Chamber and committees

Details are as follows:

External Legal Advice

	2012-13	2013-14	2014-15	2015-16	2016-17
	£000	£000	£000	£000	£000
Total (excluding VAT)	5,309	5,769	5,162	4,485	4,041

All correspondence received by the Scottish Government, addressed to Ministers, is processed via the Ministerial and Corporate Correspondence System (MACCS). MACCS records the type of response required, and directs responses to the relevant team within SG to answer. MACCS has limited functionality as a management information tool; therefore we are unable to provide detailed information on subjects raised by correspondents.

The number of two-year olds registered for funded Early Learning and Childcare is published by local authority within the annual ‘Summary Statistics for Schools in Scotland’ report available on the Scottish Government website (http://www.gov.scot/stats/bulletins/01255). Currently information is collected on the number of registrations and this might be a slight overestimate of the number of children accessing funded provision due to some children being registered at more than one setting. Children accessing provision outwith the local authority that they live would also affect the breakdown by local authority. The Scottish Government is currently making improvements to data collection through the ELC Data Transformation Project.

Under our new Funding Follows the Child approach, local authorities will retain the statutory responsibility for ensuring that funded early learning and childcare entitlement is available to all eligible children in their areas. We are working closely with authorities to ensure that there are sufficient places available, across settings in all sectors, to deliver entitlement to 1140 hours of early learning and childcare from August 2020.

Under the new Funding Follows the Child model, to be implemented from 2020, local authorities will continue to negotiate and agree rates locally with providers in the private and third sectors who want to deliver the funded entitlement and who meet the national standard. Funding rates will have to reflect national policy priorities, including payment of the Living Wage, and ensure financially sustainable provision across all sectors.

The Scottish Government supports mentoring and related befriending, advocacy and apprenticeship programmes across several Ministerial portfolios. Mentoring has a substantial evidence base demonstrating its effectiveness in substantially improving outcomes across a wide range of educational, health and wellbeing indicators. We support a range of activities to improve outcomes for children and young people through the Children, Young People & Families Early Intervention and Adult Learning & Empowering Communities Fund. A total of 117 organisations receive core funding to support their general infrastructure and core service costs, of which 7 have an element of mentoring activity. These are Apex Scotland, LINKnet Mentoring Ltd, Mentor Scotland, Positive Help, Rape Crisis Scotland, Scottish Mentoring Network and The Venture Trust who collectively receive £706k from CYPFEIF/ALEC.

My portfolio also has a specific focus on supporting looked after children, who currently demonstrate the poorest outcomes by comparison with their peers. Within Scotland's population of looked after children and young people, those who are looked after at home demonstrate the poorest outcomes of all. You may therefore be interested to know about ‘Intandem’, Scotland’s mentoring programme for young people looked after at home, which was launched in November 2016 and receives £750,000 Scottish Government funding per annum. Intandem, which is delivered by Inspiring Scotland, provides mentors for young people aged between 8-14 years who are looked after by their local authority but living at home. Through our portfolio of 13 partner charities, Intandem matches young people from all across Scotland with trained local volunteers to build positive, trusting, supportive and secure relationships.

The distribution of these additional workers across local authorities will reflect local plans for implementing the expanded entitlement. Local authorities have recently submitted ELC Expansion Plans, which provide initial estimates of the workforce required in each area. The Scottish Government’s multi-disciplinary delivery support team, co-designed with local authorities, is currently discussing these plans with local authorities. Those discussions, identifying good practice as well as areas for improvement, will inform individual feedback to authorities as well as a national learning report, to be published later in the year.

The total number of Education Scotland inspections carried out each academic year for the last five years for Dumfries and Galloway :

Inspection Figures for Academic Years August 2012 to July 2017

Academic Years	2012-13	2013-14	2014-15	2015-16	2016-17	Total
Total inspections	13	12	12	11	7	55*

*includesEarly Learning and Childcare settings, and Primary, Secondary, All through, Independent and Special schools.

All figures include short model inspections resulting in QI evaluations and 'try out' inspections not resulting in QI evaluations.

Any homeowner who claims that his or her property is damaged by overflow from defective sewerage and road drainage systems has to be able to demonstrate liability on the part of Scottish Water or the relevant roads authority on account of a breach of a common law or statutory duty on the part of that authority.

The GTCS have accredited 3 programmes for aspiring headteachers. These are the Scottish Qualification for Headship, the Flexible Route to Headship and the Into Headship programmes. Only the Into Headship programme is currently operating and has recruited cohorts over the last three years.

The Into Headship programme is aimed at those teachers whose next post will be that of a head teacher, likely to be within two to three years. Details of numbers on that programme are outlined in S5W-12536 on 21 November 2017. 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