Chamber and committees

Student Awards Agency Scotland (SAAS) administer the Disabled Students' Allowance (DSA) which is a needs led funding award based on demand. DSA helps support equality of access to higher education for individual students.

The following table shows the number of DSA applications to SAAS from students who have declared they are dyslexic.

Source: SAAS

Note: DSA funding from SAAS is available to students undertaking a course of higher education at universities, colleges and eligible private institutions. The data in the table for colleges also includes private institutions.

The decline in the number of promoted posts in Scotland’s schools since 2010 is primarily a result of local authorities moving to create faculties within the secondary sector thereby reducing the need for as many principal teachers.

The Scottish Government has invited partners, including ADES and teachers’ representatives, to form a Working Group tasked with taking shared action on the Report’s recommendations.

Holding the Standard for Headship is not, in itself, a ticket to promotion and aspirant headteachers are still required to complete local authority recruitment processes for headteacher posts. The new Into Headship programme, which replaces the Scottish Qualification for Headship and the Flexible Route to Headship, requires local authorities to confirm that their candidates are within two to three years of becoming a headteacher thereby helping to ensure those trained are ready for the role.

The Scottish Government receive quarterly reports from BT providing detailed information on number of premises connected to fibre, structures built, marketing activity and broadband speed of properties connected to the fibre.

The due dates for these reports are dependent on the verification process for each and are not all received at the same time. Each report’s agreed delivery date is based on a fixed number of working days turnaround, calculated from the end of each quarter. The contractual reports for each quarter are received during the following quarter.

Further to my response to question S5W-02361, I would reiterate that the Scottish Government is in regular contact with the Crofting Commission about crofting policy and regulatory matters in general, including matters relating to common grazings regulation.

On those occasions where the issue of VAT registration of Grazings Committees has been mentioned, no discussion has taken place beyond the point that VAT is a reserved matter. This has also been covered in my response to questions S5W-02359 and S5W-02360 on 15 September 2016.

All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament’s website; the search facility for which can be found at: http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx

Given the necessity for rapid progress and the level of priority we attach to this agenda, in the first instance the Commissioner for Fair Access will be appointed by Ministers for a fixed term.

Following the expiry of this term we will consider reviewing how any subsequent appointments are made.

The Scottish Government currently capture information on the causes for concern identified for children on the child protection register. The data is returned by local authorities on an annual basis and is published as part of the Children’s Social Work Statistics Scotland compendia.

The latest data available is for the period 1 August 2014 to 31 July 2015 and includes information on the number of children with a cause for concern as “child exploitation”, which is used to refer to situations where children are abused – physically, verbally or sexually, or when they are submitted to unsatisfactory conditions as part of their forced or voluntary employment. http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Children/PubChildrenSocialWork

From 1 August 2015 information on “sexual exploitation” specifically will be captured as a cause for concern for the first time; subject to assurance of quality, this data will be published as part of the compendia publication scheduled for Spring 2017.

We are committed to protecting children from abuse including child sexual abuse, and are taking specific action to increase our knowledge of the nature and prevalence of child sexual exploitation across Scotland.

We have committed to establishing a child protection data and evidence programme as part of the Child Protection Improvement Programme and work to develop our understanding and approach to preventing and tackling child sexual exploitation will be taken forward through this work.

To improve local problem profiling and in order to build a national profile of child sexual exploitation across Scotland, Action 15 of the Update of the National Action Plan to Prevent and Tackle Child Sexual Exploitation (March 2016), sets out that we will work with Police Scotland and Child Protection Committees to agree a template to capture information about child sexual exploitation and implement across Scotland by December 2016.

In common with other broadband projects across the UK that used the UK Government’s contract framework, the Digital Scotland contracts do not require BT to make cabinet location information public ahead of the build phase. This is to minimise the potential for contradictory information being given to the public, if cabinets subsequently need to be relocated due to planning or other issues.

Once there is certainty on cabinet locations, these are added to the publicly available interactive map on the Superfast Scotland website each quarter and provides public access to the live cabinet network through a simple post code search. This ensures that the public are able to access the most up-to-date, reliable information in a user friendly format.

The Youth Employment Strategy: Developing the Young Workforce (DYW) sets out our ambitions for reducing youth unemployment in Scotland. This includes a range of milestones around strengthening links between schools and employers; improving the quality of careers education; and ensuring that all young people have access to a range of high quality work related learning opportunities.

Local collaborative partnership working, which has the flexibility to ensure that all young people in their area have access to a broad range of work relevant education opportunities, is a key aim of the DYW programme. The DYW Regional Groups have been established to support these partnerships and encourage more employers to engage directly with education in their region.

In addition to a series of national learning events, national guidance on school/employer partnerships, a career education standard (3-18) and a revised work placements standard have been provided on the Education Scotland and Skills Development Scotland’s websites, alongside a range of resources on DYW for local authorities, teachers and other partners.

The Scottish Government does not have the responsibility for visits by external parties to schools in Scotland. This responsibility lies with local authorities who have the statutory responsibility to deliver education in their locality.