Chamber and committees

NatureScot has also made other recommendations on how national parks should be run. For example, it recommends that there should be more involvement of communities and different sectors in developing national park plans, and that funding streams should be available to deliver the plans.

What are your views? Would further changes to how national parks are governed or supported address your concerns about existing or future national parks?

The Scottish Government has proposed changes to national parks legislation in a bill that is due to be introduced later this parliamentary year. Did you engage with that consultation? If so, were you able to take that proposal into account in the development of the nomination that you are involved in?

This is my last question. Would you like to see any further changes to how national parks are governed or supported that would help to maximise benefits, or that you think could help to resolve stakeholders’ concerns about the designation of new areas?

When I asked the witnesses in the previous session whether they were aware of the proposals, a lot of them said that they were not. How can the Government get those people involved?

To ask the Scottish Government what steps it is taking to improve transparency in the management of Scotland’s finances. (S6O-03855)

This disagreement between COSLA and the Scottish Government has been going on since February. It is disappointing that the Government has not resolved the issue and that schools will continue to miss out on funding. The Scottish Government now faces twin crises of its own making: a failure to retain and expand teacher numbers, despite its promise to do so, and the results of years of local authority underfunding.

In May, this Parliament voted to recognise the precarity in the teaching profession today. For too long, teachers have been running on good will. Research that the Educational Institute of Scotland published in June found that far too many teachers are working beyond their contracted hours and are reporting increasing stress and decreasing job satisfaction.

Many local authorities are struggling to fill posts at all. Data from the teacher induction scheme shows that only 66 per cent of council requests for probationers were fulfilled and that fewer than half of the required number of maths and computing probationary teachers were being delivered to local authorities. Those figures are made worse when we consider that fewer than a third of post-induction scheme teachers move into full-time employment. The Scottish teachers for permanence campaign group also states that we have thousands of teachers who want to work but are being denied the opportunity or are facing long waits on supply lists before gaining temporary employment.

Clearly, the current strategy is not delivering. We need regular publication of clear data that shows where we need more teachers and how many are on supply lists, and a workforce plan to address the staffing gaps in all areas of our schools.

The consistent underfunding of local authorities has also contributed to the dispute. Even if funding is released to retain teachers, as the Scottish Government has requested, other areas of education may face cuts. Additional support for learning, bus travel to and from school, and the length of the school week are all in danger. Funding for all of those things comes from core local government budgets, which have been disproportionately cut in the past 10 years, and COSLA has noted that there has been a cut of £63 million to the core revenue budget in 2023-24. Local government financing will remain an issue regardless of the outcome of the dispute.

The Scottish Government must work urgently to resolve this conflict with local authorities and publish a workforce plan to resolve the longer-term issues in the teaching profession, as was called for by this Parliament in May.

I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer. Parliament should be able to scrutinise the budget and ensure that the Scottish Government spends taxpayers’ money effectively. Instead, we have creative, selective and often complex presentation of figures, key budget documents going unpublished and well-regarded voices, including those of the Fraser of Allander Institute and Audit Scotland, criticising the Government’s failure on transparency. Can the cabinet secretary guarantee that all the agreed information will be supplied to the Scottish Fiscal Commission ahead of the Scottish budget? Will she use the 2025-26 budget to put an end to 17 years of creative accounting and financial sleight of hand?

We should write to the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to ask what the next steps will be following the publication of the gender-based violence in schools framework, when the Scottish Government intends to commission an independent review of the framework and when it expects that review to conclude.

We should keep the petition open and write to the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to ask for an update on the Scottish Government’s work with local authorities to reach an agreement on the provision of learning hours, including information on how the work is expected to progress and when information on the outcome of that work will be available, and to ask when the analysis of responses to the consultation of prescribing minimum hours will be published. Given that the consultation closed in June 2023, we should ask for an explanation as to why its publication is taking so long.

We should keep the petition open and write to the Scottish Government to highlight the requirement in England for an assessment by two doctors before short-term detention and to ask how it can be confident that just one medical opinion is sufficient for cases in Scotland.