On the Scottish Parliament’s Motions, Questions and Answers Search website, British Labour’s Scotland Branch, Shadowy Minister for Education, Iain Gray, is reported as having asked this question and as having got, for him, an embarrassing answer:
Question S5W-20759: Iain Gray, East Lothian, Scottish Labour, Date Lodged: 20/12/2018
To ask the Scottish Government for what reason Individual Training Accounts are no longer available, and whether it plans to re-introduce these.
Answered by Jamie Hepburn (15/01/2019):
Following a hugely successful year for the new Individual Training Account (ITA) programme, demand from individuals has been strong and the target of 18,500 accounts has been exceeded ahead of schedule. It is anticipated that when all verified individuals in the system have been processed, the number of people who have benefitted from ITAs in 2018-19 will exceed 22,000.
Now, I might be misreading this but is Jamie not, politely, telling Iain that his answer is a bit daft?
*Is Jamie being disingenuous? Are they still on for 2019/20? Surely, he’d have said if they weren’t.
Jamie come try me?
I think they changed the name from individual learning accounts (ILAs) to individual training accounts (ITAs) sometime in the last 2 years – I expect Iain Gray just heard that ILAs no longer exist and ran with this, without checking if anything else had replaced them
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Thanks. Very helpful.
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