Piloting an Approach to Identifying Preventative Spend in the Scottish Budget

Annex C – Education and Skills Portfolio Pilot

Introduction

As part of the preventative budgeting pilot programme, a pilot study was developed with the Education and Skills (E&S) portfolio to understand how prevention features in spending across the portfolio. This Annex covers the approach taken in the pilot and some of the aggregate results generated from the pilot study.

Approach

The pilot was designed to cover a sub-set of 2025/26 Level 4 budget lines in the E&S Portfolio that cover a mix of different types of budget lines (preventative and non-preventative) and different levels of prevention (if preventative). Lines were selected for inclusion that met these criteria.

The final scope included 22 Level 4 budget lines (around £607mn), which is around 27% of the total number of Level 4 budget lines in E&S portfolio (82) and 19% of the total value. The lines included are shown in Figure 22.

• Whole Family Wellbeing Fund
• Children/ Young People Improvement Collab
• Supporting families with disabled children
• Parenting, play and family support
• Children's hearings work
• UNCRC children and young people's rights
• Preventing offending in young people
• Child protection
• (Education) Workforce development
• School age childcare
• The Promise
• Early Learning and Childcare expansion
• Local government attainment grant
• Health and wellbeing
• Equalities and inclusion
• Communications teams (schools)
• Compensation payments
• Learning Support Advice and Policy
• Schools unitary charges
• Technologies for learning
• School estate
• Raising Attainment

The Level 4 Budget lines included in the pilot varied significantly in terms of value, and scope of activities covered within each line. In some cases, a simple tag was applied to the Level 4 Budget line (e.g. Pupil Equity Funding, Technologies for Learning). For some of the larger budget lines, we used additional budget information or additional data to apportion activity. This approach was used for lines such as Whole Family Wellbeing Funding, the Promise, and Preventing Offending in Young People. For Whole Family Wellbeing Funding, we followed a bespoke approach using returns from a sample of Children’s Services Planning Partnerships in receipt of the funding to understand how this money is spent. This was used to generate proportions that could be applied to overall spend.

Figure 23 sets out examples of how different budget lines were classified as per our definitions of prevention.

Classification: Examples

Primary Prevention

• WFWF – funding for building parent/ child relationships, play and attachment, community spaces
• School Age Childcare – spending on Scottish Football Association out of hours clubs
• UNCRC – Young Scot funding to support young people claim their rights
• Parenting Play and Family Support - Bookbug

Secondary Prevention

• WFWF – supporting at-risk children/ families, those with identified need
• Supporting families with disabled children - Family Fund Trust Scottish Grant Programme
• School Age Childcare – Early Adopting Communities (Clackmannanshire Council)
• Children’s Hearing’s work – Children’s Hearings Advocacy

Tertiary Prevention

• Child Protection - Bairn’s Hoose Funds for victims or witnesses of abuse
• WFWF – Care experienced children, trauma and crisis support
• Preventing Offending by Young People – ROSSIE (Esk House) residential care for young people
• The Promise – Care Leaver Payment for young people transitioning to independent living

Enabling

• WFWF – strengthening system join up, integration and collaboration
• The Promise – funding CELCIS for research and participation support
• Preventing Offending by Young People – Centre for Youth and Criminal Justice Funding
• Workforce Development – social work service capacity building

Acute/ responsive/ treatment

• Preventing Offending by Young People – Secure Care Accommodation for those who are risk to themselves or others

Other

• The Promise Scotland – legal commitment to provide and adoption register
• Workforce Development – general staff costs or placements
• Multiple – general research spend and events

Results

This section sets out the results from the budget tagging exercise for those budget areas covered as part of the E&S portfolio.

Note these results should be taken as preliminaryand could change between the pilot phase and the final preventative spend estimates planned for Summer 2026 . Caution should also be taken when drawing broader conclusions and comparing against other portfolios, given the exercise only covers a sub-set of the budget. The final aggregate results for the full portfolio (planned Summer 2026) may look different from the sample of pilot lines.

Preventative spend

The pilot study found that around 61% of E&S 2025/26 planned spending covered by the pilot can be defined as preventative (around £371m), while 3% was “enabling” (£19m), 4% was “acute/ responsive” (£23m) and 32% “Other/ general service” (£194m) (Figure 24).

Level of prevention

Of the 2025/26 budgeted preventative spend recorded, the majority of spend was classified as secondary prevention (Figure 25). Around 82% of the total preventative spend was spent on secondary prevention (£305m). Primary prevention accounted for around 9% of spend, (£33m) and tertiary prevention 9% (£34m).