 Good morning and welcome to the 15th meeting of the Social Justice and Social Security Committee. We have one apology from Miles Briggs. Our first item of business today is a decision to take agenda items 3 and 4 in private. Are we all agreed? Agreed. Thank you. We will move on to our next agenda item, an evidence session to inform our inquiry into addressing child poverty through parental employment. The inquiry is looking into how the Scottish Government is working with local authorities, employers and other partners at a local level to tackle child poverty through improving employability. This is our second panel on the theme of affordable and flexible childcare, and today we will focus on service delivery. I welcome to the meeting today is panel Susan McGee, chief executive of flexible childcare services Scotland, and Rami Alqasha, chief executive officer from Chaz. We are joined in the room, and we have Kirsty Rammage, project leader, the Bellsbank project and Beverly Isdale, chief executive from First for Kids, who are joining us remotely. A very good morning to you and thanks for joining us. A few points to mention about the format of the meeting before we start. We have roughly allocated about an hour and 15 minutes for questions and themes. Are virtual witnesses and members please wait until I or the member ask in the question, say your name before speaking. Virtual witnesses, please allow our broadcasting colleagues a few seconds to turn your microphone on and before you start to speak. You can also indicate with an art in the dialogue box in BlueJeans if you wish to come in on a question. Don't feel you will have to answer every single question. If you have nothing new to add to what's being said by others then that's perfectly okay as well. We have a lot to cover this morning, so I would ask everyone to keep questions and answers as tight as possible. Colleagues in the room should indicate to myself or the clerk if they wish to come in and ask a supplementary question. Members online should use the chat box or our WhatsApp. I'm going to invite members to ask questions and turn as agreed on our pre-brief. I'll bring in James, who's here remotely. Thank you very much, convener, and good morning, panel. I'd like to start by asking Susan from Flexible Child Care Services. You describe yourself as a test site for a scalable business model. What insights can you provide about how flexible services impact on child poverty? Flexible Child Care, the delivery of that, has a huge impact on child poverty. It empowers parents to be able to enter or remain in work or study or even do the courses and support that prepares them to return to work. It also reduces the amount of money that families are spending on child care. If you think of the cost of childcare as £6 to £7 an hour, if somebody can, by booking flexibly, just the hours they need rather than a session save a couple of hours a day, over a five-day week that could be £60 or £70 that helps them to move out of poverty and might pay for their food shopping so that they and their children aren't struggling to eat, so it does make a big difference and certainly we surveyed families using our own services. We currently have between 800 and 1,000 families using the service each week. When we did the survey, it would have been around 800 and about half of those use the flexible child care for reasons of returning to work or study or that type of thing. Others are families with additional support needs children. Of that, around 400 families, 94 per cent of them had increased their income by up to £5,000 a year, so it would have been a huge difference to families' lives. What do you think would be needed more than you're getting just now from either the Scottish Government or local authorities to increase the level of flexibility that's available within preschool-age children's childcare as well? Operating flexibly means that it's harder to fill your services. As a commercial provider, you would be aiming towards 100 per cent occupancy, probably realistically 90 plus per cent occupancy, and you sell your sessions on a straight line basis Monday to Friday, either half days or full days. It's really easy to fill it up. If you're selling it flexibly just to the sessions that families need, you do end up with odd gaps in that overall capacity that is really hard then to fill, so you really only get to about 70 per cent maximum on occupancy that you can fill. Also, in our own services, we tend to operate in areas that probably aren't attractive to commercial providers, and we have families with multiple and complex needs that often require our practitioners to attend, perhaps team around the child, social work. There are lots of other agencies involved in the work that we do, so we also have to have higher staffing levels very often too to meet that need. In order to deliver a really flexible service for families in the most significant need, the cost of that is probably about £3-4 an hour more than is currently funded through the 1140 hours funding rate from most local authorities. I've said more money, and do you think that that should be coming from the Scottish Government, local authorities? How good is the relationship, for example, working with local authorities to ensure that you get the support that you require? It can be difficult. Local authorities are, I suppose, their priority for their funded hours is around the education side of it and attainment, although the parental employability is in there as one of those targets of that offer. It's perhaps not the priority one for local authorities, so there is often a question about how children can learn if they're attending flexibly. I think that it's a non-question in a lot of ways because children are learning all the time, so that's continually happening. Many of the families in the particularly high areas of deprivation where we operate wouldn't use other services, so it's the choice of our services or nothing. That's the kind of approach that we probably need to work more closely perhaps with some of the local authorities' employability programmes and see if there's a connection there, particularly to support parents, because you could have the best employability programme ever, but if a family hasn't got childcare to enable them to work, then they're not going to go to work. Is there a difference in the needs in preschool and school-age childcare, or do you just face the same problem with both? At the moment, it's the preschool childcare that's funded, the school-age childcare isn't funded, and that is a big shock to many parents if they've worked through those early years and they've had some funding towards the preschool years, so their cost of childcare has perhaps gone down, they've been able to work a bit more, maybe family circumstances have improved slightly, and then their child goes to school and suddenly there isn't funding anymore for after school or before school services, so that's a real shock to the system for some families and something they struggle with, and we do see families at that point reduce working hours or stop working because they just can't find that, and children in certainly the early primary years, if not all primary years really, are too young to be going home by themselves and spending any significant period of time alone in the family home, and often in areas of poverty perhaps they haven't got the things in the family home that they might need, so they might be going home to an empty fridge or no wi-fi access, so if they're coming to a club, they're getting food after school, they're getting access to services, support to do homework, outdoor play, all of those kind of things, so there's huge benefits for all children, particularly for children from families living with significant challenges. Imagine how many times I've changed when I think that there could be no food in the fridge or no wi-fi access, but that's the reality of life. Can I just ask you one last question, so you can be really helpful, but can you tell me other particular issues with delivering a flexible provision in rural areas as opposed to other areas? Yeah, I think rural areas are a huge challenge for families looking for childcare, and certainly we often have people in touch that say that they're looking for a place for their child, but they just can't travel to the