Funding provided for Positive Behaviour Support (PBS): FOI release

Information requested

How much money has been spent on by year and is planned or budgeted to be spent in the next 5 years by Scottish Government on Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) for funding challenging behaviour PBS parent training by The Richmond Fellowship Scotland and as part of the recommendations in Section 7.4 of The Coming Home Report.

You also stated: This includes funding for the running of the PBS Community of Practice in Scotland, expenses and staff costs of PBS leads, workforce PBS training, establishing a department and course at Glasgow University and for the Scottish Commission of Learning Disability to platform PBS.

Response

Below is some of the information requested. 

The Scottish Government does not currently fund and does not plan to fund, The Richmond Fellowship Scotland in relation to PBS parent training. However, there were historical grants issued to The Richmond Fellowship Scotland in relation to the Autism Development Fund. The Richmond Fellowship Scotland was provided with 2 years of funding for their 'Positive Pathways' programme between 2015 and 2017. Positive Pathways was a training programme for family carers of autistic adults to help families implement Positive Behaviour Support in their homes.

I have included a breakdown of these figures below:

Financial Year 2015 - 2016	£62,348
Financial Year 2016 - 2017	£47,526
Total	£109,874

The answer to your question on this particular point is one hundred and nine thousand, eight hundred and seventy four pounds (£109,874.00) pounds.

For the second part of your request it might help to begin with by explaining that currently, funding is only confirmed for the current financial year. Future budgets are subject to the annual spending review and approval by Scottish Parliament, and therefore I cannot provide all the information you asked for with respect to the planned budget for the next 5 years as this information isn't yet available.

The PBS Community of Practice is ran by the Scottish Commission for People with Learning Disabilities (SCLD). The PBS Community of Practice is one of numerous workstreams that the organisation is involved in. The PBS Community of Practice is a 2 hour meeting held, on average, once every 3 months attended by two staff members. Staff costs associated with this are therefore negligible and I cannot provide a figure.

Scottish Government does fund Dr Anne MacDonald through the University of Glasgow in relation to a number of workstreams relevant to the Coming Home report which was published in November 2018. This includes working with Health and Social Care Partnerships to help them implement the recommendations of the Coming Home report as well as work to establish and deliver a Postgraduate Certificate in PBS. We fund Glasgow University one hundred thousand pounds per year (£100,000.00) in total. We estimate the delivery of PBS to be 60% of Dr MacDonald's work. Therefore I can give an estimated figure of sixty thousand pounds per year (£60,000.00) however this is an estimate as it includes hidden costs such as management fee's and employee on-costs charged by the University. I have included a table of these figures below:

Financial Year 2019 - 2020	£60,000
Financial Year 2020 - 2021	£60,000
Financial Year 2021 - 2022	£60,000
Total	£180,000

'PBS Leads' is an informal term and these are not formal posts. Where they exist, they are funded by Local Authorities and likely form a negligible part of an individuals role. Scottish Government does not hold this information and you may wish to approach the local authorities, although it may not be possible for figures to be calculated.

You may be interested to read the Position Statement by SCLD on PBS which attempts to describe the definition of PBS as a concept of approaching personalised care. Although various definitions of PBS exist across Scotland, for Scottish Government and SCLD, PBS is not a single intervention but rather the name given to taking a person-centred approach.

Based on the above information, the best estimate for - How much money has been spent by the Scottish Government on PBS? - is two hundred and eighty-nine thousand, eight hundred and seventy four pounds (£289,874.00 ) This covers the period of the past 7 years (from financial year 2013-14), which under current records managements processes is the standard length of time we keep records.

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