Hansard

This is not the first time that the Parliament has debated the aims of the Give Them Time campaign, but it is the first time that we will have a vote on the proposal. I fully support the right of parents or carers to defer the start of school until their child is five and I will vote tonight for automatic entitlement to a nursery place for a deferred year.

In May, I took part in Fulton MacGregor’s member’s business debate on the issue. It is clear that there is support across the political parties for the campaign, which is about addressing an inconsistency in the law. That law gives parents a clear right to make a decision to defer but too often has negative consequences, as it does not always provide continuing education. The inconsistent approach across Scotland leaves too many families feeling disempowered, under investigation and disadvantaged. This afternoon, we can commit to ending that situation and supporting parents’ decisions on when their child is emotionally, socially and intellectually ready for school.

On the one hand, the legislation is clear that a child does not have to start school until they are five but, on the other, children are expected to start school at age four if their birthday is between school commencement and December. Parents whose child is four in December or January have the same choice to defer the child’s entry, but some parents who exercise the right to defer are not provided with an additional year’s nursery place, because that policy is not consistently applied by local authorities.

I have an issue with some of the language and, in particular, the terms “defer” and “additional”. The legislation says that a child does not need to register with a school prior to their fifth birthday, so why is not starting school at four seen as a delay when it is true to the legislation? We talk about an “additional” year at nursery, but the reality is that the children who start school at four typically have the least time at nursery. They start nursery in the January following their third birthday, so they have only one and a half years there rather than two. They are the youngest in the school year, but they have had the least pre-school education.

In the debate in May and today, we have talked a lot about awareness raising and parents’ lack of knowledge of the right to defer. That is important, but it does not resolve the issue of children not being awarded a nursery place. A parent can decide that they want to defer and go through what some describe as a bureaucratic and difficult assessment, but then the education authority might decide that it will not support deferral. Although the child can legally still wait a year, the education authority does not have to provide what it sees as an additional year’s nursery provision.

We should not forget that a child who starts school at four will start high school at 11 and will be almost a whole year younger than others at a challenging time in their education, when they are entering a period of exams and increased stress and are going through adolescence. For many parents, the consideration of their child’s high school starting age is as relevant as their child’s primary school starting age.

In the previous debate, I asked the minister to consider whether discussions could take place with parents at an earlier stage. There could be an initial discussion about options at the point when a child turns three and a parent is offered a January nursery place. Perhaps a parent of a younger child could be offered the opportunity to delay the start of nursery until the August intake. The child would then receive two full years of nursery, as the majority of other children do, and start school at five. If the barrier is financial, that approach would result in no child receiving additional months in education.

However, the simpler solution—this is the one that I fully support—would be to change the necessary legislation so that there is an automatic right to a further year of nursery education every time that a parent chooses to defer the school start.

Our motion today calls for “the necessary resources” for the policy of automatic nursery provision. I welcome the Government’s announcement that it intends to legislate, but if it actually supports the content of the motion, its amendment is unnecessary—unless it is an attempt to avoid or delay making that legislative change. When I wrote to the local authorities in my region, they did not say that the decisions that they are making about deferrals are governed by funding. The number of families involved is quite small and in many cases there is available space in a local nursery to enable nursery provision to continue. The Give Them Time campaign also makes the fair point that the savings made from all the children who have only one and a half years of nursery education could offset any additional costs.

We cannot support the growth of self-financing by parents—it must not be the only option open to parents who want their child to benefit from a continued nursery placement. I hope that members can agree to the calls of the Give Them Time campaign and support legislative change in this Parliament.