Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government recognises that COVID-19 and the decrease in oil and gas prices has had a significant impact on both the oil and gas sector and the North East of Scotland, and this has unfortunately led to a number of redundancies across the sector and more may yet follow as the UK Government’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme comes to an end. We are providing support to any individuals affected by redundancy through our Partnership Action for Continuing Employment, PACE initiative.

The Scottish Government has committed £100 million in 2020-21 to support those looking for work or at risk of redundancy to retrain and get back into work. This package of support will include a job guarantee for young people, a new national retraining scheme and more funding to provide immediate assistance and advice if people are made redundant. I shall seek to ensure that the sector is aware of all opportunities for support for individuals arising from this funding, for example in supporting transition to alternative employment, through a £25 million economy-wide National Transition Training Fund, having learned from the previous oil and gas specific £12 million Transition Training Fund, now closed, which operated successfully to support oil and gas sector workers during the last downturn in oil and gas prices.

Fair Start Scotland, our employment support service for Scotland, is a vital element of our approach to helping people back into work as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Fair Start Scotland aims to support a minimum of 38,000 individuals, including those who face the greatest challenges accessing the labour market. The service provides flexible support, taking into account personal circumstances and removing barriers to accessing work.

The Scottish Government is already providing support to those who are facing financial hardship, through Crisis Grants from the Scottish Welfare Fund. Crisis Grants can be used to support people and families on low income who find themselves in an emergency (such as losing their job) or disaster (e.g. a fire or flood). The budget was more than doubled in response to the pandemic and over £6.9 million has already been awarded in Crisis Grants between March and June 2020

The Scottish Government will continue to work closely with the UK Government which retains many of the key levers required to support the sector, including delivery of a North Sea Transition Deal. This will add support to our own £62 million Energy Transition Fund, launched in July, and developed with input from the Oil and Gas and Energy Transition Strategic Leadership Group that I Chair. We recognise it is critical that both Governments are doing all that we can to protect jobs and minimise any negative impact of COVID-19 on groups particularly affected by the pandemic and I want, for our part, to reassure those working in the sector that is exactly what the Scottish Government intends to do.

The Scottish Government is committed to ensuring that children and young people, including those with disabilities, get the support that they need to reach their full learning potential.

The Equality Act (2010) places a legal duty on education authorities, colleges and universities to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to ensure pupils and students with disabilities are not disadvantaged.

Education authorities also have duties under the Additional Support for Learning Act 2004 (as amended) to identify, provide for and review the additional support needs of their pupils, supporting them to overcome barriers to their learning and fully access learning opportunities at school.

The Scottish Government funds a range of services to provide advice and support to children, young people and their families. This seeks to ensure that they are fully informed of their rights to additional support at school and can access support and guidance to be involved in any decisions that are made about that support.

To provide specialised support for individual students with specific educational support needs, colleges can access the Scottish Funding Council’s (SFC) £50.5m Access and Inclusion Fund to help them to achieve parity of outcomes for all students. This allows colleges to provide support measures for students who need extra resources such as staff or equipment.

In order to support universities in making ‘reasonable adjustments’ the SFC’s University funding model includes a Disabled Students Premium to recognise additional costs that universities may face. Further, students can also apply for Disabled Students Allowance, a non-income assessed allowance to cover any extra costs or expenses a higher education student might incur while studying, which arise because of their disability.

The following table shows the number of declared-assessed disabled school leavers and the proportion that have achieved passes at SCQF Levels 3-7, by stage of leaving for 2014-15 to 2018-19.

This information is not held for primary and secondary school education.

College - The Scottish Funding Council (SFC) publish data for Further and Higher education enrolments at College for a range of characteristics including disability in the College Performance Indicators (CPI) publication. This release breaks down the cohort by ‘Completed Successfully’, ‘Partial Success’ and ‘Withdrawal’.
‎ http://www.sfc.ac.uk/publications-statistics/statistical-publications/2020/SFCST022020.aspx (Figure 11, with previous years data available in previous releases - http://www.sfc.ac.uk/publications-statistics/statistical-publications/statistics-schedule/statistical-publication-schedule.aspx )

University - The SFC publish data on student characteristics in the Report on Widening Access. This includes retention rates at university by disability status for two cohorts: Scottish-domiciled full-time first degree entrants and Scottish-domiciled Undergraduate entrants.
‎ http://www.sfc.ac.uk/publications-statistics/statistical-publications/2020/SFCST062020.aspx (Background Table 3)
‎ Note: Background Table 6 also includes information on successful completion rates at college split by level and mode which supplements the data from the CPI linked above, but does not include a Withdrawal rate.

Further to the answer to question S5W-31200, a breakdown of investment targeted specifically at children living in low income household in financial years 2018-19 and 2019-20 are published in the respective child poverty annual progress reports. These are linked here:

• 2018-19: Tackling child poverty: first year progress report - PDF p99-101
• 2019-20: Tackling child poverty: second year progress report - PDF p69-70

Detailed demographic data on end-users is still being collected from the 456 organisations and teams currently supporting end users through Connecting Scotland. However, based on the initial evaluation information we have to date:

• 40% are aged over 60

In terms of status:

• 34% have a long-term condition or disability that prevents them from working
• 20% are unemployed.

Scottish Government continues to work closely with Public Health Scotland on the publication of data related to Test and Protect. We constantly evaluate the balance between public benefit and data protection in our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Publishing data by setting raises potential disclosure questions due to the small number of cases involved in some settings. At this time, the data is not published. Data on cases by Intermediate Zone (areas of roughly 4,000 people) will be published by PHS from 2 September, on their dashboard [ link ].

Scottish Government has previously published data from June and July [ link here ] on the proportions of people saying whether they have followed each aspect of social distancing, based on a national survey, and the latest version of this report will be published when complete.

The average time taken to reach contacts is not published. However, the latest PHS weekly report contains information on the time taken from cases entering the Case Management System (CMS), to being closed [ link here ]. Between 3 August and 27 September, 70.1% of index cases were closed within 48 hours of the case being created in the CMS.