Chamber and committees

Statistics on the number of young people supported through the targeted Employer Recruitment Incentive are published by Skills Development Scotland, as part of their quarterly statistical official reporting mechanism. The full year statistics 2014-15 are due for publication on June 9 2015. Previous published statistics can be found at http://www.skillsdevelopmentscotland.co.uk/statistics/other-skills-initiatives/. The published Quarter 3 breakdown shows that:

Breakdown of starts to Quarter 3 2014-15*

	16-24	25-29	Total
Disabled	369	25	394
Care Leaver	40	5	41
Young Carer	113	0	113
Ex Offender	101	0	101

*Please note, some figures have been rounded for the purposes of data protection compliance.

Statistics on the number of young people supported through the Targeted Employer Recruitment Incentive are published by Skills Development Scotland, as part of their quarterly statistical official reporting mechanism. The full year statistics 2014-15 are due for publication on June 9 2015. Previous published stats can be found at: http://www.skillsdevelopmentscotland.co.uk/statistics/other-skills-initiatives/.

This is an operational matter for Skills Development Scotland and we will ask the Chief Executive to write to you.

Any Modern Apprentices made redundant from the oil and gas industry in Scotland will be guaranteed support through Partnership Action for Continuing Employment to move into employment with another business, or to continue with their training.

As announced in January 2015, employers in the oil and gas industry will be supported to employ any redundant Modern Apprentices with a specific recruitment incentive of £5,000 through the Skills Development Scotland Adopt an Apprentice scheme.

Workforce information on how many specialist motor neurone disease nurses there were in (a) 2011, (b) 2012, (c) 2013 and (d) 2014 and have been to date in 2015 is not held centrally. National Services Scotland, Information Services Division (ISD) does not capture this information. Motor neurone disease is treated within the specialty of neuroscience/neurology. The number of clinical nurse specialists in neuroscience/neurology is shown in Table 1.

Table 1: The number of whole time equivalent neuroscience/neurology clinical nurse specialist staff in post as at 30 September

Year	2011	2012	2013	2014
Scotland	21.1	21.7	20.8	26.8

Source: Scottish Workforce Information Standard System; ISD Scotland

Notes:

Clinical nurse specialist data are published annually (data as at 30 September). Therefore data for 2015 are not yet available.

Due to the multidisciplinary nature of the role a nurse may work in more than one specialty. However, only one specialist area is recorded for each nurse. The data shown in Table 1 include clinical nurse specialists who have been recorded with a specialty of neuroscience/neurology.

Further information on these statistics, including information on how the data are collected and notes to aid interpretation, is given in the ‘FAQs’ section of the workforce statistics website at: www.isdscotland.org/workforce

The most recently published information on the number of clinical nurse specialist staff in post can be found on the workforce statistics website at:

https://isdscotland.scot.nhs.uk/Health-Topics/Workforce/Publications/2015-03-03/Clinical_Nurse_Specialists_S2014.xls

The funding of £700,000 announced on 7 January 2015 for nursing care and support for people with motor neurone disease was earmarked to fund all NHS motor neurone disease specialist nurses from the public purse from 1 April 2015 and to double their number. The Chief Nursing Officer has advised boards of funding arrangements and outcomes to be delivered and funds will be allocated in the near future.

The funding of £700,000 will allow all existing NHS motor neurone disease specialist nurses to be paid from the public purse from 1 April 2015 and to double their number. Funding to NHS boards to achieve this will be allocated in the near future.

The First Minister announced on 7 January 2015 that an additional £2.5 million will be invested in specialist nursing and care from 2015-16. The announcement also included the commitment that all existing NHS motor neurone disease clinical nurse specialists will be paid from the public purse and their number will be doubled. Funding of £700,000 was earmarked for this purpose. The remaining funds will enhance access to and provision of other specialist nursing and care across Scotland, based on local needs, including the recruitment of additional specialist nurses in all NHS boards.

Local authorities have a statutory duty to employ adequate numbers of teachers in the schools under their management, and the recruitment and retention of teachers are matters for local authorities. We are working with universities, local authorities and others, through the Teacher Workforce Planning Working Group, to explore how the barriers to recruiting to the Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) subjects can be overcome. We fully expect all local authorities to meet the teacher numbers commitment that they have made. The terms of the commitment make it clear that successful delivery of the commitment will attract additional resource and that failure to deliver will result in clawback.

The Scottish Government's preference would have been to reach a Scotland wide agreement on teacher numbers for 2015-16 as in previous years. COSLA's failure to commit to such an agreement left us with no alternative but to secure commitments from individual local authorities. The consequences of this will be different for each local authority dependent on a range of factors including pupil roll movement.