nearest space that's available, and it's really difficult for a provider to deliver a sustainable service in a rural area, so that becomes very difficult too. There's certainly a big case there for use of the school estate so that providers are able to have small clubs within the school premises in those areas, because obviously there is a school that families are able to travel to, and if that could be used for both school-age and for younger-age childcare by providers that step in and provide those services within those premises, that would certainly be helpful for families. The other thing that could be explored around that is a hook-up with demand responsive transport, so often in rural areas there are demand responsive transport services that perhaps struggle to be sustainable too, that may be there for people who are elderly and need transport, or people who have disabilities or additional support requirements in need transport. Could they also support families with young children? Does that take two boxes really? It helps families to travel to the childcare services that they need, but it also helps the demand responsive transport service to become more sustainable? Yeah, that's very helpful. I see that Beverly will come in. Yeah, happy to bring Beverly in, thanks. Thanks very much. I just want to echo really what Susan was saying there about the shock that parents get when they find out that school-age childcare is not funded, and it does, I think, have quite an impact on parents' careers, because they have this three and four-year-old place, or a two-year-old place now as well, and then suddenly they've got to start paying again, so it's a bit for shock for them. The flexibility thing for me, I would quite like to have a definition of what we mean by flexible. Is it flexible booking for parents, or is it flexible hours that our childcare is delivered on? There is talk of people who've got shift patterns or people who work in the NHS, so it might be really late into like an eight o'clock finish, and how that is much more expensive than me being able to say you can book whatever day you want between eight o'clock and six o'clock, because I might have enough people to fill childcare between eight o'clock and six o'clock, but from six o'clock till eight p.m. I might only have one child that needs that in the service that I've got. I just wanted to open up if any other panel member wanted to come in. Okay, I'm going to move on to theme two, and that is Katie. Katie is with us remotely, if you want to come in. Katie, can you hear us okay, Katie? Katie, can you hear us okay? Okay, what I'll maybe do then is I'll move on to Jeremy then, who's going to take theme three and we can come back to Katie. Thank you. Well, thank you. Good morning to the panel, both here and online. Thank you for coming along. Obviously, staffing costs are presumably your major pressure, your major cost for childcare providers, both preschool and school age. I wonder what other costs are you facing? Are these changing and how are you coping with them? I don't know if anyone wants to jump in. Yes, the staffing cost is the biggest cost. It's a ratio driven business. You have to have a set number of staff per children, so staffing is the biggest cost for the service. However, cost of living is impacting really heavily on the services as well, the resources that we buy, the consumables, the food for the children. All of those costs are firing up really quickly. The costs of the fuel, the power for the services is rising. Also, rents in some areas where we've been using local authority services, rents have risen massively on those premises to be able to provide the service. The costs that are fairly standard for any business are rising rapidly for us. The increase in real living wage, which we absolutely support, and we're an accredited real living wage employer. However, the funding rates haven't kept up with the percentage increase on those costs. Of course, the cost of inflation has been higher than the increase in funding rates. We feel a bit like it's being hit from all sides here at the moment that trying to provide the service that meets parents' needs and the costs are going up and up to be able to do that. The staffing cost is also under pressure because we can't compete with higher salaries that are paid in local authority services. There's a real pressure to push up costs even beyond the real living wage increase to try to attract good quality staff. The job that the people are doing within our services deserves to be a higher paid job. It's a really important job supporting and developing our citizens of the future. I don't know if anyone else has got a comment to make on that. If not, I'll move on. I'm interested to go. A partner provider leach for funded early learning and childcare keeping up with the rising costs. Can you just move expand a wee bit about, you know, is it getting worse as in the last couple of years, or has this been a thing that's been going on for a number of years, the differential? Wait, anybody answers that? There was a request from Beverly and Kirsty on your last point. I'll bring in Beverly, if that's okay, thanks. One of the additional expenses for us is the gaps that have come in our places from the changing pattern of parents working. The whole hybrid working where parents are able to work at home some of the time and are actually at their place of work other times. They may now only use our service three days out of five, and the other two days are working at home, so they have the children at home with them at the same time. Rightly or wrongly, it obviously makes a difference to the amount of places that we have that are all the better places we have that are empty. That's another thing that costs us quite a lot of money. There are things like we have had funding to develop the school activity and holiday fund for the last two years, and that has been cut this year, so all the work that has been done to develop that, we now have to try and find the money to carry on that because the money is not there anymore, so that is another additional expense for the holiday provision that will come up this summer. School lets are the biggest part of next to our staffing costs, which are 80% of our costs, our expenditure. It's school lets, and during the pandemic, because things were so tight and we were just losing money, we chose to not pay our rent to the local authority as one of the things that we just couldn't afford to pay at the time. I'm sure that other businesses would have accrued debt in different ways during the pandemic, so paying that back will be a big issue for us to do over the next however many years. The local authority has been extremely kind to allow us to do that, but we now have this bill that we need to pay them. The other things, everything that we do, every business thing that we do, so all of our telephone lines, all of our IT, I think has gone up by inflation, so everything is much more expensive now. I don't again, does anyone else want to come in on that point? Kirsty wants to come in. Can I invite Kirsty? Hello. More or less just to say the same thing, because we are third sector, all our work is done and paid for by grant funding, and we've found that as well. The grant funding isn't going up, but everybody's expecting the wages to go up, so we're now in the position, instead of applying to maybe two or three major funders a year, we're applying to 17-18 funders. Everybody's wages are paid from three and four and five different sources, it's really difficult to keep top of that. Once again as well, the local authorities take all our staff because they can provide generation as well. One of the biggest things is cover. If we've got a member of staff of sick or annually, even if we need to get burnt staff in, that does... Kirsty, we seem to have lost our connection. I don't know if you want to try and come back in again, sorry. Can you hear me okay, Kirsty? No, I'm afraid Kirsty can't hear me right now. We seem to be having some technical problems. No. I can hear everybody. Oh, you can now, okay. That's good. I was just one more point. As I said, covering staff absences is a real issue for us, but also when we're looking for bank staff, because we're in such a rural area, high deprivation, working in early years you need your PVG, which is £59, you need to register with CCCC, which can be £20, £25, and you might only get four hours' work out of that. It's really difficult to keep up with those banks. Sorry, Kirsty, we seem to be losing you again. Can you hear us okay? We can always come back to you, Kirsty, and see if your connection picks up. Well, I can hear you now, sorry, thanks. If you want to turn your camera off, then your connection might pick up your sound a bit better. No. Okay, we can always move on. I don't know how much to that you heard, but it's the cost. No, I'm afraid, Kirsty, that your connection is really poor at the moment, so we will come back to you. Rami, you want to come in? Rami, thanks. I just wanted to mention the point about staffing costs, and whilst Chas is not a childcare provider, we work with many families who are struggling to access childcare, and one of the barriers is often in relation to, for children with very complex needs, the level of skill that is required to be able to support that child in any setting in or out of the home, and where we're looking at high levels of nursing skill that are required. The salary reference point is the NHS, so we're looking effectively for people with pretty much the skills that you would need to be providing nursing or nursing support work, but doing it out with the NHS, and there is a huge gap emerging between NHS pay and non-NHS pay for those skills, and that's a real challenge for non-NHS healthcare providers. Thank you, I think that's a really helpful point. Again, can I just go back to what we were discussing just previously very quickly, and that is in regard to partner provider rates or funded or learning and childcare keeping up with that, because I think you were saying no, that isn't the case. I was just wanting to see that kind of thing post Covid, or has that been happening before Covid as well? I think that there were always concerns that that rate was not the same. Anecdotally, there's figures that it's a couple of pound more per hour that local authority per child allocation is than funded providers get, so it has always been a concern, and it's something that the sector has challenged in a number of ways on lots of occasions. I suppose that, as costs continue to rise, it's just becoming a bigger and bigger challenge for providers to support, really. And in some ways, PVI providers, who are those partners of local authorities, are supporting that policy because they're carrying some of that cost, and the funded rate can be below their own hourly charge-out rate, so by being a partner, they are losing on what their predicted revenue would have been. The simple, I suppose, the really basic thing is the 10 per cent increase in the real living wage, the inflation rate, and yet the rate of increase in the funded rate for partner providers is nothing like that. It varies, obviously, across authorities, but it's gone up by nothing like that. If I can move on, just one further question, convener. I think in your statement, Susan, you said that targeted access to flexible childcare will cost more to deliver, but this higher funding may only be for a temporary period. I wonder if you could just expand on what these higher costs are, and why is it only temporary rather than ongoing? The higher costs of delivering the flexible service are related to the gaps in filling your occupancy capacity, so you can't fill it to 100 per cent because you end up with bits that just won't sell. It's around the higher staffing levels that are required to attend the various meetings that come with providing a service in an area of complex need, where families have much more need and other agencies are involved in those services. There are additional costs that come with it, and we think that it may be temporary. We need to do some more research with that. We have had some discussions with the ELC directorate about exploring that further to try to understand that period. We are observing in our services that, when families first come to us, some of them, perhaps when they are first moving away from perhaps multi-generational unemployment in a family, life can be a wee bit chaotic when they are first starting to move away from that, so they may start work. It may be very sessionals, zero hours-type contract. They may go into work then come out of work because it is really difficult to get that routine established in a family. After a period of time, we are observing that things tend to stabilise, and where families may have been booking really quite randomly flexible sessions to allow them to do an odd shift when they got a zero-hour shift and things like that. It starts to form a pattern, and it may be that it is a shift pattern that it is one week on, one week off for, so there are different things around that, but we do think that there is a pattern that starts to emerge. It does need further research and analysis to understand where that point is that you would say that targeted higher rate perhaps is not needed any more now because that family are using a more standard model. I do not believe that it would be a set time frame for every family. I do not think that you could say that it is only ever going to take three months, six months, because it would have to be person-centred and depends on the needs of that individual family, but it is something that is certainly worth further exploration and analysis. I am now going to go back to Katie Clark, who can pick up on her themes there. Thank you, convener. I was going to ask about workplace issues. We have heard a lot of evidence previously about the difficulties with recruitment and retention linked to getting conditions, indeed, even the remuneration of those running small. We have heard further evidence today in relation to some of the other financial struggles that the sector is currently facing. What do you think that the Scottish Government can do about that? Who would you like to ask, Katie? I am happy if, convener, you can see who would like to come in. Around the workforce capacity and the recruitment challenges and things that you are asking about, there was obviously an increased need for people in the sector as part of the 1140 increase. There has been a big scale-up within local authorities that has had more services that they have added, so they have had a big recruitment drive around the 1140. Lots of qualified people have gone from the PVI sector, where perhaps they have not been able to be paid as much, to go into those jobs. There has been a real movement of the qualified and experienced staff from the PVI sector into the local authority services. We thought that that was perhaps starting to stabilise, but then the deferred entry entitlement has come in this year. Again, local authorities are in many areas looking for more staff to meet that deferred entry requirement, so that there are more people going across into local authority services, which makes that really difficult. At the same time, we were obviously living through Covid, which had an impact on our colleges and training providers, so there has perhaps not been as many newly qualified entrants to the sector as well, which has been really challenging. Recruitment is really, really difficult. It is having an impact on quality of experience for Scotland's children, because we have an experienced staff leading an experienced staff because we just cannot keep that quality and experience within the services. It is really challenging at the moment. There are more vacancies than there are people applying for them. People are competing for staff, so you are seeing recruitment bonuses being advertised to get people to sign up. There are lots of different things like that happening, which in some ways is positive, because it improves conditions for people working within the sector. However, it is really, really difficult as a provider to do that and remain sustainable alongside the other challenges. I think that there are some things that could be done around looking at the qualifications. We are still a sector that is predominantly female staffed. It has a 96 per cent female workforce. Perhaps if we widen the qualification criteria, including more outdoor, play-based, different routes into the sector, it would be an interesting way to do it. It might diversify the workforce some more as well, which would be a positive thing for