« Previous | Contents | Next »
Listen
Building a Better Scotland
EDUCATION AND YOUNG PEOPLE
To give every child and young person the best possible start in life, through delivering the National Priorities in Education and Closing the Gap for those who are not sharing the general level of attainment and wellbeing.
Objective 1 | | Closing the opportunity gap by: putting children and young people and their families first; ensuring they are safe and do not threaten the safety of others; promoting equality, inclusion and diversity; achieving and developing values and citizenship. |
Target | 1 | By March 2008, ensure that children and young people who need it have an integrated package of appropriate health, care and education support. |
Target | 2 | By March 2008, have developed and implemented a single, coherent system of children's services inspection and quality assurance to promote continuous improvement in delivery across children's services as a whole, and to provide transparent measures of service delivery standards. |
Target | 3 | Deliver better quality services by implementing a new improvement and inspection framework to strengthen quality assurance across all social work services, beginning with services for people with learning disabilities and spreading to all social work services by March 2008. |
Target | 4 | Increase the number of children in Gaelic-medium education year on year, and by 20% by December 2009. |
Objective 2 | | Building capacity by: establishing an effective framework for learning; investing in infrastructure; and ensuring the workforce has the capacity to deliver high quality services. |
Target | 5 | Ensure teacher numbers have increased to 53,000 in September 2007, and target these additional teachers on reducing class sizes in S1/S2 Maths/English and in P1. |
Target | 6 | Provide a modern, high quality learning environment through the completion of 300 either new or substantially refurbished schools by December 2009. |
Target | 7 | Secure improved skills and qualifications in the social and child care workforce by: - trebling the proportion of residential child care staff meeting the qualification requirements of the Social Services Register between 2003 and 2009; and
- ncreasing the proportion of early years, childcare and support staff meeting those qualification requirements from 66% in September 2003 to 85% in January 2009.
|
Target | 8 | By March 2008, increase by 25% the numbers of qualifying social workers; and provide all qualified social workers with the training they need, by increasing the average number of days' training each social worker gets by 10 days per year, to secure improved service delivery and outcomes. |
Objective 3 | | Ensuring excellence by: maximising achievement and attainment; and providing a basis for Learning for Life. |
Target | 9 | Increase the average tariff score of the lowest attaining 20% of S4 pupils by 5% by March 2008. |
Target | 10 | Deliver improvements in outcomes for pupils across the five National Priorities in Education from the position as published in 2003, by ensuring local authorities set targets; by reporting publicly on progress by 2006; and by building on this to a second phase of local improvement planning with targets set by April 2007. |
What we will do
Across all portfolios, the Executive is committed to ensuring that all Scotland's children and young people are safe, nurtured, healthy, achieving, active, included, respected and responsible. They should have access to positive learning environments and opportunities to develop their knowledge, skills, confidence and self-esteem to the fullest potential. Across all portfolios, our policies and spending plans are complementary, integrated and focused on that common goal. Within that broader context, this chapter describes the policies and spending plans of the Education and Young People portfolio.
Our expectations of what our schools and young people can achieve are rising and our aim is constant. We want to give every child and young person in Scotland the best possible start in life. Helping all children grow safe and strong to realise their full potential - educational, social and economic - remains the key. It gives them a sense of achievement, self-fulfilment and citizenship, and equips them for the future we share.
In everything that we do we are committed to ensuring that we work to grow the economy, to promote equality and close the opportunity gap, and to ensure that our activities are sustainable. Our schools, and all the services that support children, families and young people, play a vital part in unlocking and developing Scotland's potential. That is why, in these spending plans, we are continuing to invest significant additional resources in school education and children's services.
