Chamber and committees

We know that demand for social work services continues to grow. The National Social Work Agency was launched on 17 March 2026, to empower the profession, champion social justice, and keep people safe. As part of the launch, investment of up to £994,000 was announced for 2026/27, supporting measures that directly respond to national workforce challenges around recruitment and retention, particularly in high demand areas such as mental health and practice education.

The Scottish Government and the National Social Work Agency, across the course of the parliament, are committed to identifying opportunities to strengthen the social work workforce, including children and families social work. We recognise that these skilled and dedicated professionals play an essential role protecting children and in achieving The Promise commitments by 2030.

Working alongside social workers and sector experts, we have developed Valuing Practice: The Framework for Social Work Education and Learning, which, for the first time, sets out standards for learning and development across the full span of social work careers. It aims to enable a skilled and confident workforce that makes a meaningful difference to people and communities. We will engage with the sector in the autumn seeking views on learning and skills priorities to inform development of a national training plan.

The National Social Work Agency aims to address ongoing sector challenges, including workforce capacity and consistency of practice, across all social work disciplines, including children and families. Recognising recruitment and retention as key to a resilient workforce, which is supported and sustainable, we will do this by:

• improving and strengthening professional leadership and development, including learning opportunities,
• reviewing workforce wellbeing, including measures to address stress and promote positive working environments, in recognition of the impacts of high caseloads on retention engaging with the workforce to develop career resources and clear pathways, increasing consistency in service delivery, and
• enabling social workers to work more effectively with people (children, young people and adults) to transform their lives and implement rights-based practice across all services.

However, we cannot achieve all this alone and we are working alongside COSLA and Social Work Scotland, through the Scottish Social Work Partnership , to ensure a skilled, supported and sustainable social work workforce throughout Scotland.

We recognise the importance of young carers being identified in schools so that they can be supported in achieving their educational and wider goals. This is why we fund an Education Officer at Carers Trust Scotland, who works with Education Scotland, the General Teaching Council for Scotland and the Scottish Qualification Authority help ensure education staff are aware of young carers and can support them appropriately.

This work has included producing an online learning module, accredited by Education Scotland, for education staff to help them better understand how they can identify and support young carers.

Also, through this work we have funded Carers Trust Scotland’s “Young Carers School Challenge” pilot. This programme supports and encourages all schools who sign up to: -

• Have a young carer champion
• Have all school staff undertake Young Carer Awareness training
• Have a young carers charter or policy
• Correctly record all young carers on the school system (SEEMiS)
• And to forge partnership links with their local carer organisation.

Our National Carers Strategy has driven cross-government action to ensure young carers are identified, supported and protected from inappropriate caring, helping to reduce negative impacts on their education, social lives and future opportunities, including support in educational settings.

The Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Act 2004 states that children and young people with support needs, including young carers, should have these identified and met. The Code of Practice recognises that home life can affect a child’s ability to engage in education and highlights that young carers may need support to balance school and caring responsibilities, including flexible learning arrangements. Local authorities have a legal duty to identify and support those with additional support needs.

The Scottish Government is committed to ensuring that all children and young people experience public services consistently upholding their rights. We encourage all Local Authorities to take a children’s rights approach in the delivery of all their services, regardless of the source of their powers.

We recognise the immense contribution unpaid carers make to communities across Scotland, and we are continuing to work closely with local authorities and partners to ensure carers are supported, recognised and involved in decisions that affect them.

Through the Carers (Scotland) Act 2016, local authorities and integration authorities have clear duties to provide support for unpaid carers, including access to personalised support planning, information and advice services, and local carer strategies. Authorities must publish key documents so that carers can understand what support is available locally and what they are entitled to – a local carer strategy, local eligibility criteria and a short breaks service statement. We are investing £88.4 million each year through the local government settlement to support implementation of the Act.

We are also supporting local carer centres and organisations that help carers stay connected to their communities. In 2026-27, we are providing £600,000 to local carer centres, alongside £13 million for voluntary sector short breaks funding, including £6.5 million delivered through local carer centres.

Through the Care Reform (Scotland) Act 2025, we will establish a right to breaks from caring to support people to protect their wellbeing and sustain caring relationships. These changes place new duties on Local Authorities to determine, through a carer’s personalised plan, whether a carer can take sufficient breaks from their caring role; and if not, to provide support to enable this.

In addition, we continue to engage directly with carers and representative organisations through forums such as the annual Carers Parliament and Young Carers Festival, ensuring carers’ voices help shape national and local policy development.

We are also working with local authorities and health and social care partnerships to strengthen carer involvement in hospital discharge processes, supported by workforce training and resources to improve identification, inclusion and support for unpaid carers across services.

Our National Carers Strategy has driven cross-government action to improve recognition and valuing of unpaid carers, including strengthening carer involvement, improving awareness of carers’ rights, and promoting carers as equal partners in care across public services and communities.

Together, these actions ensure that unpaid carers can access breaks, peer support, wellbeing activities and community-based support.

PSD (Scotland) has implemented the industry-standard ITIL Service Management approach, which includes Problem and Incident Management. Some GP Practices have encountered as lowdown of their usual processes, while they become familiar with using new software. There have also been some issues connected to the IT system, server capacity and rollout .Any issues reported by GP Practices about the software are escalated to the supplier, OneAdvanced, as a priority.