everybody. Perhaps a boost on funding rates for bringing in mature candidates, perhaps having a change of career into the sector, would be a good thing. I also wonder whether there could be an opportunity to... It is a sector with high churn. People come in and, sadly, when they have their own children, they cannot afford the childcare, so they do not return to the sector, which is not the best situation to be in. Perhaps there could be something around some incentive to bring people back into the sector, so some kind of golden hello, I suppose, to come in and join the sector, alongside a supported training package. Things change quickly in the sector, so could you have something that helped boost people's confidence and made sure that their practice was up to date and their knowledge was up to date if they were returning to the sector after a period of absence? There are a number of initiatives. I know that the workforce team at Scottish Government is looking at a number of initiatives on that. It would be really good to work really closely with the sector and get providers involved in that. Thank you. Katie, do you want to come back in? In fact, I would think that Beverly's requested to come in. I will allow Beverly to come in. Thank you. Marie, can you hear me? Yes, thanks. All right, thanks. I think that one of the things for us would be to consolidate what we have already got. There is lots to talk about when the split is going to go for school-age childcare or the two-year-old places. There was the holiday provision, and then the money stopped. There is no security. We have clubs that are absolutely full with weight in this, but we cannot recruit staff to increase the numbers. We also have clubs that are sitting at 60 per cent full, so there is 40 per cent spare capacity there that could be used for the type of children that we hope to get in in the near future at very little cost, but would be much more secure to our sector. I have staff moving on not because they want to, but because there is no security in our sector. We might have to close some of the services that have such low numbers. We really need to consolidate what we have, instead of looking at other places to fulfil what is already there and when there is already space there. I think that the way forward has got to be that the school base is open until six or eight or even eight, if you want to include things like brownies and youth clubs and things like that, so that it is really flexible. What you have in there is different people doing different jobs. We have staff who work at support for learning assistants in schools and then come straight to us because there are not enough hours in a support for learning assistant job, and it is only term time. There are not enough hours in an after-school club either, and it could only be term time. They put the two of you together and they are running two jobs to get almost a full-time wage. If we could make that easier for people, so that improves their income and improves their hours. If they get more hours and could do that, that would be good. That would improve the diversity of those people that we would have in. It would be a full-time job at a reasonable rate. You want people who are very well qualified. You want people who have got child development in their backgrounds somewhere. You want people who have got sports backgrounds, dance backgrounds, any kind of the cultures and arts backgrounds so that the children, particularly the school-age children, would get all of these activities in one place rather than have to be varied backwards and forwards to all different sorts of camps to get their football practice or get their band practice or whatever, so that it would all be an essential point. I think that that is the only way that we are going to get enough good-quality staff that want to stay—I suppose that is a competitive approach—that want to stay in the job and that we can be secure that we know that parents have got this piece of mind and can go off to work. Thank you, Beverly. That is interesting. Some of the points you have raised there. Katie, do you want to come back in again? Yes, to Beverly's point that she is making, which she covered in the first prepared submission, just whether she has any proposals as to how some of those ideas could be taken forward about perhaps people who are working in childcare also have been roles as the classroom assistants. Has she got any practical suggestions as to how that could be taken forward? I do not. Recruitment and HR is not really my expertise, but I think that one of the blocs is often—portful learning is seen as—I suppose that you should be—a little bit of pin money for when your children go to school, you can work in a sportful learning assistance job. It is not highly qualified, not particularly highly valued, and it is only termed time in a few hours, so you can be home life if it is in. It is very female-orientated, as much as childcare is. It is all of those things that are the same as childcare that we need to get passed. If we can value a pedagogy that does more than a support for learning or a classroom assistant or a playwork but is more about a mentor for that child, they get all of these roles that we have divided up. I think that we need to value the position. I think that it goes hand in hand with how do we value children and how do we value playwork or play or their recreational time, and how important is that? I think that there is also the question for me about whether we should be making parents work more hours rather than spend time with their children. That is where the flexibility comes in. People need to be able to choose whether they want someone else to look after their children or they want to work 40 hours a week to be absolutely shattered, not be able to do the homework, etc. That is where the flexibility comes in. I think that it is definitely about valuing the post and valuing the child. It is something that we could do at a social and cultural change, not how to start infusing it. We have done that for things that are unhealthy, like smoking and all that. We need to do it about how important children are as well. I am now going to move on to Marie. Thank you, convener, and good morning, panel. It is great to see you here this morning, thanks for your time. The written submission from First for Kids suggests that the current system is penalising parents for choosing to work part-time and having the balance between family and work. Chaz highlights the flaws in the UK care allowance system and how we can improve on that in Scotland. I know that the committee is going to take some evidence on that in the near future. From a social security perspective, can the witnesses highlight anything else that is a barrier? For example, previous witnesses suggested that the increase in conditionality in universal credit is limited in choices. It also suggests that 85 per cent childcare costs are covered under universal credit. Why not 100 per cent? How can families meet the remainder of those costs? Can you highlight any barriers to start with yourself, Susan? Probably one of the biggest barriers is parents' understanding of what they are entitled to. I think that there is a real lack of understanding about that. It is not easy to get the information about what they are entitled to. We try to signpost parents to any support that they can get financially. However, people find it complicated and struggle to understand that. Particularly our eligible twos. Families are linked to some of the other benefits that are on them and the low income. Some of our families would have thought that because of other things in their family circumstances that they would have been entitled to funding around that. They have not always been. It is quite a complex system. Could it be something that is more straightforward for everybody would be one of our requests around that? For parents who are also carers in receipt of carers allowance, there are challenges around the cliff edge of losing carers allowance entirely if the person earns more than £139 a week. For some parents who are in receipt of carers allowance, there is a financial disincentive to look for childcare and look for work because they would lose significant money. We certainly believe that that should be tapered off rather than a cliff edge at the end