Over the Spending Review period we intend to gear up our actions to implement key commitments from the Partnership Agreement:
- ensuring that our children have opportunities to learn and develop in first class schools with modern facilities;
- providing more flexible learning and development opportunities so that pupils' experience of education is matched to their individual needs;
- delivering improvements in outcomes for pupils across the 5 National Priorities in Education;
- improving provision for all children with additional support needs;
- delivering more teachers and support staff in schools to provide more focused attention to their individual learning and development in order to improve attainment, particularly in literacy and numeracy, promote positive behaviour and help narrow the attainment gap;
- supporting continued development of the social care and social work workforce, as a key driver for improvements in the quality of provision;
- protecting our children and introducing a modern, integrated and efficient system of inspection of children's services;
- maintaining free part-time nursery places for every 3 and 4 year old and exploring further options for expansion of universal or targeted early years provision;
- increasing the availability of affordable childcare, thus removing one of the barriers preventing parents from accessing employment or training opportunities, whilst also creating more employment opportunities in the childcare sector itself;
- encouraging the more active involvement of young people in the lives of their communities; and
- following the review the Children's Hearings system, developing the fundamental principles, improving effectiveness and ensuring the system delivers more effectively for children.
That is why we will:
- increase total central government expenditure - including specific grants - by 42% from 608m in 2004-05 to 866m in 2007-08;
- continue to support integrated service delivery for children and young people and early intervention for the most vulnerable by progressively realigning the 65m in the annual Changing Children's Services Fund towards ongoing frontline delivery of improved children's services through transfers to local authority Grant Aided Expenditure (GAE); in 2006-07 15m will be transferred from the change process to front line services and that sum will increase to 35m in 2007-08;
- provide new resources, totalling around 64m (5m in 2005-06, 22m in 2006-07 and 36.8m in 2007-08) for the development of robust inspection and quality assurance across children's services and social care, for social work services, for fostering, for developing innovative, integrated services for the youngest and most vulnerable children (and their families) and children in need generally, including any changes arising from the Review of Children's Hearings, and to sustain the year-on-year increase in our support for professional development in the social work and social care workforces;
- increase total support for Gaelic-medium education by 0.4m and 1.0m in 2006-07 and 2007-08 respectively, growth of more than 30% by 2007-08 compared with 2004-05;
- develop an innovative leadership and school transformation initiative, in partnership wherever appropriate with philanthropic donors, to bring about improved outcomes for the school system as a whole and some schools in particular;
- continue to invest significant sums in new and modernised schools across the country, via the Schools Fund and support for PPP projects - with plans for 160m in 2006-07 and 185m in 2007-08 (2); and
- provide new resources to ensure teacher numbers increase to 53,000 by 2007.
No efficiency assumptions have been applied to teachers or support staff salary elements of central or local government budgets because of the prioritisation of the increase in teachers numbers and the developing role of support staff in schools. We are however committed to securing the best value for money over the Spending Review period, and we will work with local authorities and teachers representatives to ensure that together we deliver improvements in class sizes and a range of other quality improvements.
As part of the Efficient Government initiative, some budget lines will be held constant. Our detailed plans will be included in the Executive's Efficient Government plan, due to be published in the autumn.
In addition, we will explore with local authorities and others a range of options to allow resources to be released and re-deployed to deliver improvements in frontline services to children and young people. The first steps in that ongoing process will involve progressively realigning the Changing Children's Services Fund towards frontline delivery of improved children's services following discussion with CoSLA about appropriate distribution arrangements within GAE. Thereafter we will work with CoSLA to explore the potential for rationalisation and consolidation of existing GAE budgets for children's services. These steps will increase the financial flexibility available to local authorities, promote innovative thinking and implementation of best practice, and create real incentives for delivering efficiency savings which can then be used differently to meet the needs of children and young people. This Spending Review sees the total GAE for children's services increase from 528m in 2005-06 to 552m in 2007-08.
Table 5.01 Spending plans 2004-08 (level 2)
m | 2004-05 Plans | 2005-06 Plans | 2006-07 Plans | 2007-08 Plans |
Schools (1) | 256.07 | 257.96 | 313.31 | 345.71 |
Children, young people and social care (1) | 161.25 | 187.17 | 209.27 | 224.37 |
Total | 417.32 | 445.13 | 522.58 | 570.08 |
Specific grants (2) | 191.13 | 292.53 | 271.08 | 295.58 |
(1) Central government spending, not including council care allocations. Figures here still include the 15/35m which will be transferred into GAE from the Changing Children's Services Fund in 2006-07 and 2007-08.
(2) The specific grants figure in 2006-07 takes into account revised estimates of drawdown of school PPP payments in that year. This will be largely offset by the addition to the Schools baseline of capital provision of 5m and 9m in 2006-07 and 2007-08 respectively.
« Previous | Contents | Next »