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Restrictions on care home visiting have been challenging during the pandemic for residents, their families and staff.

On 20 February, the then Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport announced the publication of new guidance setting out an expectation that providers put in place arrangements to enable regular visits to resume from early March, having undertaken necessary planning and risk assessment. This guidance, ‘Open with Care: resuming meaningful contact with care home residents’ was published on 24 February: Open with Care - supporting meaningful contact in care homes: guidance - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) .

In addition to its focus on the reintroduction of indoor meaningful contact, the guidance also recommends that outdoor visits, including garden and window visits, are supported by care homes. Outdoor visits should not be viewed as replacements to or substitutes for indoor visiting.

Outdoor visits (including window visits) can take place either within or outside the care home grounds. Care homes can increase the frequency and duration of visits away from the care home as they assess it is safe to do so, taking advice from local oversight arrangements as necessary. Those meeting up with residents outdoors do not need to be the same two designated visitors as for indoor visits. As outlined in Section 5.1 of the Open with Care guidance, limits on group sizes should be in line with national Covid-19 restrictions for the general public.

On 17 May 2021, the Scottish Government published additional guidance on outings: ‘ Open with Care: activities and outings away from the care home ’ .

The general principle of the guidance is that, when a resident wishes to go on outings away from the care home, the presumption should be that these should take place in line with general population COVID-19 restrictions/ permissions relevant to the local area, unless there is clear evidence justifying a more restrictive approach.

Outings away from the care home will, for many, be a significant positive change. However, we must not become complacent. Outings must be carefully planned, taking account of individual needs, preferences and local conditions. Local oversight teams play a key role in supporting care homes to facilitate safe outings.

Support for essential visits is unaffected, which should always be compassionately and generously enabled by care homes when needed.

The Open With Care National Oversight Group is monitoring implementation of the guidance, identifying any additional support that might be required, and will report on progress in early June.

The Scottish Government has identified in the region of 500 pieces of correspondence received between 2016 and January 2021 relating to the provision of ferry services provided by CalMac on the West coast of Scotland. However, it is not feasible to ascertain which of these are specific to the Arran ferry service.

The Ardrossan – Brodick route is the busiest route on the Clyde and Hebrides Ferry Services (CHFS) network and carried over 3 million passenger and over 760,000 vehicles between October 2016 and January 2021. CalMac, over the period October 2016 to January 2021 received around 870 complaints, relating to the Ardrossan - Brodick ferry route, concerning both the ports and vessels. This equates to just 0.03% of total passengers carried on this route or just fewer than 3 complaints for every 10,000 passengers travelling on the service.

In fact, CalMac has a strong reputation for customer service. As a testament to this, CalMac have won a number of awards since the start of the Clyde and Hebrides Ferry Services contract in October 2016, such as Ferry Operator of the Year in 2018. CalMac have also received Worldhost Recognition for Excellent Customer Service as well as CCA Global Accreditation 5 years in a row up to 2020. All these awards are only made possible through the hard work, dedication and professionalism of CalMac staff.

There are two ferry routes serving Arran, Ardrossan – Brodick and Claonaig - Lochranza.

There was 19,537 scheduled sailings on the Ardrossan – Brodick service of which 1,571 were cancelled with 173 additional sailings provided, resulting in total of 18,139 sailings operated.

There was 14,600 scheduled sailings on the Claonaig – Lochranza service of which 802 were cancelled with 231 additional sailings provided, resulting in a total of 14,029 sailings operated.

Further details are provided in the tables below, by reason between October 2016 and January 2021. The two routes are shown separately. A copy of the table has been placed in the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (Bib. number 62253).

School leaders are expected to develop their school level curriculum with cognisance of a range of factors, including the national curriculum framework which is politically neutral in its formulation, local circumstance, the specific needs of their learners and staffing structure.

The ‘How We do It’ section within the Refreshed Curriculum Narrative sets out the main considerations which school leaders will wish to take account in formulating their school level curriculum, including Understanding the learners, Being clear on practical approaches, Using meaningful learning networks, Knowing your own learning and support needs and Knowing the big ideas. https://scotlandscurriculum.scot/5/

Within the General Teaching Council Professional Standards for Leadership and Management school leaders are expected to have an enhanced understanding of the dynamics of political power and influence in the relationship between schools and society, and the consequent implications for the work of their organisation. They should understand the political and social context and the ways in which this impacts on schools and those within schools, taking account of this in their leadership and management practices. School leaders are all registered teachers and must also take account of the Code of Professionalism and Conduct which sets out key principles and values for all teachers including a need to uphold standards of personal and professional conduct, honesty and integrity.

The priority at this time should be on learning and teaching to ensure that learners consolidate their learning and have sufficient course coverage prior to assessment.

On 16 February, the National Qualifications 2021 Group issued an update to the Alternative Certification Model providing clarity on the assessment approach to be adopted this year. The revised model included a further extension to the submission date for provisional results to 25 June to provide more time for learning and teaching and gathering of evidence.

SQA has reduced the evidence requirements for each National Course to the minimum to preserve the validity and public confidence in the qualifications. In addition, SQA published 116 subject-specific guidance documents across National 5, Higher and Advanced Higher courses to support teachers and lecturers in gathering key assessment evidence as the basis for provisional results. Teachers will be using a holistic approach and a range of evidence to determine the provisional results. They also have the flexibility to assess learners at times and in ways that are appropriate to their needs.

The following table details when the vessels the MV Isle of Arran and MV Caledonian Isles has been taken out of service for repairs or maintenance since 2016.

All vaccinations are held on an individual’s medical records. Upon receiving the first vaccination, patients will also be given a reminder leaflet which will be issued with the date of their follow up appointment to receive their second dose.

A vaccination certificate could play a valuable role but there are various issues to work through, not least the significant equalities issues with allowing freedoms only to those vaccinated. Work, on a 4 nations basis, has started to scope and develop a technical solution to allow secure, authenticated access to Covid vaccination status.

This is to ensure technology is not the limiting factor should the work underway indicate it would be appropriate to introduce certification at the right time.

Due to the nature of this piece of work and the stage that we are at in discussions, it is difficult to determine the number of staff partly or fully involved in discussions. We can however confirm that a small number of staff in Scottish Government teams including; Covid Ready Society, Vaccinations, Community Surveillance, Scottish Government Legal Department, and several teams across Scottish Government that manage issues relating to the digital environment, have provided input in the work already undertaken.

We continue to engage in international developments in relation to COVID-19, including on the issue of vaccine certification. These discussions are led by the World Health Organisation.

We will continue to keep vaccine certification under review as further evidence around vaccines and immunity emerges.

The STEM bursary scheme, which offers a bursary of £20,000 to encourage career changers to train as secondary school teachers in Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Computing Science, Technical Education and Home Economics, was introduced in 2018. Initially 100 bursaries were made available each year but in 2020 this increased to 150.

The numbers of bursaries awarded are as follows:

107 in 2018

111 in 2019

150 in 2020

The success of the scheme demonstrates that teaching is recognised as an attractive profession and we will again be making available 150 bursaries of £20,000 in 2021-22 to career changers to undertake a PGDE in these STEM subjects. Skills Development Scotland intend to open the 2021 bursary scheme for applications on 5 April.