of 139 hours a week. That would help and support many parents who are in receipt of carers allowance. I know who else. If not, thank you for those comments. I hope you can hear me this time. I am sorry, but you are breaking up again. I do not know if you have tried switching your camera off. I was just saying about the universal credit and how it actually does not benefit people taking on extra work. I have got an example of our parent. We had, who was working 16 hours, universal credit, housing benefit and all the rest of it. When she took on 32 hours, she is actually £100 a month worse off. Because she gets paid for once a year, universal credit thinks that she has been paid double in that month. She loses all her housing benefit and universal credit for that month every year. She actually has not benefited financially by taking on more working hours and her childcare costs have went up as well. What about other policy areas, such as health and social care? Are the reforms neasier there? What would help parents with additional support needs? The solutions are complex, but the challenges are significant. There is a real lack of the ability for parents to, when they need support workers to be with their children, to find staff with the right skills. There is a real skill shortage, so there is a difficulty getting packages of care agreed with the local authority or health and social care partnership. There is a challenge, even where a package is in place, of being able to find staff with the right skills. I was talking to a parent just the other day who had a very significant package of support in place that was simply unable to recruit the staff that she would need to support her child, so she is giving up work to be able to be the sole care her for her child. There is a real challenge around the workforce, the skill. There are also examples of really good practice where children's community nurses are working with other staff in different systems to upskill them, including in childcare provision. There are examples of good practice, but the magnitude of the problem is very significant in relation to children with additional support needs. Does anyone else want to come in? Anyone else wants to come in? On the question of children with additional needs, we have a number of times come across this, but it is happening right with us at the moment, where children with additional needs tend to have transport from school to home, and if they want to come to school care, parents have to request that children go somewhere else. Educationers might refuse to send them to out-of-school care. They have to go to their home base. That makes it really difficult for all parents, and it's back in equipment. If we can have a child, if we have the facility for a child, do we have the challenging facility for a child? Is there any staff training that is needed? How forthcoming can that training be? Thank you for those comments, Beverly. I will hand you back. I will move on to Paul. Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to the panel. I'm particularly interested in looking at eligibility and how do we continue to look at expanding provision, particularly for different age ranges, and maybe just start in terms of two-year-olds, and the work that's been done there. Audit Scotland's recent report has obviously highlighted that progress is being made, although we still have further to go in terms of that piece of work. A sense from the panel, if it can, is that we are getting it right in terms of how we are identifying those eligible two-year-olds? Do councils need to use more of their discretionary powers to get to more families, and maybe just your initial sense of what's currently happening? I think that we are making progress. There are eligible two-year-olds that are benefiting from attending services, most definitely. However, there is still a wee bit of an air of stigma about accepting an eligible two-year-old place, because it's kind of you get one of those places if there's a reason that you get it, so that there is a bit of a stigma around that for some families, and we need to get over that for a start. That's really something that just shouldn't be there, so we have to communicate around that in a different way to remove that feeling of not wanting to be one of the families that gets an eligible two-year-old place. We need probably to, yes, use a bit more discretion around that, and where a service is identified that a family is facing particular challenges, that the local authority are able to say, well, okay, they might not meet the definitions of what the funding would be, but we know, because you've been able to show us that they're experiencing this, this and this challenge, and actually that child would really benefit from an eligible two-year-old place, so I think that there is a definite need for discretion and real partnership working between the local authorities and the providers on that, so that we're providing that connected holistic approach to supporting the family around that. I think that in the broader expansion to younger children, there is absolutely a need to be more in a partnership, in its driest sense of the word, to have a relationship with providers so that providers feel that they are being listened to and that the challenges of the three to four-year-old expansion are not just repeated with the expansion for younger and also for older children, so that there is a real joined-up approach to that, and any of those challenges are addressed before we just make them bigger by scaling that, so. Kirsty, can you give us okay things? I think we've lost Kirsty. Is that okay? Yes. Okay. We actually work in an area of high deprivation, so we do understand the benefits that children and the two-year-old get from... No, can you hear me? Yes. Okay, thank you. Sorry, am I back on? Yes, we can hear you okay. Kirsty, do you want to carry on? Morat. We do understand the benefits available for children in this area to access childcare, but the local feeling has now turned into... They just feel that work in parents is actually at the detriment of work in parents. There's no place for them. We offer a creche and it's full of work in parents because they can't access local authority childcare because they don't qualify. They're not classed as vulnerable because they're working, but they can't work if they don't have childcare. On that point, we obviously, as committee, had submission from earlier Scotland. I suppose focusing on that point, that the thresholds, if you like, for access to that are quite limited, you know, 25 per cent, I think, eligible and many families missing out. I wonder if my question, I suppose, is, are those thresholds right or do we need to look at them and try and expand that to, in other words, if you want to comment? I think so many of the families that are working and are just above that threshold are probably pretty close to sitting out in that sort of poverty area as well and are struggling in lots of ways. There is that balance of you just tip over that, so suddenly you've got that bill for childcare to pay. Perhaps now you're paying that bill, you're actually in a worse situation than some of the families that are qualifying for the funded place, so there's probably a need for more of the funded places just in general for families, but we have to get it right because at the moment there's going to be an unwillingness from providers to enter into that, so we've got to get that model right so that we can provide those places and then look at that, where does the threshold sit, how does it support families to work and what's that whole wellbeing approach to it, so maybe it's not to work, maybe it's to train or maybe it's to support their mental health and wellbeing that they have that break to, so there is a big picture, look at that I think, needed to say why do families need that care and it's not just about earnings, it's a different reasons for that too. Whenever I just follow up that point, obviously a lot of the discussion that we've had is about universal provision at three and four, do you see that there are significant challenges to try and have a universal system for two-year-olds and I mean what work has been done that you can see that actually might be moving towards that position? The biggest challenge I suppose like many things