Meeting of the Parliament 02 October 2019
I thank Iain Gray for bringing the debate to the chamber, and I pay tribute to Fulton MacGregor. I also want to commend speeches by members from across the chamber—too many to mention individually in my short allocation of time.
Today’s debate has focused on the Give Them Time campaign’s ambition to end the unfairness that faces many families whose children are born between mid-August and the end of December. As we have heard, parents have a legal right to defer those children’s entry to P1 for a year if they decide that the child is not yet ready to begin school. However, as things currently stand, those children are not legally entitled to automatic funded childcare throughout that deferment year: rather, that funding decision is left to each local authority.
In contrast, children who are born in January and February are automatically entitled to funded childcare if their entry is deferred, which means that the picture for a child who is born in December might be totally different from that for a child who is born in January.
As a result of my curiosity about that varying picture, I recently submitted a freedom of information request to every local authority in Scotland. For the year 2018-19, only three of the 28 local authorities that responded said that they automatically grant that year of funded childcare to children who are born between mid-August and December. On top of that, just 15 said that they grant more than 90 per cent of requests for the funded year. The result of that variance in policies among councils is that many parents who wish to defer their child’s entry to P1 are unable to do so. That evidence and the speeches that we have heard today confirm the inconsistency of the situation across Scotland.
Should it not, therefore, follow that the Scottish Government would make every effort to correct that? The Government’s amendment today surprises me only a little, because in an Education and Skills Committee meeting in May, the Minister for Children and Young People told the committee that she was confident that local authorities
“make decisions on the basis of the best interests of the child and in conjunction with the parents.”—[Official Report, Education and Skills Committee, 22 May 2019; c 8.]
In fact, the minister responded to several different questions from the committee with exactly the same response. However, if the minister had been confident that that was the case, there would not now be a commitment to introduce legislation to fix the anomaly.
As matters stand, two children who live in two different local authority areas who are at similar stages of development and might even share the same birthday could end up at opposite ends of the choice just because their local authorities have different policies on funding the extra year of childcare. It appears from the minister’s words in committee that the Scottish Government’s position was, until today, that every child who was denied that year of childcare received their best possible outcome.
Let us be clear: today’s motion does not seek to restrict local democracy. That being the case, the Government’s amendment is not pertinent. The motion is about correcting the anomaly that we all agree exists. There should be no anomaly; there should be a clear route from nursery to primary school, regardless of where the child lives. The decision on when a child goes to school should be based on the parents’ opinion of whether their child is ready for that step.
Starting school is one of the most important days in a child’s life—not to mention the parents’ lives. It is essential that we get that day right for every child.
15:38