Meeting of the Parliament 31 October 2018
The people Clare Adamson needs to speak to are those in the gallery who brought the issue to my attention. I think that 2020 will be too late and that balloting for places is not the way forward.
We have councils that are supplying childcare for 38 weeks of the year but have the audacity to ask the private providers to deliver holiday cover. Not only is that grossly insulting, it most definitely does not have the child’s wellbeing at the centre of the policy. One council is allocating all Scottish index of multiple deprivation 1 to 4 places to the local authority, with SIMD 5 and 6 going to private nurseries. Where is the parental choice in that? Why are they forcing those SIMD 1 to 4 children out of the partnership nurseries that they are already settled in? That council is taking choice away and is labelling children.
I have listened to stories of local authorities that have openly stated that they do not believe in partnership nursery childcare and have no intention of working with private providers at all. They are going to take all their childcare in-house, rather than use nurseries that have delivered decades of top-quality care and have become an integral part of the community. Every nursery represented at the meeting highlighted the issue of local authorities recruiting directly from the partnership nurseries into local authority nurseries. They are losing so many of their highly trained, qualified staff that the Care Inspectorate is now downgrading them because of an increase in staff turnover.
There are huge discrepancies between what the SNP Government and the minister have asked local authorities to deliver, and what they are delivering. There are local authorities that are consulting and using partnership nurseries as a crucial part of scaling up childcare in Scotland. However, as I have tried to highlight today, a significant number are treating them as anything but partners.
I ask the minister to meet the representatives of partnership nurseries who are in the gallery today and to listen to their concerns directly. The minister and the Government must get this right. Aspiration is not enough without a proper plan and a continued audit of its implementation.
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