Chamber and committees

Prior to establishing the framework for delivering counselling services, officials engaged with professional counselling bodies who advised that therapeutic counselling is not appropriate for younger pupils. In light of this advice, our commitment is specifically to make counselling available to secondary, primary and special school pupils aged 10 and over.

School counselling is just one of a range of services that schools may have in place to support the health and wellbeing of children and young people. We provide local authorities with £15 million per annum to fund community-based mental health and wellbeing supports for children, young people and their families.

We have also supported school staff to understand and recognise the range of mental health and wellbeing concerns that young people may experience in a new professional learning resource introduced in June 2021.

In line with the National Standard for providers of funded Early Learning and Childcare (ELC), it is a requirement that “children have daily access to outdoor play and they regularly experience outdoor play in a natural environment as part of their funded ELC offer ” .

Transport Scotland are working with support from external specialist commercial and technical advisors Turner and Townsend, to progress development of the next CHFS contract. Work is underway to the develop the next CHFS3 contract including stakeholder engagement to support this process.

The Programme for Government 2023-24 set out major new commitments on childcare including how we will test, for the first time, what an all-age childcare system will look like for Scotland in six councils.

We will work closely with those communities, our partners, and providers to consider how the early learning and school age childcare workforce can support these systems, and what they will need to do so. This will include consideration of regulatory issues, qualifications and professional development, which will take time to do fully and is why we will now set out our plans in 2024.

In the meantime, we will continue to work with the Framework Steering Group and other partners to support delivery of the actions being developed as part of the original plan. We have, for example, already developed a range of new learning resources, implemented a Protecting Vulnerable Groups (PVG) fee waiver and are starting work on a new national portal for professional learning.

Through the Scottish Industrial Energy Transformation Fund (SIETF), to date, we have allocated over £22 million to co-invest with a diverse range of Scottish manufacturers to reduce energy costs and carbon emissions through increased energy efficiency and deep decarbonisation projects.

The regulation of the energy sector is reserved to the UK Government.

Planning enforcement powers are held by local authorities. Planning authorities can take action to issue a fixed penalty notice or seek prosecution through the Scottish courts. Local authorities are required to keep a publicly available register of enforcement notices.

We are unaware of any fines issued by the Scottish Government to power companies in the last five years; and the Scottish Government does not hold any relevant data relating to our agencies.

I wrote directly to Richard Turfitt, the Senior Traffic Commissioner, on 6 September to set out our strong concerns with the proposed guidelines and to request any future proposals are developed with the full involvement of the Scottish Government and the Scottish football governing bodies, and most importantly, supporters clubs and fans. The consultation was subsequently withdrawn but nevertheless I look forward to receiving a response to my letter.

Procurement of the upgrade works at Ardrossan has been paused. Please refer to my letter to Task force members dated 15 August 2023 informing them of the decision.

Minister for Transport – Letter to Task Force members August 2023 | Transport Scotland

And as in the answer to question S6O-02548 on 21 September 2023 Meeting of the Parliament: 21/09/2023 | Scottish Parliament Website .

The Family Learning Scotland Programme (‘the Programme’) was successfully delivered by Peeple from March 2020 to December 2021 despite significant disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic. The Programme was managed through a contract and Peeple provided reports throughout the contract period to provide assurance on progress and on the final outcomes.

The Programme offered training to early learning and childcare practitioners in an evidence-based family learning approach. A review of the evidence for the chosen approach can be found on the Peeple website here:

peep evidence base | www.peeple.org.uk

Training was offered to up to 432 practitioners in every local authority in Scotland and 383 practitioners undertook the training. Practitioners continue to offer family learning opportunities to children and families across Scotland and continue to be supported by Peeple. This support includes the Peep Champions Network, a termly meeting of representatives from each local authority in Scotland trained in the approach.

Through the Whole Family Wellbeing Fund, we have conducted a competitive grant process to build on the Family Learning Scotland Programme. ‘Families Learning Together’ will test widening out family learning training to all services that interact with children and families in a local area.

We will announce the partner for this new project shortly.

The Home Energy Scotland (HES) Grant and Loan Scheme was launched in December 2022 and offers homeowners in Scotland a grant, interest free loan or a combination of both to support the installation of zero direct emission heating systems and energy efficiency measures.

As the scheme is already open to all domestic homeowners in Scotland who live in the property they own, there are currently no plans to widen the eligibility of the scheme.