Hansard

I think that this is the eighth time in the recent past that the Parliament has engaged in a full debate about the early years programme, alongside the many committee sessions and ministerial statements on the same issue. That is a sign of what the minister just said about the issue’s prominence; it is also a sign that the issue continues to present the Scottish Government—if not the whole Parliament—with some of its most significant challenges, as the publication of this week’s report makes abundantly clear.

Even if we might dispute some of the figures and exactly whose fault the underspend might be, we learn from the report that such an underspend has taken place. I can well understand that some parents, when they saw that news this morning, might have wondered exactly what happened and might be a little perturbed.

The feedback from last week’s early years Scotland conference, which included some of Scotland’s foremost thinkers in the area, made plain exactly what the policy challenges are, as well as reiterating the compelling and consistent evidence about the importance of the early years. There is unanimous agreement about the challenges that we face but perhaps less agreement about how to confront those challenges.

I will set out the policy commitments from the Conservatives and I will press the Scottish Government hard to make one important and radical change by adopting another Scottish Conservative policy that it has said publicly that it is keen on, because of the feedback from parents, but which I notice does not appear in its motion. I will come to that a bit later.

First, I will deal with the earliest years—even the period pre-birth. I restate our firm commitment to the midwife and health visiting system, which commands the overwhelming trust of the public because it delivers some of the finest personal family care in Scotland, thanks to a dedicated and professional staff. The Scottish Government has rightly pledged to create 500 more health visitor posts, but that still leaves many professionals with huge case loads, and we know that there are recruitment issues in some areas.

Evidence from abroad suggests that we should seek to extend health visitor provision up to the age of seven years rather than just five, but that demands a major spending commitment. As that can be only a longer-term aim just now, there are perhaps other things that we can do in the short term.

Part of that should involve addressing neonatal care. We all know that a recent report from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health identified overworked staff, cancelled appointments and insufficient medical cover in some children’s wards. The report also said that staff did not get enough time off to study for the crucial training courses and qualifications that they need to do their jobs properly. Those are serious concerns.

I turn specifically to childcare and nursery provision, and I set my comments against the backdrop of the changes to schools policy that were recently announced. The Scottish Government has a laudable aim to deliver 600 hours of free childcare, but the reality is that the provision of places remains a problem. The majority of funded places are made up of three-hour slots, exactly as Daniel Johnson described. In many schools, provision can happen only in term time, and some families are forced to use private providers even if that is not their first choice.

On top of that, a number of local authority places can be purchased only in partnership nurseries, for which there is sometimes a capping policy. We know from the work that has been carried out by authorities, education experts and parents groups such as the fair funding for our kids group that there are serious pressures in provision. Despite the Scottish Government’s commitment to increase the number of hours that are provided, those pressures are putting barriers in the way of really flexible access for parents in choosing a place for their child. The net result is that both choice and flexibility are heavily constrained.

Here lies a contradiction in the Scottish National Party policy. The Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills, John Swinney, has said unequivocally that the best education needs to be based on strong pupil-teacher trust and that that is greatly enhanced when staff are liberated to follow their own professional instincts and when schools enjoy greater autonomy. If that is true—I whole-heartedly agree with Mr Swinney in that respect—surely that is also the case for childcare and nursery provision.

If the Scottish Government is now committed to the principle of freeing up our primary and secondary schools and to acting on “A Plan for Scotland: The Scottish Government’s Programme for Scotland 2016-17”, in which it says that it wants to spend £1 million on testing different delivery models—the minister hinted at that—why will it not also properly free up our nurseries and childcare facilities? Is the Government really committed to a child account, as was reported this morning? I will be interested to know when the minister sums up whether that is a specific pledge.

Like parents, the Scottish Conservatives firmly believe that we need to completely free up the system so that there is genuine choice and so that local authorities are not able to restrict places in the manner that has been flagged up by the fair funding for our kids campaign. At present, the mix of state, partnership and private provision is simply not working well enough.

As a start, we should perhaps look to some of the more flexible local authorities, which at least recognise the problem, even if they are not able to solve it completely. For nursery provision in Edinburgh, for example, a voucher is allocated to parents in the form of a number code that the parents pass to the partnership nursery in which they want to purchase a place. That sometimes does not happen in other council areas, which leaves parents with an unacceptable postcode lottery.

Should we perhaps look to a country such as Sweden, which operates a wholesale and highly successful child voucher system that gives families a choice between public pre-schools and nurseries and approved private and voluntary sector childcare providers? Indeed, should we go even further and introduce a voucher system that allows the state money that is due to a child in his or her early years to be spent in units on registered childcare or nursery provision as and when parents choose? In that way, money would truly follow the child, and the system would be wholly responsive to parental demand.