Chamber and committees

As set out in the June 2017 Scottish Government publication Education Governance: Next Steps, we anticipate that Scotland will initially establish up to seven Regional Improvement Collaboratives. To ensure that the regional support arrangements are appropriate for local circumstances, the Scottish Government will work with partners to establish the regional improvement geographies to be covered by each Regional Collaborative and the detailed operating arrangements. The timescale for their establishment will be subject to those discussions. We wish to make early progress in establishing Regional Collaboratives.

We will consult on proposed legislative changes to take forward our education governance reforms in autumn 2017.

In their report Improving Schools in Scotland: An OECD Perspective, the OECD called for a strengthened middle operating through networks and collaboratives amongst schools, including school clusters, and in and across local authorities. The reforms set out in Education Governance: Next Steps - Empowering Our Teachers, Parents and Communities to Deliver Excellence and Equity for our Children, strengthens the middle and supports collaborative working at all levels of our education system through the establishment of Regional Improvement Collaboratives. In addition to providing a framework for strengthening collaborative working across and between local authorities and national agencies, we will work with partners to ensure that Regional Improvement Collaboratives support our schools and education professionals in learning from and sharing best practice, in forming and developing collaborative networks and in pursuing partnership approaches, including within school clusters. School level collaboration and leadership will be further strengthened through the development new Executive Head and Cluster Leader roles.

The Scottish Government has made clear its commitment to tackle teacher workload and bureaucracy in education. We will work with local authorities, national bodies and other partners including the professional associations to ensure that the impact of changes on workload and bureaucracy are considered as part of the implementation process. The devolution of power to the school level means that the traditional roles of national and local government will change. However, local government will remain democratically accountable for the provision of early learning and childcare and of schools.

I am confident that the programme of reform we have put in place, combined with the excellence of Scotland’s hard-working teachers, will enable our education system to realise our ambition of excellence and equity for all.

The reforms set out in Education Governance: Next Steps, including the regional improvement collaboratives, reflect evidence from the OECD, the International Council of Education Advisers and other international evidence as well as the messages we heard during the consultation process.

In developing regional improvement collaboratives, we took account of the views we heard on: the importance of collaboration; the desire for curriculum area specialist support and hands on improvement support; and the need to address inconsistency while maintaining a democratically accountable role for local authorities in the delivery of education.

We will work with local authorities and other partners in ensuring that the regional improvement collaboratives deliver on these expectations and are responsive to local circumstances.

Prior to 2009-10 local authorities were not asked to specify whether a school was built or refurbished and information for 2007-08 and 2008-09 is outlined in table 1. In 2009-10 this information was collected for the first time, however, not all schools were categorised as being built or refurbished and information for 2009-10 is therefore presented in a separate table, table 2. Table 3 outlines the number of schools that were built in each local authority between 2010-11 and 2015-16, respectively.

This information is not held by the Scottish Government. Each local authority should be contacted for this information.

We will launch procurement to deliver the initial phase of our 100% superfast broadband commitment by the end of this year. This will follow a State Aid Public consultation - a necessary precursor to public investment in broadband infrastructure – that will be published soon.

The Smart Meters rollout is a UK Government policy, led by BEIS and implemented by suppliers. The Scottish Government recognises the importance of the roll-out of smart meters as an important national modernisation programme that will bring benefits to Scottish energy consumers. Supplier cost savings are expected to account for almost half of the total benefits with saving expected in reduced costs related to meter reading and complaints handling.

The Scottish Government are working with suppliers, as well as consumer groups and national groups involved in the smart meter rollout, to ensure that the programme is delivered to the greatest number of Scottish consumers, at the lowest possible cost, whilst enhancing the benefits to the most vulnerable in our society and those at risk of fuel poverty. A key factor in helping promote the deployment of smart meters will be to effectively communicate the benefits to consumers.

Suppliers will require a significant number of skilled workers to complete the roll-out and the Scottish Government’s £12 million Transition Training Fund is actively engaged in supporting former oil and gas workers or those threatened by redundancy to transition into smart metering through its second procurement round. A smart metering skills action group has also been set up open to smart metering contractors, colleges, SP Energy Networks, SSE, SDS, and the National Skills Academy of Power.