Education Committee, 29 Sep 2004

Meeting date: Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Official Report 196KB pdf

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Early-years Learning and Child Care

Item 3 is consideration of correspondence from the Scottish Executive on early-years learning and child care. Members will remember that we discussed the matter a little while ago and asked the minister to advise us of further developments. The minister wrote to us shortly before the summer recess, so the information is a couple of months out of date. We are aware that the review of the early-years and child care work force that was announced in June is scheduled to report to the minister around June 2005. At the committee's away day we agreed that the outcomes of various Executive initiatives might well be the focus for a committee inquiry in 2005. Do members want to raise any matters or request clarification from the Executive on any matter?

The Executive says of the integrated early-years strategy:

"We aim to publish the strategy in summer 2004."

I think that the strategy is to be published in autumn 2004.

The strategy has not yet been published.

Perhaps the Executive is talking about an Indian summer.

This is a small point, but it might be helpful if the Executive could tell the committee how the £29 million that it will invest in child care in the coming year will be allocated.

Do you mean to ask how the money will be allocated between different councils?

I mean to ask how the sum will be broken down in general.

I am not sure that I follow you. I think that the money will be allocated to councils—there is a formula for that. Is the allocation broken down beyond that?

The Executive does not do that. I am not even sure that the specific amounts for each council are in the budget documents, although we might be able to get that information from the Executive.

It might be helpful if the Executive was asked to provide the information so that we are clear how the money is allocated.

We will take evidence on the budget in the fairly near future. That may be a better time to raise the issue.

On that subject, I wonder whether the money will in due course be mainstreamed into local authority budgets and whether there will be an agreement on outputs, so that the Executive can check that the money goes where it is supposed to go. That should probably also be raised as part of the budget process.

Parenting is an important aspect of early-years learning and child care. Is it possible to get information from the Executive about where parenting fits in its responsibilities?

Parenting straddles different departments. I am sure that the Development Department has some input through social inclusion partnership funding and so on. We could ask the Scottish Parliament information centre for a briefing on that.

I would be interested to find out who takes the lead on the issue.

Perhaps we should write directly to the minister, then.

To follow on from that, the correspondence mentions that the final report of the study on the demand for child care was to be published in June 2004. I cannot recall seeing that report.

I think that it has been published.

We could check that and get some information to the committee—the report may be too large to circulate.

Has any evaluation been done of the impact of the pledge to provide free nursery places for three and four-year-olds?

Figures have been released about the percentages—almost all four-year-olds and a large percentage of three-year-olds have taken it up—but I suspect that you are talking more about the quality of the change that takes place.

The uptake has been good, but I am interested more in the impact of the policy on the children. It would be interesting to know about that, if we were considering whether the policy should be extended.

It is certainly the understanding that early-years intervention should lead to better outputs and outcomes later on. I am not sure if a specific study has been done of the outcome of nursery school provision. We will inquire about that from the Executive.

I am interested to know if there is any on-going research, such as a time-series study.

We should also ask whether the Executive has any plans for such research.

We can pick up on that point when we hear more about the integrated early-years strategy—I hope that it will refer to evaluation. The baseline assessment has been available for several years, which should give an idea of the impact of the measures.

We will write to the minister on the bits and pieces that we have identified. Otherwise, as we agreed, we will come back to the subject of early-years learning and child care, probably around the middle or later part of next year, when there will be more information to get our teeth into. Do members agree with that course of action?

Members indicated agreement.