The next item of business is a members’ business debate on motion S6M-19090, in the name of Jamie Greene, on addressing the postcode lottery of early learning and childcare provision. The debate will be concluded without any question being put. I invite members who wish to speak to press their request-to-speak buttons.
Motion debated,
That the Parliament recognises what it sees as the importance of funded early learning and childcare in giving every child in Scotland the best start in life; believes that funded places have a vital part to play in helping parents return to work and boosting Scotland’s economy; considers that the high cost of childcare is creating real barriers for parents who want to get back into work; understands with regret that many local authorities in the West Scotland region, including Inverclyde Council, North Ayrshire Council and East Dunbartonshire Council, only offer funded places from the start of the term after a child’s third birthday, leaving some families missing out on up to four months of support; considers that this postcode lottery stems from the Scottish Government’s Early Learning and Childcare Statutory Guidance, and notes the calls for the Scottish Government to guarantee that funded places are available from the day after a child’s third birthday, and that children are treated fairly, no matter where they live or when they are born.
16:43
I thank the members who have stayed the course this afternoon and those who supported my motion, which allowed this debate to come to the chamber. I thank the organisations that have written to us ahead of the debate, including Close the Gap and the National Day Nurseries Association, which circulated some thoughtful research ahead of the debate. I also thank the many parents, particularly from my region, who saw this debate in the business programme and wrote to me on the issue.
Let us start with the basics. In Scotland, parents are entitled to 1,140 hours of free childcare each year for all three and four-year-olds. Some eligible two-year-olds are also included in the provision, but I will focus principally on those who are aged three or four. I support and welcome the policy. However, I know from my many years in the Parliament—particularly from a spell on the Education and Skills Committee and from being the shadow cabinet secretary for education and skills at one point—that the early years sector is not without issues, which I am sure we will discuss today.
The genesis of this debate was parents from the West Scotland region contacting me because they were concerned about the eligibility criteria for funded childcare. I am not a parent, so I inquired further about the problem. I found out that, until this year, three-year-olds in East Dunbartonshire could access the provision from the day after their third birthday. That makes complete sense. However, that has changed. They will now have to wait until the start of the next academic term to access childcare. In practice, that means that a child in that area who turns three years of age on 1 September will have to wait until the new year before they can access much-needed early learning. That is resulting in many children missing out on up to four months of vital early learning places in comparison with peers who were born just a few days before them.
East Dunbartonshire Council is not alone in having made that decision on the date of access. Inverclyde Council and North Ayrshire Council, which are also in the West Scotland region, have adopted a similar position. However, children living only a few miles up the road in Renfrewshire, for example, can access provision from the month after their third birthday. In Glasgow, which is a few miles further up the M8, the criterion is even more generous and children can access the entitlement from the Monday after their third birthday. We often talk about postcode lotteries in relation to accessing public services. To be honest, it is a bit of a cliché, but, in this case, it really is a postcode lottery in its truest sense.
The Scottish Government’s statutory guidance for local authorities on the issue states that eligibility starts from the beginning of the first term after the child’s third birthday. Councils have discretionary powers to provide funded early learning sooner than that, and they are encouraged to do so in that same guidance. However, the reality is that many are simply not in a financial position to do so. Indeed, East Dunbartonshire Council made its decision with the very explicit aim of saving £757,000, which is not a small amount of cash to save. The reality is that councils up and down the country have been making impossibly difficult decisions for a number of years in order to plug the budget gap that they face, which is £650 million in this financial year alone. Things do not look any better as we look down the barrel of the funding gap in future years.
The Accounts Commission forecasts a budget versus resource delta of almost £1 billion in the next two years. It is no surprise that councils are making the difficult decision to delay access to early years provision. Yes, they are simply following the guidelines, but they have opted for the minimum, not the optimum, early years provision, and that comes at the expense of parents, who will either have to fund that childcare privately, if they are able to, or delay going back to work or even into the workplace at all. None of that is helping those families and none of that is helping the Scottish economy.
Will the member take an intervention?
Yes, if I can get my time back.
I have to agree with everything that Jamie Greene has said so far. Does he agree that the current situation comes at a cost to the child as well, because they are not interacting with other children of their age?