comes down to cost and the funding of that and getting the funding level right so that providers are able to do that, the obvious of the ratio of staff to children is different so you've only got five children to each member of staff for your two-year-olds whereas you have eight for your older children, so again your staffing cost is higher again which would actually call for a higher funding rate, we already as providers don't think that funding rate is meeting the cost of delivering that service for children so I think that's the biggest thing, we have to get that funding right and if that can be right and if the workforce challenges can be resolved then I think having that universal offer is good for all parents but then beyond that I also think there's a targeted need for additional support for families that are facing the most complex challenges in their lives. What I mean is just a couple more, convener and witnesses are very helpfully leading my questions into the next area I'm planning to go to which is always good but I wonder if I can ask Rami on that point about families who require that additional support and who have different needs. Do you think that councils are using flexibility at the moment in order to provide childcare particularly in that two-year-old bracket or is there far more that can be done now within discretionary powers and in terms of wider looking at the eligibility to actually look at those circumstances? I mean I think that's a really important question because we talk about a three and four universal availability, we don't have universal availability and there are many hundreds of children who are not able to effectively find childcare settings that support them because of their very complex healthcare needs that are in place and we have many parents who would like to work who would like to be able to obtain childcare but simply can't because the right settings with the right staff and we've heard both about staffing and the physicality of the settings this morning are not available and so I think that would be the first thing I would want to say so you know I think there is always often a good will from local authorities to try and be supportive both from a childcare perspective and from a self-directed support perspective but there is a lack of availability and settings that are suitable for all children and I suppose at CHAS we work you know very much at the hard end of hard things so with children who have very complex needs and have life-shortening conditions but the points I would make would be I am sure relevant for children who simply have complex disabilities with no life-shortening conditions so there is a real challenge I mean I was speaking to a parent in preparation for this today actually from the Lothians a mum of a young girl called Eva who sadly died a number of years ago and she talked about the challenges that she had in trying to find somewhere suitable for her child so she was saying that they were very lucky to have a child minder who was willing to take Eva and learn and up a skill with community nurses to develop the skills she needed to look after her and she then you know Eva's needs changed and that stopped being a feasible placement so they tried a nursery placement and that worked well for a short period of time but actually what was happening was that the parents were being called every single day to come and support with feedings or complexity and so whilst there was a childcare place in it nominally the reality was that those parents could not work because they were constantly being called daily away from their work and in the end one of the parents the father gave up full-time work to be able to care for that child and care for Eva and she talked about how school worked really well and that worked really effectively but the challenge was around out-of-school care holiday clubs these were simply not accessible to to Eva and that I think is a challenge faced by many many parents across Scotland so I think the point is less about eligibility criteria about the practicality of how this can be delivered for some of Scotland's most vulnerable children and I suppose sorry computer what I might say is that when it comes to children with a life-shortening condition those children are overwhelmingly likely to be from the very poorest post-codes in Scotland there's a real association between poverty and life-shortening illnesses so there is something that needs to be done thank you thank you can be very happy for yes Susan if you would like to come yeah just a quick one sorry that's another area where we find that as providers we are supporting really through our own funds and our funders the cost of this policy we do have children attend some of our services who have quite complex additional support needs and in some cases we have gone back to local authorities and asked about additional funding perhaps they might need a one-to-one support or we need a specialist piece of equipment and often that funding isn't there so we have to manage that within our own budgets or with support from some of our grant funders to try and provide those services but the benefit for the children and families of being in part of that service with other children is huge and it can be done that the facility can cope with it the team can cope with it we just need to be able to pay for the additional resources and staffing thank you just finally if i may convener we've spoken about two-year-olds keen though perhaps to understand a bit more about school aged children we don't currently have clear eligibility in that space so i just wonder if there is a view about what kind of eligibility for school aged children would be the most helpful in terms of trying to ensure we support people into work keep people in work you know at this stage as the government considers all of that i don't know if anyone wants to add a big question i appreciate i mean just to expand the point that i was making a moment to go via holiday clubs for children with additional support needs i mean that where they are available they are sometimes charged at a higher cost than holiday clubs for children without additional support needs where specialist provision is put in place during school holidays i was hearing of one where a parent was offered a holiday club of two days during the course of the entire summer holidays and charged charged at twice the rate of the holiday club that would be available for mainstream children because of the complexity of the needs that was required for that child so there is an inequity there and i think that is a real challenge for being able to to support that that period of time and have parents being able to to work during the school holidays and i think for children with disabilities there is also a question about the older age range and the wraparound support that is available for older children who may not be able to be on their own but require support out with the school period as well. Yeah i think in the solution quite clearly said what we thought the expansion priority should be and i think for us it's those those in work poverty the parents who are you know who are working and still in poverty so those most at risk of having to stop work because they can't afford the childcare. Also lone parents who don't have family support around them so you know they're quite isolated don't have parents in the next street or people who can do the informal stuff for them. Those people who are newly engaged back to work because it's quite a precarious situation for people to be who have not worked for a long time going back there's a lot of anxiety around it and so if we can take away that anxiety about what's going to happen to their children then that we've got a better chance of them staying in work and maybe even getting better hours or less reason to not turn up at their work even. Respite for children or parents or families with children of children with a disability or a particular need that is as was just been talked about it is expensive in comparison to you know the business models are done on the ratios of what the care inspector think that you should have for children so for our age it's one to ten or obviously that change if you've got children with additional needs in that so it becomes more expensive but certainly it should be a