Recap on Programme for Government 2024-25

Date: 8th October 2024
Category: General measures of implementation

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The Scottish Government has released its official plans for 2024-25 with a focus on key areas such as child poverty, early learning and childcare, education and human rights.

Key commitments from Scottish Government include:

Child poverty

• Invest in innovative, local projects to tackle child poverty, through a second round of its Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund.
• Invest nearly £600 million in affordable housing in 2024-25. The majority of this will be directed at boosting social housing supply – keeping rents lower and benefitting around 140,000 children in poverty each year.

Early learning and childcare

• Ensure access to affordable, high-quality funded early learning and childcare services by continuing to invest almost £1 billion a year.
• Work with local authorities to increase take up of funded early learning and childcare for eligible 2-year-olds, with a particular focus on boosting take up among the families most at risk of poverty and areas with some of the lowest take up rates.
• Over the next two years the government will design and deliver a new childcare offer, backed by £16 million, for priority families within six ‘Early Adopter Communities’ – aligned with its fairer futures partnerships and offering easier access to the support families need.
• Prioritise funding to increase the pay of workers in adult social care who are delivering direct care in commissioned services, early learning and childcare workers delivering funded hours, and children’s social care workers, so that they are paid at least the Real Living Wage from April 2025.

 Education

• Implementing the Curriculum Improvement Cycle, with work underway on maths and numeracy, led by the National Mathematics Specialist Adviser
• Reforming its national education bodies to drive improvement. This includes a redesigned Education Scotland with a primary focus on the curriculum, a Centre for Teaching Excellence, replacing the Scottish Qualifications Authority with Qualifications Scotland, and creating a new independent inspectorate.

Children in need of special protection and support

• Test its approach to Bairns’ Hoose across ten areas – providing safe, trauma informed environments for child victims and witnesses to access multi-agency support and recovery services – ahead of a national rollout, incrementally, from 2027;
• Continue work to Keep the Promise by consulting on the next stages of reform of the children’s hearing system, future of foster care, and the support available to those moving on from care;
• Work with Police Scotland and Crimestoppers/Fearless to fund and develop a targeted sextortion awareness campaign to be launched this year.

Human rights

• Seeking to strengthen implementation of human rights and advancing proposals around extended rights protections. The Scottish Government remain committed to legislation to incorporate international treaties into Scots law, developing proposals and engaging with stakeholders.
• Consult on and publish a framework to embed equality and human rights across the Scottish Government and the wider public sector.
• The Scottish Government intends to introduce 14 Bills over the course of the parliamentary year – alongside 12 Bills already before the Scottish Parliament including the Post-School Education Reform.

This brilliant blog by Nicole Busby, Professor of Human Rights, Equality, and Justice at the University of Glasgow, highlights the Scottish Government's decision to omit the highly anticipated Human Rights Bill from its 2024-25 Programme for Government. It also discusses the broader implications of this delay, including concerns over missed opportunities to strengthen protections for people whose rights are most at risk and address inequalities.

• Read the full Programme for Government 2024-25 here.
• Read the First Minister's accompanying speech here.
• Read the full blog here