The Education (Scotland) Act 1980 places a statutory responsibility on all local authorities to manage and maintain the school estate across Scotland. The Government is providing significant investment to local authorities through the £1.8bn Scotland’s Schools for the Future programme to replace the worst condition schools throughout the country.

The Scottish Government has given a commitment to examining the case for an extension of the Borders Railway, along with potential improvements to the A1, A7 and A68. This work is currently being taken forward by Transport Scotland through the Borders Transport Corridors – Pre-Appraisal study which commenced in Spring 2017. Having completed an extensive engagement exercise over the summer it is now moving into the reporting phase. A series of presentations to key stakeholders is scheduled to take place in the early December with a final report expected in early 2018.

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 Scottish Government has instructed no external legal advice in relation to the Children and Young People (Information Sharing) (Scotland) Bill.

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 Scottish Government do not collect information on the number of nursery places available. Information on capacity is collected by the Care Inspectorate. They do not publish figures at local authority level but Scotland level figures are available on their website (http://www.careinspectorate.com/index.php/publications-statistics/19-public/statistics).

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

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.

Scotland is participating in the Teacher Questionnaire of the 2018 administration of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This will cover teacher job satisfaction and an assessment of the factors they believe are hindering instruction.

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