Meeting of the Parliament 08 March 2016
Like everyone else who has contributed this evening, I thank Cara Hilton for bringing this important debate to Parliament. Although we have differences, it is important—as she said in the closing remarks of her speech—that we work together on areas of commonality. Like Cara, I have a young family. You do not have to have a young family to understand the pressures of family life, but it is a practical, lived experience of the challenges that many people across the country face.
I am delighted to have an opportunity to debate childcare, because this Government has been ambitious in what it wants to do to ensure that all our children get the best possible start in life and that we can make a significant difference for future generations of families.
We have massively expanded early learning and childcare by almost half from 412.5 hours a year to 600 hours a year, and we have committed to almost doubling that to 1,140 hours a year by the end of the next session of Parliament. That is equivalent to the number of hours that a child spends at school. The reason why we focus on hours is that we want to ensure that the provision is configured in a much more flexible way, in response to what families need.
On the points that Iain Gray made on the costs of childcare, the cost of 25 hours and 50 hours a week of childcare is lower in every area in Scotland than is the case in England and the rest of the UK. Scotland’s childcare costs are lower, and we are trying to ensure that we are providing the resource that is necessary to help families even further.
We have fully funded that expansion, and have already invested £500 million in the first three years. Far from cutting expenditure, we have invested unprecedented levels of capital: £170 million to front load infrastructure changes, with local authorities receiving their final £30 million instalment in 2016-17, as agreed with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. It is absolutely vital that that full funding that is allocated by the Scottish Government is prioritised on the transformation that we seek over the next session of Parliament.
This is money well invested. With it, we are improving outcomes for all our children, especially those who will benefit most; supporting parents to work, train or study, especially those who need routes into sustainable employment; and reducing the burden of costs to parents, with an equivalent saving of £780 a year for those additional hours.
Our ambitions go beyond simply increasing hours. Our aim is to develop high-quality, flexible early learning and childcare that is affordable and accessible for all and is integrated with school and out-of-school care. That is why the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 introduced for the first time an entitlement for the 27 per cent of two-year-olds who will benefit most from early learning and childcare. That will make a significant contribution to closing the attainment gap and improving equality for all our children. That is also why we have introduced for the first time a requirement on local authorities to provide choice and flexibility, based on local consultations with parents, providing opportunities for employability support and family support.
If we are serious about giving children the best possible start in life, quality is non-negotiable. I agree that that does not have to be just about free hours; it must also be about quality and flexibility. That is why we are making early learning and childcare part of the learning journey from birth, integrated with the earlier stages of the curriculum for excellence; supporting the development of an early learning and childcare workforce, which is—in response to Mary Scanlon—highly valued and based on specialist skills; introducing additional graduates from 2018 to support children who will benefit most; creating a new standard of training and induction for childminders, so that they can become integral to our expansion of funded entitlements; continuing to fund the University of Aberdeen and the University of Strathclyde to deliver early years-specific masters qualifications for primary teachers, in order to provide opportunities for teachers to specialise; and providing £1 million to invest in pilots of different types of early learning and childcare, as a way of finding out what works well for children and families.