Chamber and committees

The Scottish Executive believes everyone should have a chance to learn regardless of their personalcircumstances. In 2003-04 activity by students on further education programmes,specifically designed for their additional support needs, increased by 9% on theprevious year.

Ourrecent guidance document Partnership Matters, assists those agencies involved in making and managing support arrangements forstudents with disabilities and additional support needs at college. The guidanceencourages key partners to form local partnerships and develop agreements on supportingstudents in further education.

Thereare a number of other initiatives designed to improve opportunities, such as:

• The Educational (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Act 2004, due to commence by the end of this year, will create a stronger, better system for supporting all children and young people who may need additional support, for whatever reason, to benefit from school education. It makes provision for improving transition from school with a view to ensuring that there is a continuum of support for these young people going into further education.
• From 2005-06, the Disabled Student Allowance will be extended to both full and part-time Scottish postgraduate students who fund their own tuition and living costs.

The Get Ready for Work trainingprogramme for 16 to 17-year-olds aims to raise the skills of young people with additionalsupport needs, including those with disabilities. In addition, Training for Work (TfW), Scotland's voluntarytraining programme underwent a refocus in 2004-05 and now has a much clearer emphasison vocational training towards a specific employment goal. TfW plays a strong supportingrole in the wider Welfare to Work and social inclusion agendas by offering immediateaccess to training for the most disadvantaged, including disabled people.

I refer the member to the answerto question S2O-5932 on 24 March 2005 which is available on the Parliament’s website, the searchfacility for which can be found at:http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/sch/search.

This information is not held centrally. The Scottish Executive and NHSScotland are committed to offering equality of employment opportunity to all.

NHSScotland employers support applications from people with disabilities and strive to ensure that people can continue in meaningful employment. To increase awareness, I launched the diversity awareness poster campaign on 31 March. This campaign aims to introduce the workforce to equality and diversity in a positive way and also show NHSScotland as having an inclusive and welcoming working environment.

Due to the large volume ofdata requested the information has been placed in the parliament referencecentre. (Bib. number 36221).

Between 30 September 1999and 30 September 2004, the whole-time equivalent numbers of staff in postin each staff group increased. In Scotland, qualified nurses rose from 35,596.5 to 38,906.5 (up9.3%), qualified physiotherapists from 1,737.1 to 1,997.9 (up 15.0%), qualifiedoccupational therapists from 1,088.2 to 1,364.5 (up 25.3%) and qualified speechtherapists from 708.1 to 814.0 (up 15.0%). Figures for individual years and NHSboards are published on the Scottish Health Statistics website under WorkforceStatistics at www.isdscotland.org/workforce.

Section A gives details ofqualified nurses broken down by NHS board. In particular, table A1 shows thewhole-time equivalent and table A2 shows headcount figures for each year since1994. Qualified physiotherapists, occupational therapists and speech andlanguage therapists can be found in tables F1 and F2 of Section F.  Latest availablefigures are at 30 September 2004.

The Scottish Executiveprovided £85,000 for the 2004 and 2005 North Glasgow International Festivals,an initiative focussed specifically on awareness raising. The Scottish RefugeeCouncil receives funding to meet core costs and in 2005-06 is being providedwith £64,000 to run Refugee Week which aims to increase awareness of refugeeand asylum issues.In2002, the Scottish Executive also provided £9,500 to launch a resource entitled WelcomingNewcomers with the aim of supporting schools in sharing good practice inthe integration of asylum seekers and refugees http://www.antibullying.net/newcomers1.htm.Communities Scotland hasprovided almost £4 million since September 2001 through the Integration Fundfor Asylum Seekers to support a range of projects, which will contribute topromoting greater awareness of asylum seeker and refugee issues. In addition, the Scottish Executive has providedover £1million since 2003  to projects taking forward recommendations in the Scottish Refugee Integration Forum Action Plan http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2005/04/04142815/28180.

Many of these projects havean awareness raising element built into them.

This information is not heldcentrally. NHS boards are required by the mandatory Staff Governance Standardto ensure that their staff are appropriately trained. There is no requirementfor NHS boards to return their figures to the Scottish Executive. The StaffGovernance Standard is monitored by the Scottish Partnership Forum and in thatway the performance of each NHS board is monitored.

It is only possible to providecentrally held information in relation to the cost of ministerial receptions. Thecentrally held information (which is the vast majority of information held on thissubject) is set out in the following table.

Financial Year	£000
July 1999-2000	17
2000-01	75
2001-02	64
2002-03	55
2003-04	48
To Dec 2004	75*

Note: *This included £13,000for the reception for the opening of the new Scottish Parliament building.

The information sought is notheld centrally and such detailed information could only be obtained at disproportionatecost.

This information is not collectedcentrally. The cost of checking manually all individual staff records would be disproportionate.