I could not agree more, and I will come on to some of the cognitive effects that that has on a child of three years of age.
A wider point, which I hope Mr Whittle will agree with, is that the whole sector is in desperate need of focus, which is why the National Day Nurseries Association wrote to us ahead of today’s debate. It warned that the current funding model quite simply does not sufficiently cover the costs that nurseries incur to provide childcare. It is right to point out that, if people like me want to expand eligibility to universal access, we must also recognise the flaws in the current funding model. It believes that, on average, there is a shortfall of around £1.40 between the funding rate and the cost per child per hour. Seventy-six per cent of the association’s members report that they believe that they will either only break even or operate at a loss this year. Those are not reasons not to expand eligibility, but they are reasons to fix the current funding model.
This week, we have a much wider political focus on poverty—and rightly so. The Scottish Government itself has an explicit aim of reducing child poverty, and I support that aim. However, the Fraser of Allander Institute states that limited access to affordable childcare is the
“elephant in the room when it comes to the cost of raising parental employment”.
The Scottish Women’s Budget Group conducted a survey on that very issue, and 50 per cent of the women who responded reported that managing childcare had impacted the volume of paid work that they were taking on, with a third reporting that they were reducing their working hours simply to meet childcare costs. Those substantial costs are not to be sniffed at. The Scottish Government’s own Scottish household survey, which was published this morning, says that 16 per cent of households are spending between £5,000 and £10,000 per year on childcare. That figure was just 10 per cent in 2018, so it has gone up massively. For the vast majority of families, that money is simply not there and childcare is just not affordable.
On the point behind Mr Whittle’s intervention, high-quality early learning is vital to supporting a child’s cognitive development and their development of social skills. UNICEF has identified it as one of the key factors. It knows that children from lower-income backgrounds are at greater risk of learning delays and of falling behind their more affluent peers. UNICEF also identifies that children who have access to high-quality early learning will do better in terms of attainment and higher job earnings and are more likely to stay out of the criminal justice system. There are plenty of upsides, down the line, to the provision of early learning and childcare.
My question is simply this: why are children in Scotland subject to a postcode lottery when it comes to accessing early years provision? My motion makes the simple asks that the Scottish Government change the guidance and guarantee funded places, across all local authorities, from the day after a child’s third birthday. If that is not doable and the Government is not minded to change that guidance or to fund any change, other options should be considered.
Ultimately, I am seeking universality and equality of access to early learning and development across Scotland, which simply does not exist at present. The Government must end the postcode lottery, it must encourage more parents back into the workplace and it must properly fund early learning provision from a child’s third birthday, no matter where they live in Scotland. I look forward to hearing what the minister and others have to say in response to those calls.
16:51
I thank Jamie Greene for bringing this important matter to the chamber. Mr Greene’s motion begins by recognising
“the importance of funded early learning and childcare in giving every child in Scotland the best start in life”.
Scotland remains, it should be said, the only part of the UK where 1,140 hours a year of funded ELC are available to all three and four-year-olds and eligible two-year-olds, regardless of their parents’ working status. I believe that that helps to promote equality and make sure that every child accesses the same high-quality early learning foundation.
All that said, the motion notes that there are variations in the commencement date of the funded hours across local authorities. In the past few weeks, there have also been reports of some local authorities restricting funded hours to specific nurseries, including term-time-only nurseries.
Many individuals and organisations are pushing hard to ensure that local provision around the country meets demand. I can think of such organisations in my constituency, such as the Uist and Barra childcare forum and the new outdoor facility in North Uist, Otter Mountain, which just last week received its Care Inspectorate registration, allowing it to begin operating as an after-school and holiday childcare facility.
It is only right that I also acknowledge the challenges that are faced in rural and island areas, where the distances involved make it impossible for parents to shop around to access the childcare that they need. Some of the challenge is a consequence of the declining number of childminders. For instance, there are now no childminders left in Barra, Uist or Harris, and there has been a steep drop in the number of childminders in Lewis in recent years—a trend that is reflected in some other parts of the country. I have heard examples of parents having to take an interisland ferry journey daily to access a place at a nursery for their child, although that is an extreme, rather than a representative, example.
