Meeting of the Parliament 03 June 2015
On 20 November last year, in her first First Minister’s question time, Nicola Sturgeon gave a very firm commitment that her door would always be “open for sensible discussion”. A month later, on 11 December, at First Minister’s question time, she assured Ruth Davidson that she would listen to sensible suggestions from all Opposition parties. Since then, the Scottish Conservatives have tried on three occasions to ensure that the First Minister keeps that promise and today we will try for the fourth time. We will do so, to use a line from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning’s speech at the University of Glasgow two weeks ago, on the basis of “what works” and not dogma or ideology.
On Thursday last week, Ruth Davidson cited the case of Marisa, a single mother in Glasgow who had turned down three job offers because she could not find a nursery that could take her daughter during the hours that suited. We believe that that situation is not only unacceptable on educational and economic grounds, but is directly contrary to the stated aims of the Scottish Government’s social policy.
Although everyone in this Parliament supports the move from 475 to 600 hours of provision and the additional money that has been put in place to support that policy, we can surely never be content until all parents can access their entitlement. The issue is not so much about the number of hours on offer, but about parents’ access to them and the current inflexibility in when the hours can be taken. The First Minister, although she acknowledges the concerns of some parents about the issue, does not seem to recognise that the situation cannot improve until there is a radically different approach. Additional hours are no use unless they can be properly accessed.
I will spend a little time on the detail of the problem before I set out what we think to be the solution. In the first instance, the problem relates to the fact that neither the Scottish Government nor the local authorities seem able to provide the full facts. That is because data is weak, incomplete or, in some cases, meaningless. For example, the Scottish Government persists in using what is described as the registration figure, which it believes shows a 98.5 per cent uptake. Parents groups, however, struggle to understand that statistic, given that the evidence on the ground shows something entirely different. From the evidence that they have compiled, their opinion is that the uptake figure is closer to 80 per cent, which obviously tells us that the problem is still acute for one in five children.
Fair funding for our kids looked at the 2014 nursery census and found that 2,802 children were registered in partnership providers in Glasgow. However, the number of places was only 2,089. In other words, 713 children are not receiving the funding that had been included in the registration statistics, which incidentally correlates with almost £1.5 million-worth of funding.