NICOLA Sturgeon has put her personal stamp on the Scottish Government by unveiling a legislative and policy programme aimed at tackling inequalities and addressing long-standing problems in health, education and local government.

The new First Minister set an ambitious target to ensure teenagers from poorer backgrounds attend university in equal numbers to their better-off peers as she unveiled her first Programme for Government.

She also announced radical land reform legislation, giving ministers a say in how private estates are managed, and a commission to consider alternatives to the council tax.

Extra funding will be found to tackle "bed blocking" in hospitals, after figures this week showed cases have more than doubled over the past year.

Ms Sturgeon said achieving a long-term solution to the problem of delayed discharges, by integrating NHS and community care, would become a "key objective" for the government next year.

She also announced measures to promote gender equality and reduce poverty by encouraging firms to pay the "living wage," a higher rate of pay than the minimum wage.

The Programme for Government -Holyrood's equivalent of the Queen's Speech - was delayed from September because of the referendum and Alex Salmond's resignation.

In a legislative programme speech shorter on rhetorical flourishes and longer on detail than her predecessor's, she told MSPs her three priorities were "participation, prosperity and fairness".

Calling for cross-party support for the wide-ranging package of new laws and policy initiatives, she added: "I hope I have given an indication today of how the government I lead will carry itself, in a way that is open, listening, accessible and decentralising.

Ms Sturgeon announced a new Commission on Widening Access to drive efforts to ensure teenagers from the poorest 20 per cent of communities are equally represented at university within a generation.

The move will go hand in hand with a literacy and numeracy campaign called "Read, Write, Count," for primary schools in deprived areas.

Ms Sturgeon said widening access was a "personal mission".

She will seek to promote gender equality with a "50:50 by 2020" campaign encouraging private, public and third sector organisations to ensure half their boards are female within six years.

Ms Sturgeon repeated her pledge to increase frontline NHS budgets after 2016 if the SNP win the next election, despite warnings during the independence referendum that privatisation of services down south would reduce cash for the health service in Scotland.

She also threatened to ban councils from charging care fees to terminal cancer sufferers in the last six months of life.

The pledge followed a meeting with Gordon Aikman, who has campaigned on behalf of Motor Neurone Disease sufferers.

Mr Aikman, 29, who has been told he less than a year to live, said: "I would rather Nicola Sturgeon outlawed care charges for terminally-ill patents right away but I welcome her vow to crack down on councils still breaking the guidance."

Scottish Labour dismissed the measures as a "missed opportunity" to tackle inequality. Stand-in leader Jackie Baillie said the commission considering council tax reform would delay changes until after 2016, while cash strapped councils continue to cut services.

The Scottish Conservatives said the programme promised little to boost the economy.

On land reform, pMSP Alex Fergusson said: "The First Minister wants to establish a Land Reform Commission to decide matters such as who owns too much land and whether or not the management of that land is appropriate.

"Big Brother is about to be legislated for by a government that said it would govern for all Scotland's people.

"It would appear that that is not the case if you own land."