Last May, I carried out a survey among parents of young children in my constituency. Although it found that parents were making use of what was available and were grateful for it, 82 per cent of parents surveyed said that they or their partner were unable to work as many hours as they wanted because of childcare issues. Those views were reflected at a meeting that I held recently in Benbecula with parents on childcare. Solving the issue is not straightforward, but it is right that we debate it.
The countries that are often rightly cited as world leaders in childcare and pre-school education have available to them the fiscal levers of small independent countries. I respectfully suggest to those who come after me in the debate that, if we are willing to ask for substantial additional spending in this area, we must be willing either to identify the fiscal freedoms that would achieve that or to identify where in Scotland’s existing budget the money might be found.
I hope that there is a greater degree of consensus across the chamber on some of the other issues. Those include the need to ensure equity of access to funded provision across Scotland, the need to build on the good work that is already being done to boost the creation and sustaining of childminding businesses, the need for better tailoring of Care Inspectorate requirements, and the need to ensure good pay and conditions across private and local authority-run nurseries in order to strengthen Scotland’s childcare sector.
16:55
On 5 September 2023, Humza Yousaf announced the plan to improve childcare, which involved a pilot to expand the provision of childcare to children from the age of nine months to the end of primary school, alongside plans to accelerate the expansion of care provision to two-year-olds and to offer more parental choice, to make childcare flexible.
Two years on, where are we? Well, we are not world leading, as some Scottish National Party members would have us believe, because, despite repeated promises, the SNP has failed to deliver on its pledge to expand the provision of early learning and childcare to children from the age of nine months. The pilot was scrapped before it even managed to get off the ground. I remind members that it was a flagship policy that was hailed as transformational for parents but that, like so many other SNP promises—such as those about free bikes, free laptops and the full roll-out of free school meals, to name just a few—turned out to be hollow words. The Government told parents that it would back them, but it turned its back on them.
Nowhere is that betrayal more evident than in places like North Lanarkshire, in my region, where the council does not provide early learning and childcare provision until the start of the term after a child turns three. The reason for that is budget pressures. Let us take a closer look at what that means for parents. A child who turns three in September will not receive funded childcare until January. That means months of additional pressure on working parents and months of missed learning opportunities for their child. However, that is not just an administrative error made by one local authority; as Jamie Greene rightly states in his motion, it is commonplace, and there is a postcode lottery. Councils are just following the guidance, but who sets the guidance? Well, it is the Scottish Government.
This systemic failure leaves parents in an impossible position and those who are hoping to start a family perhaps thinking again. Why is that? Without funded childcare support, parents are being forced to make an unfair choice. They can go back to work and pay extortionate childcare costs—which, for some, outstrip the cost of their rent or mortgage—or give up work altogether, sacrificing income, career progression and financial stability. Not many families have a choice about whether to work or to stay at home.
In September 2025, Pregnant Then Screwed reported that more than half of parents were forced to reduce their working hours or leave their jobs due to the high cost of childcare, with one in four families paying more than £1,000 a month. The Government needs to acknowledge that childcare is not a luxury and that starting a family is not just nice but is a pillar of a functioning economy.
Given that birth rates are declining, we need to make it easier, not harder, for couples to start a family. When parents are priced out of the workforce because they cannot find affordable childcare, we all lose. Parents are not a burden on our system; they are contributing taxpayers and they are the backbone of local and national economies. They deserve a Government that supports them so that they can give back.
Under the SNP Government, promises will continue to be made and will continue to be broken. Families are repeatedly told by the Government that help is on the way only to be left behind by a Government that views them as an afterthought. That is what they are—parents are being told that they are an afterthought. Local authorities such as North Lanarkshire Council are unable to deliver because of a lack of resource, planning and political will from the top. That is not about political will from councils; it is about political will from the Scottish Government to acknowledge the problems that we experience in our childcare provision and make the necessary changes to fix those.
We need a childcare system that works for every family—one that is accessible, that is affordable and that delivers. I will finish with a question. Has the SNP Government completely given up on expanding childcare or fixing its problems, has it forgotten about it, or is it completely incapable of fixing the problems that we have in our childcare sector?
17:00
It is a pleasure to follow Ms Gallacher’s articulate argument on the challenges that we face. I thank Jamie Greene for allowing us to discuss the subject today. The statistics that have been outlined paint a very grim picture. Families have been let down by the SNP Government’s outlandish promises, on which it has failed to deliver.
