Meeting of the Parliament 25 January 2023
When the First Minister announced the scheme for 1,140 hours she was at Fallin nursery in Stirling. She said:
“All children deserve the best start in life. Providing access to free, high-quality early learning and childcare enriches children’s early years and provides them with skills and confidence for starting school and beyond. It also supports parents’ ability to work, train or study.”
The then COSLA children and young people spokesperson, Councillor Stephen McCabe, said of the programme:
“These additional hours will be transformative for families, ensuring children have more time to play and learn while parents and carers will have more opportunities to work, study or volunteer.”
I mention that because the ethos behind the programme was not only to provide Government-funded childcare for under-fives but to allow parents and caregivers to have time for themselves, which in most cases they use to return to work. I would go so far as to say that for the 1,140 hours scheme to work properly, it has to meet the needs of working parents and allow them to do just that.
Most working parents commute to work. Fallin nursery, which is the one that the First Minister visited, opens at 8 o’clock in the morning. If someone lives in the Stirling area and works in Edinburgh, they need to catch the 7.29 train to guarantee that they will get to work for 9. Coming home, they need to catch the 5.33 from Waverley, which arrives in Stirling well after 6, which is when the nursery closes. That assumes that the trains are actually running or are on time.
A simple blend of having a childminder to top and tail the nursery offer would be perfect, but that blend is proving problematic. We have heard from my colleague Meghan Gallacher about the issues that are faced by the private nurseries, but the childminding offer is in sharp decline and under threat too.
The Scottish Government’s 2022 report, “Childminding workforce trends: qualitative research report” comes up with the following points:
“The childminding workforce has declined by 28% in Scotland between 2014 and 2020”;
the annual decreases of childminders have been accelerating since 2017; the proportion of childminders over the age of 55 has steadily increased, from 11 per cent in 2010 to 24 per cent in 2020;
“a quarter of respondents to the Scottish Childminding Association ... 2020 members’ survey said they were unlikely to still be childminding in five years’ time”;
and
“the process of becoming a childminder was generally viewed ... as time consuming and overly bureaucratic”.
On pay, the report states:
“The amount of administration required was seen as exacerbating the low pay issue because of the longer hours it requires of childminders”.
I could go on, but I have only four minutes. Nevertheless, that is quite a damning list. What is the point of the follow the child funding programme when blended childcare is becoming limited at best? The current level of funding is insufficient to work in this situation, but that is for an entirely different debate.
I look at the decline that has been highlighted by both the National Day Nurseries Association and the Scottish Childminding Association: nursery staffing in crisis, childminding in crisis, the wage disparity, the on-costs and the administration and bureaucracy. We are rapidly heading towards having no offer at all. Let us be honest: that cannot help but reduce the 87 per cent that has already been mentioned here today.
A mix of childminder, public and private offers is imperative to fit in with the needs of the family as well as for the children whom it is meant to provide for. Setting up a nuanced mix of what is available so that a child becomes settled, safe and secure in the time away from their parents is fundamental.
If we do not sort this out, the objective of the 1,140 hours will fail. It will fail to provide for working parents, for rural nurseries, for childminders and, most of all, for all children, which cannot be allowed to happen.
18:33