Chamber and committees

Local authorities will receive additional annual revenue funding of ‎£567 million in 2021-22 to support the expansion in entitlement to funded early learning and childcare to 1140 hours from August 2020. This is the first full financial year of the expansion.

This sum is based on local authority finance estimates submitted in March 2018, uprated for inflation, less an adjustment of £33.9 million to align local authority population projections to National Records of Scotland population projections (2014), as agreed between Scottish Ministers and COSLA Leaders.

Table 1 reconciles the estimated recurring revenue costs by 2021-22 submitted in March 2018 to the agreed allocation for 2021-22 per local authority.

Table 1 – Local authority revenue allocations for the expansion of early learning and childcare, financial year 2021-22

As explained in the answer to question S5W-16560, the additional £10 million was allocated to local authorities in lieu of any money they may have received through the Bellwin Scheme.

Local authorities have a statutory obligation to repair and maintain local roads, therefore individual councils must determine the funding that should be allocated on the basis of local needs and priorities.

Despite continued UK Government real terms cuts to Scotland's resource budget, we have treated local government very fairly and the £10.7 billion local government finance settlement in 2018-19 provides a real terms boost in both revenue and capital funding. While local authority budget setting is the responsibility of individual authorities the total funding they have available will increase by almost £342 million in 2018-19

In addition, the Scottish Government has allocated £10 million to assist with the cost of winter maintenance and road repairs following the severe winter weather. The allocation for each local authority is as follows.

The Scottish Government activated the Bellwin Scheme on 2 March 2018 to provide councils with emergency financial assistance for any eligible costs resulting from the severe winter weather. While 18 local authorities formally notified the Scottish Government of a potential claim, none of the local authorities submitted a final claim.

As announced on 6 April, an additional £10 million funding was allocated to local authorities for winter maintenance and road repairs in lieu of the Bellwin Scheme. The additional funding was paid to local authorities on 15 May and removes the strict eligibility criteria and full audit process involved when submitting a Bellwin claim.

We do not hold all the information requested centrally. Current local authority estimates are that 138 new builds will be needed. As set out in the answer to question S5W-16245 on 27 April 2018, the Scottish Government and COSLA Leaders reached agreement on a multi-year revenue and capital funding package for the expansion of early learning and childcare on 27 April. This agreement represents a shared understanding of the costs required to deliver the expansion – including all required additional capacity - in entitlement to funded early learning and childcare to 1140 hours from August 2020.

All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx .

Under our new Funding Follows the Child approach, which will be introduced in 2020 as part of the national roll-out of the expanded early learning and childcare (ELC) entitlement to 1140 hours, local authorities will retain statutory responsibility for ensuring that the funded ELC entitlement is available to all eligible children in their area. As part of this local authorities are required to consult with representative groups of parents and carers in their local area to seek their views on how they should make ELC available.

All local authorities have developed expansion plans, which set out how they propose to deliver the expansion to 1140 hours by 2020. These expansion plans include details of how they intend to increase flexibility, including increased operating hours and year round provision, whilst ensuring the provision remains of a high quality. As these plans are implemented we expect to see further increases in the number of ELC settings operating outwith school hours, and year round.

Some families have already benefitted from participation in Scottish Government expansion trials, which have included a focus on innovative and flexible models of delivery, as well as from the early phasing of the expanded entitlement in some authorities. This includes access to more flexible provision outwith school hours and in school holidays. We expect this trend to continue to increase over the next 3 years as authorities prepare for 2020.

As part of their expansion planning, local authorities will consider how to make full use of existing buildings and how they might enhance the use of partner provider assets prior to building new nurseries. Each new build project will have its own specific requirements but the average construction period for a new build nursery is likely to be in the region of 6 to 12 months.

The Scottish Government estimates up to 11,000 additional early learning and childcare (ELC) workers will be required to meet the demands of ELC expansion. In order to attract those additional staff we are working with delivery partners on a range of initiatives, all of which will contribute to the collective recruitment effort. These include:

• Our national recruitment campaign, which includes advertising across multiple advertising channels in order to ensure messages are delivered to the target audiences. Our advertising encourages people to apply to training or work opportunities, but also addresses societal misconceptions around the ELC sector.
• Our advertising for phase one of the national recruitment campaign focussed on school leavers and has been supported by a programme of field events, involving roadshows in schools across the country and activity at all three Skills Scotland national career events. The roadshows directly engaged over 5,000 pupils, encouraging them to apply to training opportunities.
• We work with colleagues in local authorities to adapt the national recruitment campaign for local needs and to support local initiatives, such as jobs fairs or sectoral information events.
• We are working with colleagues in Skills Development Scotland to ensure the number of Modern Apprenticeships available for the ELC sector is increased by 10% year on year up to 2020. Data for 2017-18 (the first year of this commitment) will be available shortly.
• Funding will be available to ensure that all childcare workers delivering funded ELC will be paid the “real” Living Wage from 2020. We are working with a range of delivery partners to ensure new pathways are opened up to enter the sector, in particular for those furthest from the labour market. For example, Glasgow City Council are piloting a new pathway for refugees to join the sector, and Perth and Kinross are exploring innovative ways to recruit males in to ELC. These are new initiatives which may only recruit small numbers of people to the sector, hence no particular targets are set for how many they will directly recruit to the sector. These examples indicate that we are pursuing every avenue to ensure the required workforce is in place for 2020.
• Local authorities, as commissioners and providers of their early learning and childcare services, have individual recruitment requirements in line with their local delivery plans. National recruitment initiatives will facilitate the recruitment of additional staff via local authorities and their funded partners. A full monitoring and evaluation framework for the early learning and childcare workforce expansion will be in place this summer.