I welcome that the motion
“calls for the Scottish Government to guarantee that funded places are available from the day after a child’s third birthday”.
A significant number of parents whom I have spoken to fully expected that to already be the case, because that is what they thought that the Scottish Government’s commitment meant. It was only afterwards that they found out that it is not. We have to acknowledge that such guarantees are utterly meaningless unless we can provide the childcare workforce with adequate support to provide the childcare.
I will raise another postcode lottery that has occurred: councils are being forced to interpret the guidance in such a way that they can make savings. That is the case with the City of Edinburgh Council and the surrounding councils, where cross-boundary support arrangements exist. Parents who come into Edinburgh are required to use only city-run nurseries rather than private nurseries, which might be better located geographically and familiar to the children.
Parents who want to return to work and who want to know that their child is safe and in an environment in which they can properly develop, are facing challenges of all sorts, such as the amount of time and thought that they are required to put into considering how on earth they will get childcare for their children; they have no alternative but to spend almost their entire time begging grandparents and families for help, and fighting their local administration and a guidance system that is being interpreted differently in different areas. I am not blaming the councils, because they are not making decisions to limit access to childcare on a whim. The decisions are a result of shrinking budgets and a failure to properly value the people who make childcare happen.
Alasdair Allan made an incredibly powerful contribution: the loss of childminders in Scotland has been a real tragedy, because they are able to provide flexible, imaginative care in the community where a child is growing up. It is right to say that the Government has tried to stem the haemorrhaging. However, 50 per cent of childminders were lost in the six years between 2016 and 2022, and the Government’s proposed policies and ideas are not filling the space that childminders have left—the aim is basically just to stem the loss. The sad thing is that, with proper support, older parents, women who want to change their work and men who want to change their work-life balance could provide the most brilliant childminding facilities—first to their own children but also to others at a later stage. We are losing a skill set of expertise that will be very hard to bring back.
To echo Meghan Gallacher’s contribution, if we cannot get childcare right, we will not do anything with the economy and we will put pressure on families, who will start to make really serious decisions about whether they can afford to have a second child.
To put it at its politest, this is putting an unrealistic expectation on the parents of today.
17:04
I apologise for being a couple of seconds late. I thank Jamie Greene for bringing today’s members’ business debate on early learning and childcare provision.
I have not ordinarily been involved in education debates, because I have not been on the committee or had that portfolio to speak on. However, I have recently been very involved with this specific issue, because, only last week, a parent contacted me to share their concerns about the lack of affordable and accessible childcare. She said:
“It puts Scottish families even further behind those in England”
with some
“pushed to the limit of affordability each month”.
That speaks to the importance of this topic.
Many members have spoken about the importance of the accessibility of childcare for young children. Although it is not explicitly referred to in the motion, I would like to speak about the importance of nurseries in rural communities. In places such as the Scottish Borders, nurseries provide much more than childcare: they support working parents, help to attract new families, keep rural primary schools alive and viable, and safeguard the future of our rural towns and villages.
Sadly, in the Borders, their future has recently come under threat. Over the past year, amid the national insurance hike from Labour and the SNP’s chronic underfunding of local councils, some families have been faced with proposals to mothball childcare facilities and to create composite nursery classes by combining them with classes in the primary school. That has happened in places such as Cockburnspath, Ednam, Westruther, Yetholm and Sprouston. Those decisions have caused huge worry, and the threats have been felt very strongly by the local communities.
Parents and families have been in touch with me. One parent said that she would have to leave her job in a career that she has worked very hard for. We want to encourage women into the workplace, not discourage them. Another parent shared that they feel as though they are being forced out of the village because of the lack of access to childcare. During and after Covid, many people moved to the Borders from cities and settled in rural villages. Some of the attraction was the standard of the schools and the educational offering in the Scottish Borders Council area. Families have told me that the nursery is so important in keeping their village vibrant and bringing in new families and that any closure could have an impact on the future of the primary school and the village itself.
I would like the minister to respond in her closing speech to those concerns about mothballing, which I have raised before. I know that there is going to be a review of sections of the statutory guidance on mothballing under the Schools (Consultation) (Scotland) Act 2010. I asked a question just last week about when that will happen, and, if possible, it would be great to have an answer to that for parents.
