on the valuation roll as at 1 October 2021, 1 October 2022, 1 October 2023 and 1 October 2024.

Figures from 30 March 2023 and 1 April 2023 were used to calculate General Revaluation Transitional Relief.

Figures in this table are rounded to the nearest £1,000, and may not sum due to rounding.

Table 1: Estimated gross cost of reducing the Higher Property Rate to the level of the English Standard Multiplier (£), broken down by property class.

To address inactivity, it is essential to support those who are currently inactive – not in paid work and not actively looking for work – through employability and other interventions that seek to support a return to the labour market, and also provide preventative in-work support, for instance through occupational health services and retraining/upskilling, which reduces the likelihood of people becoming economically inactive.

No One Left Behind is our shared approach to delivering an all-age, place-based, person-centred model of employability support in Scotland. Our Employability Strategic Plan, published in September, sets out our vision to deliver an employability system that tackles inequalities in Scotland’s labour market, creating a responsive and aligned approach that helps people of all ages who face the greatest barriers to progress towards, into and to sustain work.

Drivers of inactivity are diverse, with evidence indicating a rise in physical and mental health conditions in all inactive people in recent years. Our Programme for Government commits to support those already in work, help more people back into work by improving access to health and work services by April 2025 and introducing enhanced specialist support for disabled people across all 32 local authorities by Summer 2025. The Programme for Government also ensures access to funded early learning and childcare, demand-led employability support to parents and carers, and improves careers support for carers.

We are also considering what additional actions can be taken across employability, health and local service delivery through the development of a health and work action plan, in partnership with Public Health Scotland (PHS) and employers.