Due to the Coronavirus crisis we have been unable to process Young Scot cards for P7 pupils – our usual timescales and processes were completely disrupted as you might imagine.  The card production bureau, which services the whole of Scotland and beyond had to close its doors during the lockdown, and has only just re-opened, however they are still not able to accept large bulk files due to limited capacity and competing priorities. In North Lanarkshire we produce approximately 4000 cards for the new intake each year.

We are liaising with the National Entitlement Card Programme Office and await further guidance about what the new production timescales and arrangements will be for our local authority.  The last communication indicated an aim to have cards produced for pupils returning to school in August, and the likely scenario will be that we will have to arrange for cards to be sent to a central location (Civic Centre) where we can sort them and distribute to high schools just prior to the start of the new term. This is a change to our normal system whereby cards are posted to primary schools for distribution to P7 pupils prior to their induction visits in May and June. A very small number of pupils will already have received their cards, as they were processed during a test run in February. Another small batch will receive cards sent to home addresses as the file has already been encrypted and coded as such.

We have the majority of the cardholder data ready and waiting to be sent for production, and will securely transfer the data as soon as we have the go ahead to do so. After we have done that, we will be able to identify which pupils have not yet supplied the required data and follow up with them directly, by matching against records. Rest assured that even though we are a very small team, we will do our utmost to produce a card for each pupil as soon as we are able to do so.

We are also liaising with catering services as we understand the importance of the card being used in the school cashless catering system.

In the meantime, you might like to direct your pupils to the excellent resources at[ http://www.young.scot ]www.young.scot including our own local pages at[ https://young.scot/north-lanarkshire ]https://young.scot/north-lanarkshire. Young people aged 12+ can sign up for young scot membership and access additional opportunities, rewards and discounts on the web page. Our social media pages also contain lots of great information about events, opportunities and youth issues, so please follow @NLCYouthwork and encourage pupils and parents to do the same.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact the North Lanarkshire Young Scot team by email[ mailto:Youngscot@northlan.gov.uk ]Youngscot@northlan.gov.uk , although please do not send enquiries about individuals at this time.

Kind regards.

Young Scot Team