priority. The parents that we have who have children with disabilities that come to our services are so grateful because it's so difficult to get support for them and the children have so much benefit from being able to be free and playing with their peers so anybody socially isolated that needs support particularly people who are new to the area or new to the country even and they need time to settle or they need support to settle you know coming to a community-based activity is good and then also the very youngest children in schools the P1, 2 and 3s it is absolutely fundamental that children enjoy those very very early years at school because it makes a difference to how they feel about school for the rest of their life and they need to be able to build those good relationships you need to have that free time that leisure time to enjoy that isn't necessarily about can they help the pencil right or do they know this or do they know that but it's associated with them being at school and their school friends so those youngest children in school would also benefit most I think. Thanks Beverly. I just want to come in before I bring Gordon in to go on to the final theme. One of the things that is coming through particularly within my own constituency was the in-work poverty but the challenges that you know both parents are working they're paying quite a phenomenal amount on childcare and they've applied for a mortgage recently and basically been refused a mortgage on the grounds that their childcare is so high and then it's impacted on their credit ratings as well. Is that a thing that you've picked up on within your own areas at all? Maybe ask Beverly there when you were touched upon you know in work poverty. It's certainly not something I have come across or any of our parents have said to us. One of the things we do all of the time when we send out our application packs is make sure we send out information about tax credits and the HMRC childcare vouchers so that parents know you can get help wherever you're in commission you can get help with childcare so that that's certainly not something I've heard. I use some childcare as you know I'm to mention what your childcare outgoings are as part of a mortgage application. Okay no thanks. I don't know if Susan wants to come in on that. Have you come across that before? It's not something I've come across as directly as that and certainly not in my current role since founding flexible childcare but in my prior role to that in more commercial nursery services I've certainly been very aware of families whose childcare cost has been significantly more than their mortgage and they've been really concerned about that and in fact families really that it was taking more than one whole salary of the two parents to cover the cost of their childcare because if you've got more than one child in full-time childcare it's really really expensive so yeah I can understand how that could very well be the case because you would be declaring your outgoings on that application so I can certainly see how that could reasonably be the case for families yeah. Okay thank you. I'm going to pass over to Gordon now thanks. Thank you very much convener and good morning panel. We've talked an awful lot this morning about the challenges facing the sector but I was wondering you know looking to the future and the government announced in October its approach to expanding childcare offer and I know it had its consultation in the previous parliament about developing the policy but I'm just wondering what involvement has the sector had in developing the policy that was announced in October about expanding childcare to school-age children and to one-and-two-year-olds? Yeah I think there have been consultation events and obviously the sector membership groups are consulted and speak. I think there is always a clamour from the sector for more consultation and to have voices heard directly definitely so there is a real willingness for people to share their expertise and want to be a part of that. It can be difficult if surveys come out you get multiple surveys from different things so it can be a really hard way to gather that information from people there's obviously it's hard to be running around the country setting up consultation events and things so that there are challenges around that and the routes into getting that everybody's voice heard can be difficult but there is a willingness and I think there would be a desire for more of that to happen. I think it's probably at fairly early stage at the moment some of that work. My organisation we've been working with the school-age directorate through the CivTech programme developing a piece of software to gather data around that type of service both regulated and non-regulated school-care provision but that's still in development about going to user testing phase so we are still at early stage of gathering that evidence and information that data then will be an ongoing live feed of data that's there so it wouldn't be a one-off piece of research that was done but yeah there is a desire to be more consulted with and to get this right before it expands because if we expand with the struggles that currently exist there's a danger that the system implodes and that we just don't have a service for families. I mean as you quite rightly pointed out the policies at an early stage and there's clearly ongoing discussions but do you feel those ongoing discussions influencing the government policy? I think in some ways yes to get the influence through to the government policy at national government level it's harder at local government level once that filters down there's often barriers there so it's sort of that whole joined up thing isn't it that the people influence the policy the policy comes down from government but then it kind of gets a bit messed up when it hits local government areas and I think that's really the sticking point for for lots of providers around that. Okay does MD else want to come in on that point? I agree that there have been consultations and as you will have heard today I've got a lot to say for myself so often at these things I do say quite a lot but then things happen and you wonder why because the whole theme of that consultation are all the feedback that you've given then something else turns about funding so like the holiday money disappearing and Scottish football getting money to provide holiday camps and you think well that's not what was said at the consultation so you kind of it's where how does all that join up and how how does the information then filter so I think yes we've been asked a lot but there's not a lot that then is coming back to us about this is useful and so we think we might go this way or we think we might go that way yeah it's still it's still very piecemeal and I have to say I'm not sure that how well we are listening to portion of it and locally local authorities know as little as I do because I speak to them quite a lot and this kind of they've just got this two weeks notice to put an application in for the capital funding that was released and there wasn't much around and much lead up to that and so I'm not sure that that will that will be really well spent because it's not exciting enough time to think it through properly okay yep I just feel that this committee is taking evidence on parental employment but there doesn't seem to be much talk of you know if you have a baby your maternity leave last six months to nine months if you're lucky then you're expected to go back to work if you're lucky enough to find a provider locally that you can use for childcare at night course of your weeks wages but in reality if your child's six months or nine month old it's the capacity as well there's nothing available local authorities don't provide childcare for working parents of babies you have to wait till your child's three can have maternity leave until three a month so I think a lot of the issue as well is around capacity actually fighting somewhere when you can go so just moving on I'm sorry Kirsty you got more to say you dropped out no that's me for I I just feel I just feel working parents are always at the bottom with a panel for access to childcare at all ages and I don't understand how pre five childcare and after school childcare isn't just part of the normal school day and the