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We will continue to work with universities to maintain and enhance the excellence of Scottish higher education whilst ensuring that access remains free.

As outlined in my statement to Parliament on the 16 June, I will set out a wider package of reforms on post-16 education later this year. Any changes to funding for widening access initiatives would be brought forward next year as part of this exercise.

We have asked the Scottish Funding Council to work with Universities Scotland and NUS Scotland to develop a system that ensures the sector as a whole benefits from the proposed new fee and funding arrangements for students who usually live in other parts of the UK.

This will be determined as part of the forthcoming Spending Review.

Yes.

Applications for free bus travel are categorised as over 60, disabled, disabled plus companion, visually impaired and visually impaired plus companion.

The exact number of passes issued specifically to injured veterans is not recorded and cannot be reported upon.

However, Transport Scotland have been in discussion with the National Entitlement Card Programme Office and the Improvement Service regarding the possibility of capturing additional data at the point of application in order to be in a position to provide more detailed information in the future.

The proposals in our consultation would allow Scottish universities to set their own fees for students who normally live in another part of the UK. We will bring forward proposals to set an upper limit of £9,000 for such students in due course.

The First Minister announced further and higher education bursaries for the children of fallen Scottish service personnel at the Armed Forces day in Edinburgh on Saturday 25 June 2011.

Bursaries between £1,500 and £8,240 a year per person are intended to help young people who have lost parents in action to attend college or university.

The scheme has been introduced retrospectively to all eligible applicants from academic year 2010-11 onwards.

Information on operations/interventions undertaken during emergency hospital admission episodes are recorded on central data returns. It is not possible to easily indentify those which are operative or non-operative (for example, imaging, injections and x-rays). Information on the number of emergency admission episodes where a main operation/intervention was recorded on either a Saturday or Sunday by hospital in the calendar years 2007 to 2010 inclusive has been placed in the Scottish Parliament’s Reference Centre (Bib number 53053).

Audiology Services have being included in the Scottish Government’s challenging target that no patient should wait more than 18 weeks from a GP referral to start of treatment. This target is due for delivery by the end of 2011.

Information on Audiology services is collected on a aggregated form. Consequently, it is not possible to provide the information requested. However, information on the median wait from assessment to fitting of a hearing aid in each quarter from April 2010 to 31 March 2011, by NHS board is provided in the following table.

Nationally collected waiting times information for Audiology services is relatively new data and is currently still under development. As information collection system are fairly new there are data quality issues around this information and figures should be treated with caution. ISD are working with NHS Boards to improve data quality.

MEDIAN WAITING TIME FROM ASSESSMENT TO FITTING OF HEARING AID IN EACH QUARTER OF 2010-11

Source: ISD Scotland

x Data not available

¹ Median waits of less than a week.

^aClyde data not available for July to December 2010.

^bData cleansing ongoing, please treat with caution

^cData cleansing is ongoing, please treat with caution. Adult figures not available for the months April and May 2010.

^dPaediatric figures not available for the month of April 2011.

^eProvides Audiology services for adults only – no patients had hearing aid fitted during July 2010 – 2011.

^fSince 1 January some Boards have submitted waiting times for one-stop clinics separately from the normal audiology stage of treatment waiting time returns. Other NHS Boards report one stop patients in the ‘first assessment’ or assessment to treatment stages.