Chamber and committees

The Executive plans to continue to work with the local authority, private and voluntary sectors to improve the quality of pre-school education. The new arrangements for integrated inspection by the Commission for the Regulation of Care and Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education will be an important part of this.The Executive has been working to improve the quality of all parts of the early years workforce, and recently allocated an additional £7.2 million for the financial years 2002-04, to support workforce expansion and development in the sector. The Executive will continue to promote better links between pre-school education and other agencies, so as to provide better integrated services for children, and will look at better programmes and facilities for supporting children's physical development and movement.The Executive is also working with Learning and Teaching Scotland and others to improve children's transition from pre-school education to primary school, and to review the use of ICT in pre-school education.

Pre-school centres are considered to be primarily concerned with providing an integrated service of education and childcare. These two important services are considered to be interdependent and mutually supportive.

No. Teacher education institutions must ensure that student primary teachers with the interest and aptitude are trained to teach modern languages in the primary school. The number and variety of languages offered is dependent on the resources available to the institution.All institutions provide French either as a core module of the course or as an elective. The Universities of Dundee and Aberdeen also provide German tuition. The University of Aberdeen hopes to offer Spanish this year as does the University of Glasgow, however the uptake of Spanish at Glasgow has been too low for it to be viable in recent years.

The Children's Services Development Fund in 2000-01 and 2001-02 made up to £1 million available each year to local authorities to help develop throughcare and aftercare services. In addition, local authorities were invited to bid for money from the Changing Children's Services Fund to help young people with the transition to independent living.

Fostering will be considered as part of Phase II of the Adoption Policy Review. I am currently considering the precise remit of the review and the membership of the review group. I expect Phase II of the review to begin later this year and will announce the membership and remit before Phase II gets under way.

I have asked Douglas Osler, Chief Executive of HM Inspectorate of Education (HMIE), to respond. His response is as follows:The inspection evidence to inform the report on Standards and Quality in Scottish Pre-school Education 1997-2001 was drawn from two different types of inspection. HMIE used all the performance indicators in their regular inspections of established nursery schools and classes. This included local authority nursery schools and classes and nursery classes attached to independent schools.Evidence about provision in the private and voluntary sectors was drawn from registration inspections. Registration inspections were designed to make an initial assessment of quality using a limited set of indicators, which did not include those on children's progress in development and learning.

I refer the member to the answer given to question S1W-25783. In addition, following the report of the Physical Activity Task Force on 6 June, the Review of Physical Education chaired by the Deputy Minister for Education and Young people will consider all aspects of PE in schools.

While the remit of the Physical Education Review Group has not yet been finalised, as sport is an element of physical education in schools, I would expect it to be included in the issues to be considered.

Local authorities are responsible for planning and delivering local services, including the provision of respite care or short breaks, based on available resources and local needs and priorities. Authorities report on their delivery of services in annual Community Care Plans, which are publicly available. In recognition of the importance of short breaks we are providing local authorities with substantial new resources to provide an additional 22,000 weeks of breaks each year across Scotland by 2003-04. We are monitoring the effective use of these resources through local outcome agreements with individual councils.

The Scottish Executive response to the report, copies of which are available in the Parliament's Reference Centre (Bib. 16335), accepts the recommendations made by the action group.