normal school week we don't pay to send our children to primary one to seven so why are we needing to pay to send our children to an after school club it's all part of their education and it's all part of keeping your children in work keeping your parents in work sorry why is it not just all one big shabang I just I don't get how it has to be all these separate organisations and all these separate services providing you know scrambling for funding and all the rest of it just make it all part of the same state okay thank you I mean clearly a lot of schools if we're looking at school age childcare clearly a lot of schools already have breakfast clubs after school clubs in some form of holiday provision but it's clearly not an ideal world in a situation where in four years time we want to see you know an entirely different approach to childcare what would that approach look like and what's the level of task facing us Susan you want to start off I think I would like to see more of a sort of a hub model in some ways but we're from your youngest children and families right the way through perhaps school age childcare within the schools as we've been talking about because we need to make better use of that school estate but that sort of hub within the community that's providing the childcare but also provides the wraparound family support community facilities so that it becomes a real asset for the the local community and it reduces the number of doors that families need to knock on for help so that they can go to one place that they're comfortable in that has the space for the childcare provision but also for things like some of our services we have foster families use so there might be the foster parents support group a meeting room for that type of thing for community groups to use for activities and then if school age childcare is also looking at incorporating the activity groups like the dance and the brownies and all of those kind of things that those premises could again be used for for those kind of things so the combination of that early age childcare within a hub and then school facilities being used for for that and it being a really normal and accepted and easily accessible thing that your child can attend those services regardless of their additional support needs so that the the extra targeted funding is available for the children and families who need additional additional staff members additional resources or have other particular they're living in extreme poverty and need support with access to winter clothes to school uniform to food all of those kind of things so yeah just a a much more holistic wrap around community based type facility do you think that's achievable if we get the funding model correct and we get the staffing levels right i do think it's achievable yeah absolutely i think it's achievable and i think that there's loads of struggles we really are facing a lot of challenges at the moment in the sector but there is a real willingness from the sector we're really adaptable and agile people through covid you saw just how adaptable and agile this sector is so there's a real willingness to to play a part on that and providers that are that are supporting that policy financially at the moment by by reducing what they bring for those funded hours is often less than what they would if they sold it privately so so there is a willingness people could have chosen topped out of that before now and they haven't so with everybody the skilled workforce that we have and the strong leaders in the sector if we get the funding model right and we work in partnership with national and local government all pulling in the same direction not all these multifarious directions that have been off at the moment then i absolutely believe that we can achieve that we have to achieve it yeah absolutely somebody else want to come in i mean very much concur with what susan has said around you know the ambition of something being more seamless for parents so that they're not moved from pillar to post between different systems and that the systems are working together to to support parents for those children who have additional needs i think moving towards something that is genuinely accessible and provision that actually exists and can be accessed by parents and children every time is critically important and done with a sense of equity and i suppose the final bit i would say is that you're rightly focused on on the child care system but not for getting the social security system that wraps around that and supports many parents to either work or access childcare and getting rid of some of the the fairly easy traps that exist there would be a big step for a number of parents who rely on social security okay thank you beverly i think you wanted to come on thank you again i concur about the hub i think that's what i was going to speak about earlier if we had a system where you know the school was available to everybody um i don't know whether they anybody needs to be employed by the same employer or how you do that in partnership but certainly a hub where all of these things happen for a child but i also think that um we need to value it so you know it happens in Scandinavia so we can definitely do it um but these these these people who work with the children in Scandinavia are pedagogs so they are valued um and they are valued higher than we value our childcare staff or our playwork staff or our support support for learning staff um and that's the that's how we need to look at it that we need to value the people who work with the children the everything with the whole everything needs to be included so we at the moment i rent a space in a school to deliver the service that we deliver and we get pushed from pillar to post so if that school wants that space for something we could allow and let cancelled at the last minute parents have got no childcare because they get priority so we need to be included we need to be as much a priority as the school day is a priority um you know it needs to be well respected it needs to be well resourced um there are a lot of and i've got cycling of stuff so you know it's a volunteer sector we always make do whatever you've got and try and make it last longer but it does need to be well resourced particularly for um you know facilities where you've got children who need specific equipment um it would be ideal to have your own space in the school estate so we're not you know i would love nothing better than a cabin in the playground of every school that i'm in so that i can uh you know i can open the doors kids get inside get outside and they've got free flow um but invariably we're in the dining hall and we've got a you know a half mile check before you get to the door to the playground on which can often be a concrete jungle um so it's not the best play area um and when we've got smaller schools where things like how a school car is not really sustainable do you need transport and at that time of day it is impossible to get any kind of transport unless you've got your own minibus um because all the you know all the drivers are being used to do school transport so if you've got a cluster based system and you've got three or four schools coming to one hub then you do need to be able to transport those children um but also in the holiday you need to be able to transport those children out on trips right to local parks and all of that sort of thing as well um theoretically you should be able to use the system where all these children have now got free bus passes but actually the buses don't run open enough so that doesn't actually work okay thank you thanks very much that's me thanks very much garden um that that's the end of our for our evidence panel so i'd like to thank the witnesses for for the evidence that they provided and they've given today and next week we will hear from two panels on employability programmes and education and training so that concludes our public business today and we will now move into private to consider the remaining items on the agenda so can i ask the members who are joining us remotely please use the microsoft teams link in their calendars to join the meeting and thanks very much to our our panel of witnesses who have came along today and who joined us remotely thank you very much and that concludes the public meeting thank you