That also speaks to issues in relation to delivering the 1,140 hours of childcare, which have been spoken about today. Everybody is signed up to ensuring that we can make a success of the 1,140 hours provision and that it is accessible to everybody, but that is not always possible. For example, if a mother and father—or a mother or a father, or whatever the family set-up is—have three children and the nursery of one child is under threat, they then have to move the child to their second-choice nursery and that child then has to go to a different setting from his or her siblings, so the arrangement becomes very disjointed and unsettling. Parents just want certainty, to be able to go to their jobs with confidence, and to ensure that their child is in a safe and nurturing setting.
17:08
I thank Jamie Greene for bringing this important motion to the chamber. It has been an eye-opener to look into how local authorities differ in their interpretation of funded childcare. For obvious reasons, providing the statutory minimum of the term following a child’s third birthday is fairly common in the west of Scotland, as has been noted, while some authorities, including Glasgow City Council, offer funded places in essence from a child’s third birthday. My constituency in South Lanarkshire is somewhere in between, where there is potentially a huge delay between March and August each year. It is not just a postcode lottery; it is a birthday raffle, too, because provision basically depends on when a child is born.
Where local authorities can increase the eligibility for funded childcare, they are doing so, because there is a demand for it. We hear anecdotally about parents putting their careers on hold to have children, but we all know that the majority of those are women, and that there are long-term consequences for their career progression, salary, pension contributions and career fulfilment. That is to say that it is not just an economic issue but a social justice issue.
Unequal nursery-place provision across local authorities also reflects the common attitude that nursery is simply childcare while parents are at work, when of course it is a solid pre-school foundation. It greatly helps the child’s development of language, physical development and socialisation by preparing them for the big day when they start primary school.
That should come at the right time for the child, not at the right time for the vague statutory guidance. There are difficulties with that—recruitment, to name but one—but that does not seem to hinder our European neighbours, who take the issue very seriously and seem to come up with solutions.
All of that is before mentioning that 1,140 hours is not even equivalent to a full-time job. I know parents who are on reasonable incomes who find that it is not financially viable to work full-time because the current funded-childcare provision is so difficult, with a postcode lottery on various issues. We need action.
I know that this is a complex issue with many parts. However, can we let common sense prevail and fix it? I join colleagues in calling for a tightening up of the guidance as well as a wider review of early learning and childcare provision.
On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I should have mentioned in my opening speech that I sit on the Pregnant Then Screwed advisory board. I apologise for omitting that.
Thank you, Ms Gallacher. That will be on the record.
17:12
I thank members for taking part in the debate and for their contributions. I assure families around Scotland that we are listening to their concerns and reflecting on them.
Early learning and childcare are central to the Government’s approach to making Scotland the best place to grow up in. As members have said, it is vital to support children’s outcomes, and we understand that. We know that the positive impact can be even greater for those families who are experiencing poverty.
More than that, our childcare sector is a pivotal part of Scotland’s national economic infrastructure. It is vital to enabling parents and carers to enter or return to work, to increase their working hours or to take up learning or training. Every year, we invest £1 billion in that crucial service. Families across Scotland have been benefiting from 1,140 funded hours of high-quality early learning and childcare for all three and four-year-olds and eligible two-year-olds since 2021. Some of the messaging that we have heard in the debate is not quite right about the priority that the Scottish Government gives to early learning and our understanding of its benefits for children’s development. We have been prioritising £1 billion of investment in that every year since 2021.
If the Government was serious about fixing the problems with childcare and its expansion, why has it not expanded funded childcare from nine months onwards? That was a promise that the SNP made, and it is a promise that has been broken.
We are expanding childcare in a number of ways and I will be happy to get on to talk about some of the different ways in which we are doing so and how we are exploring what families need in Scotland, if I can make some progress with my speech.
If families paid for the offer themselves, it would cost them more than £6,000 per eligible child per year. However, that does not mean that there are no challenges. I reiterate my commitment to listen to the views of parents, those who work in the sector and, of course, members from across the chamber on how we can strengthen our national childcare offer.
