Number and cost of Communications staff

Under the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002, I am requesting the following information: 1. The total number of full-time equivalent (FTE) press and/or communications and/or media officers employed over the last five financial years (broken down by year). 2. The total cost (including salaries, benefits, and other associated costs) of employing these press and/or communications and/or media officers over the last five financial years (broken down by year). 

Under section 25 of the Act, if information is otherwise accessible, an authority should inform the requester as such and where to access the information.

Under the Public Sector Reform (Scotland) Act 2010 (PSRA), SQA annually publishes information on public relations spend. The reports are available on our website and cover the last five financial years - SQA  Annual Report and Accounts.

In 2021, an independent review of our organisation’s communications recommended that services previously provided to SQA by an external PR agency should be brought in-house. This eliminated substantial recurring annual cost and enabled skills to be built and retained among our permanent staff.

Due to the new Communications Directorate structure only being in place since the start of 2022, we are only able to provide comparable staffing figures for 2022, 2023 and 2024. The figures for those years are as follows:

Please find below the total costs since the introduction of the new structure. Please note that the new structure came into place in January 2022 so the 21-22 costs are not comparable with 22-23 or 23-24.