Hansard

The Parliament holds consensus as one of its key virtues. The procedures that we adhere to, the committee structures and even the building’s architecture were designed to promote agreement on the issues that are important to Scotland. That is not always how it works out, but I think that we all agree that this is one of those issues on which we do agree. We agree that tackling inequality is one of the key things that we are here to do, and the role and importance of childcare in doing that are beyond dispute.

We are all aware of how stubborn the gender pay gap is: women’s pay is on average £175 less per week than that of their male colleagues, and flexible childcare is critical to helping working parents and especially mothers back into work. As the minister and Liz Smith pointed out, we know how critical early years education is to developing children’s education. By the time they reach school, children from the poorest families have a vocabulary of on average 3,000 words, while their wealthy peers have a vocabulary of 5,000 words. If we are serious about tackling the attainment gap, waiting until children are at school is simply too late.

That is why getting childcare right is so important because, without it, we will simply not make headway in tackling such inequalities. I welcome the commitment that the Government is showing to childcare. I welcome the free hours that are being provided and I think that it is right to deliver more.

As Mark McDonald said, although much has been achieved, there is still much to do. To achieve the aims, we need some honesty about what is being delivered and some realism about whether it is meeting the needs of parents and our children.

Most important, we need to know how the Government is going to achieve a massive expansion in capacity. We need three things. We need a plan—we need to know how the expansion is going to work and how capacity is to double. If I may be blunt, while it is welcome that a blueprint is being published for consultation, that is not a full plan.

Secondly, we need quality. Childcare has to improve children’s education and wellbeing. Thirdly, we need flexibility. If childcare does not fit with how work parents work, we are—frankly—barely getting started.

Let us look to the plan. The First Minister has called childcare the biggest capital project of this parliamentary session, and she is right. It will cost more than the Queensferry crossing, more than the M8, M73 and M74 project and more than any school or hospital. Its impact will also be far greater. However, we do not know how much the investment will be, where it is going, when it will be delivered or even who will deliver it.

Almost doubling the hours that are available will almost double the cost. Is the Government committing to spending—in revenue terms—an extra £300 million or maybe £400 million a year? The analysis this week does not spell that out.

On staff, the Government said this week that it does not know how much it will cost to advertise for, train and employ the promised extra 20,000 staff. Most childcare providers are not set up to provide lunch, so an expansion of the current local authority nurseries will require a huge capital injection not just to double the provision but to install hundreds, if not thousands, of kitchens.

We need quality, yet the average full-time early years practitioner who works in a private nursery is paid less than the living wage—they are paid a median of £7.71 per hour. However, nurseries are making a loss on their places, according to the National Day Nurseries Association. How can it be that partner providers are paying poverty pay to the people who look after our children? That cannot be the way to reduce the attainment gap. Any Government system that does not start with the living wage as its absolute minimum and the cornerstone of its calculations needs to look at how it is coming up with its numbers.

Save The Children is calling for all nurseries to include an early years teacher—a graduate with expertise in supporting children’s language development. As we expand funded childcare, we have to ensure that the extra money that is being invested delivers higher-wage, higher-skilled and higher-quality childcare.

We also need flexibility. Labour’s call is for the SNP to lift its sights to what the childcare commission and others have said should be Scotland’s long-term vision—52 weeks a year, and not 38; 50 hours a week, and not 30; provision for one and two-year-olds, too; and provision beyond the age of four.

We need childcare that is flexible enough for parents to use so that they can go back to work. As it stands, childcare is not flexible, and the Government must sort that out as it expands provision. Local authority nurseries are overwhelmingly half-day only. They provide their care in chunks of three hours and 10 minutes once a day, either in the morning or in the afternoon, and not in the school holidays. That is not how my working day runs, and it is the same for parents the length and breadth of Scotland. Every parent is therefore topping up childcare provision with other help and is sometimes ferrying their children—or asking grandparents or childminders to take them—from free provision to paid-for provision.

I ask members to imagine that childcare was totally flexible. If a parent dropped off their child at 8 am and picked them up at 6 pm five days a week from January, their 600 hours would run out by the end of March. Even if the provision was doubled, it would get them only to mid-June. With half-day childcare, we are only halfway there.

Because childcare issues do not go away when a child goes to school, we also need a plan for childcare that includes children beyond the age of four, with proper wraparound care. A great starting point would be a breakfast club being available to every child in every school. The arguments for breakfast clubs are clear and have been well rehearsed. They are great for parents who work, train or study. They are brilliant for children’s nutrition and they set children up for the rest of their school day. Despite those facts, however, the proportion of schools with breakfast clubs is lower in Scotland than it is anywhere else in the UK, and there is no plan from the Scottish Government to expand that provision. We therefore hope that SNP members will back our amendment.

The Scottish Government is right to expand childcare. If Labour members sound critical, it is because the current situation needs to be better. We need flexibility and more capacity. We need a plan for childcare. We need childcare that works for children, for parents and for working families.

I am pleased to move amendment S5M-01703.3, to insert after “training or study”:

“; notes the pressures that working families face in accessing affordable and high-quality childcare that fits round their daily lives; considers that a transformational expansion of childcare in Scotland must also look at how to provide affordable wrap-around childcare for all ages as recommended by the Commission for Childcare Reform; recognises the important role that breakfast clubs can play in a child’s start to the school day and to parents’ needs in work, training or study; agrees that the Scottish Government should provide additional investment in breakfast clubs, ensuring that they are available to all primary schools”.