I am very proud of the progress that we have made over the past few years in delivering the expansion to 1,140 hours. It has been a fantastic collaboration between the Scottish Government, local government, the childcare sector and families across the country, and quality is at the heart of that expansion.
I am sure that all members are encouraged that the Scottish household survey childcare report that was published just this morning shows that 91 per cent of households receiving funded ELC
“were either very or fairly satisfied”
with the quality of provision.
When I visit ELC settings across the country, I am very proud to see the difference that the investment is making in children’s lives every single day—not to forget the difference that it makes to parents across Scotland by providing them with crucial support, reducing household costs and helping them to go out and work, train or study.
I am also proud of the support that we have prioritised for the ELC workforce. In the most recent budget, we committed a further £9.7 million to ensuring that the people who deliver the funded hours are paid at least the living wage. Unlike the United Kingdom Government, we have legislated to introduce a nursery rates relief scheme, through which we provide 100 per cent relief on non-domestic rates to eligible day nurseries, which has saved the sector more than £11 million this year alone.
Is the Scottish Government still confident that the private nursery sector’s financial model works?
I will get on to talking about that funding model.
I would like to consider where we are right now, as it is important to recognise how far we have come since we delivered the policy. The fact that 95 per cent of three and four-year-olds are registered to take up funded hours is a testament to the childcare sector in Scotland, which delivers that every day. Throughout that delivery, we have been evaluating the ELC expansion, and we expect to publish a report on that first full evaluation in early 2026, covering several strands including the Scottish study of early learning and childcare and the parent and carer surveys that were carried out before, during and after the ELC expansion. That is important. As I have said, I am listening. When the reports are published, we will, of course, take the time to work with stakeholders across the ELC sector to understand what the reports tell us and what we can learn for the future.
I have listened with real interest to the points that members have made about start dates and about equity in the system. Of course, I appreciate the difficulties that parents face when systems change in their local area. Guidance was written in such a way as to allow local authorities flexibility. Members across the Parliament believe that local authorities should have flexibility, because we know that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Any change to the current minimum expectation around start dates would require a change to legislation, which would place additional duties on local authorities. Within the current structure, local authorities have the ability to put in place expanded or flexible arrangements locally should they choose to do so, as members have rightly pointed out—and I know that many authorities have been doing that. However, if the Parliament were to amend the minimum expectation, it would need to identify the significant additional funding that is required to cover the additional ELC hours that the system would have to make available.
I also point out that, even were start dates to be standardised to birth dates, that would not necessarily deliver an equitable amount of funded ELC per child. In fact, in many cases, it could create a bigger disparity. That is a technical point, but an important one. Children currently exit funded ELC provision at different ages due to the standardised entry point once per year in primary school. Although allowing those children to start as soon as they reach the age of three might seem fairer, those children who would receive the most extra entitlement, because they are born before or during the summer, are already likely to be receiving a full two years of funded ELC. I do not think that that is the answer to all the concerns that have been raised today, but it is an important point to highlight. It makes it clear that we perhaps need to consider other ways to improve equity in the system—and that is exactly why I stated that I am willing to listen and to discuss the issue. I agree with Mr Greene, who pointed out that other options could be considered.
It is important to note how Scotland deals with deferrals. The Government has legislated to ensure that all children whose school entry is deferred can continue to receive funded ELC until they start school. That is enabling families to make decisions without the need to apply to the local authority, which is an important step in supporting parents to make decisions in the best interests of their child.
I am conscious of time, and I have not been able to get through all my points, but I must come back to Mr Whitfield’s point. Indeed, Mr Greene and other members also mentioned the funding model. I reiterate that I understand the concerns around that, which is why it was my priority to more effectively understand the costs involved and why I prioritised starting the cost-collection exercise, helping us to understand the issue further and inform the guidance for setting rates next year. I had a meeting with ELC stakeholders just last week, and I believe that there is a feeling of positivity around that. I will share the outcomes from the sector later this year.
We are committed to giving every child in Scotland the best start in life, no matter their family circumstances. Our approach is based on the needs of children. We continue to make significant investment to give every eligible child the opportunity to benefit from 1,140 hours. That does not come without its challenges, and I hope that I have been clear in the debate that I am willing to listen and to act on concerns that members, families and the sector raise.
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