Chamber and committees

Do you have any niggling or on-going concerns about compliance in relation to the timeous publication of minutes and reports of meetings?

If we lose one nursery, we lose one nursery, but if a holding company that owns 70 nurseries pulls out of Scotland, that could be critical.

I should have asked this question earlier. In relation to the dynamic within the sector, is any work under way to assess whether, even though the independent sector is still quite large, there has been consolidation of ownership, with small independently owned and managed nurseries selling up to bigger, more commoditised companies with a cookie cutter approach? Is there market fragility partly because ownership is in far fewer hands now?

I think that, earlier, Sophie Flemig used the phrase “anecdotal evidence” in relation to what is happening in the marketplace at the moment. I get the impression that the independent sector is squeezed and that, given that providers do not feel that they are being adequately funded for providing care, the expansion in care means that their opportunity to turn a profit, which is effectively why they are in the sector in the first place, is, in effect, being squeezed into wraparound after-hours provision and breakfast clubs. To what extent do you get the impression that private sector providers are starting to shut their doors and move out of delivering that provision? Is there a risk that that will feed through to put more pressure on councils to provide it?

Good morning, Mr Boyle. The legislation and the associated statutory guidance place an emphasis on flexibility and choice for parents in accessing early learning and childcare, but the degree of choice is very much determined by local authorities. Will you flesh out a little bit the extent to which parents can access early learning and childcare outside their local authority, if that local authority does not give the flexibility and choice or the patterns of childcare that they might need?

I just want to delve a little deeper into the issue of sustainability of providers, particularly in the independent sector. You report that no national data is available on the demand for childcare across funded and non-funded ELC, and you recommend that the Scottish Government addresses that gap in data. What work is the Scottish Government undertaking to address that recommendation?

Mr Boyle, you said that most parents seem satisfied or content with the arrangement, but let me highlight an example from East Lothian, where the parents were not happy. The council, for perfectly valid reasons, cancelled a contract with Bright Stars nurseries. In a period of weeks rather than months, parents had to scramble to get their children into the available nursery provision, which was council-provided and strictly determined by a model that was, in my view, highly inflexible.

Given that you have identified that there is, effectively, a funding shortfall, in the sense that councils are being asked to do more with less financing, is there a risk that the buck is being passed to councils and that flexibility means what is affordable in any given area? Councils that have the resources can offer flexibility to parents, but the councils that are squeezed—which make up the vast majority, if not all of them—have to come up with rigid models. That means that people’s working and behavioural patterns have to fit the model of provision rather than the other way around.

You have slightly pre-empted my next question. For remote and rural areas, childminding is a critical part of provision. To give an example, the Scottish Childminding Association has said that the workforce in the Scottish Borders has declined by 43 per cent over the past six years, that that could double by 2026 and that, at present, 386 families are affected by 56 businesses having withdrawn from the sector. Obviously, that will have major implications in those rural areas. To what extent is childminding, which is already a Cinderella service, at risk in Scotland as a result of the 1,140?

Scottish Borders Council funded a childminding link worker. The childminding sector told me that that was vital to its operation. That funding has been withdrawn because of the pressures that local authorities face. To what extent does the wider financial environment in councils put at risk, for example, link or outreach workers who operate between councils and the independent, voluntary and third sectors? Could that also mean that greater pressures will wash back up on councils?

I wonder whether councils are basically providing what they can provide under the financial constraints, instead of looking at what parents actually need.

Given that councils, which are both providers and rule setters, determine the rates for the private, voluntary and independent—or PVI—sector, is there perhaps a contradiction or a conflict of interest in the whole system that the Scottish Government has overlooked?