The Scottish Government invests over £88 million per year in local carer support through the Carers (Scotland) Act, enabling local authorities and their partners to deliver local carer strategies, information and advice services, and community-based support that helps raise awareness of carers and their rights at a local level.

We support a national network of local carer centres, including funding of £600,000 in 2026-27, which play a key role in community outreach, helping people to identify themselves as carers, increasing local understanding of caring roles and building more carer-friendly communities. In addition, we fund the Shared Care Respitality programme, which helps local carer centres build relationships with hotels, B&Bs, restaurants and leisure providers to offer donated breaks and experiences for unpaid carers within their communities.

To improve understanding and access to support, the Scottish Government and Social Security Scotland have launched a dedicated package of online and printed resources, including 'Help if you're a carer' and Social Security Scotland - Helping hand for carers - stakeholder resources to support wider awareness and signposting within communities.

Our National Carers Strategy has driven cross-government action to improve recognition and valuing of unpaid carers, including strengthening carer involvement, improving awareness of carers’ rights, and promoting carers as equal partners in care across public services and communities.

We also fund national engagement and awareness-raising activity, including the annual Carers Parliament and the Scottish Young Carers Festival, which give carers a platform to share their experiences with decision-makers and help increase wider understanding of caring roles across society.

In addition, through the Carer Positive employer scheme, we continue to encourage more supportive and carer-aware workplaces, helping to embed understanding of unpaid carers within communities across Scotland, with more than half a million employees now working in Carer Positive organisations.

Looking ahead, provisions in the Care Reform (Scotland) Act 2025 will further strengthen our approach. New duties will require relevant authorities to take steps to actively promote awareness and improve uptake of support for carers, helping ensure that carers are more visible, better understood, and able to access the support available to them. Alongside our work to establish a right to breaks for carers, this will help protect carers’ wellbeing and sustain caring relationships.

Together, these actions support greater recognition of unpaid carers and help encourage communities to become more understanding and carer friendly.

We do not hold this information. OneAdvanced, the supplier of the Vision GPIT system, have recently moved from a legacy service desk system to a different service desk providers of previous records of the numbers of reported issues are unavailable. In May 2026, 22 technical issues were reported to the service desk by GP practices and Health Boards.

Each health board, during their preparation period, implementation, go-live and post migration have been provided with weekly support from the national team and the GP IT supplier, OneAdvanced, providing them with the tools to cascade the implementation process and advice to their GP Practices within a timescale that provides plenty of time for practices to undertake their pre-learning and preparation.

There is a benefits realisation plan in place. The strategic objectives are set out in the Full Business Case. Lessons learned logs are continually updated and reviewed by all parties involved in migrations. Following the conclusion of the migration programme we will work with stakeholders to learn lessons from this rollout to improve future performance.

The GP IT Re-provisioning Programme regularly updates senior stakeholders about the status of the programme and migrations to the Vision system. This includes The GP IT Service Management Board, which meets every two months, and has members representing Scottish Government (DHAC and Primary Care), Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP), Scottish General Practitioners Committee (SGPC, part of the British Medical Association), Scottish National Users Group (SNUG), as well as health board Chief Execs, Digital Leads, Chief Officers and other health board representatives. These updates include any performance, reliability and interoperability issues and the investigation and fixes being applied.

We continue to invest over £88 million a year in local carer support through the Carers (Scotland) Act, enabling local authorities and their partners to deliver local services and community-based support. In addition to this, we increased voluntary sector short breaks funding in 2025-26 to £13 million per year, which enables unpaid carers to benefit from easy-access short breaks.

We are working to establish a right to breaks for carers, introduced by the Care Reform (Scotland) Act 2025, to help protect their wellbeing and sustain caring relationships. Preparation for implementation is being supported by the Right to Breaks Implementation Steering Group, involving unpaid carer representatives as well as statutory and third sector organisations.

Under section 13 of the 2025 Act, we will also implement new statutory duties requiring relevant authorities to take steps to promote awareness of, and improve uptake of, support for carers.

Carer Support Payment, which has replaced Carer’s Allowance in Scotland, is available to more carers in full-time education, provides earlier access to support during breaks from caring, and more support when a caring role ends due to bereavement. Our Scottish Carer Supplement is only available in Scotland and provides extra support worth over £600 per year for carers getting paid Carer Support Payment. It replaced Carer's Allowance Supplement and is paid more regularly. Carer Additional Person Payment is extra money for carers getting paid Carer Support Payment and caring for more than one person for 20 hours a week. It is worth over £500 per year for each additional person being cared for.

We also continue to offer targeted support to young carers, including £400,000 to Young Scot in 2026-27 to deliver the Young Carers Package – an exclusive platform of tailored discounts, e-vouchers, subscriptions and other opportunities which recognise young carers and allow them to take a break from their caring role.

Young Carer Grant is the only payment of its kind in the UK and is currently worth £405.10, which can be applied for annually. It is now available to carers aged 19, allowing young carers to get up to four payments from the age of 16.

We also continue to fund the Carer Positive initiative, which is working to improve awareness and flexibility of unpaid carers in the workplace. There are more than half a million employees working in 296 Carer Positive organisations across Scotland (March 2026).