Seòmar agus comataidhean

The Scottish Government, COSLA and many others have a shared ambition to have trauma-informed and trauma-responsive workforces across the country and to have transition and support planning in place for people with care experience. That is central to our commitment to keep the Promise. As I said in response to Gillian Mackay, as part of our national trauma training programme, we are developing tailored trauma training, which will be rolled out in summer 2023 to members of the workforce who work most closely with care-experienced babies, children and young people, and their families. Focusing on having a trauma-informed workforce across all public services will help to support not only the general population but care-experienced children and young people.

Last week, the committee heard evidence from my colleague Kevin Stewart, who is leading on the national care service. This week, the responses to the call for evidence and the consultation will be published, so I do not want to pre-empt those. Children’s services were included in the consultation, and, from my conversations with stakeholders and others, I am sure that a wide variety of views will have been submitted.

The Government is committed to keeping the Promise, to ensuring that children in Scotland grow up feeling loved, safe and respected, and that the wraparound services that they receive are appropriate to them.

I have no doubt that there will be challenges with the introduction of a national care service. There will be inevitable changes to social work, even if only adult services are covered by the national care service. We are very mindful of that. As with the challenges of addressing child poverty, the commitment to the Promise is a cross-Government commitment. We are mindful of unintended impacts, so we will develop the national care service in a way that does not lead to unintended consequences for other systems and services.

There is a principle of provider neutrality. A parent who has an eligible child can choose from a variety of early learning settings. That could be childminding, a nursery placement or an outdoor nursery.

It is important to remember that, even during the time of school and ELC closures for most pupils and young people, those facilities were there, not only for our key workers so that they could maintain services, but for vulnerable families who were identified by local authorities, because they know them best. Those families were, therefore, still able to access that funded ELC and school-age care.

As I said in response to Sandesh Gulhane, we have made significant progress in delivering a major expansion of provision, and part of that happened during a pandemic. That is testament to the work that many people have done to ensure that we could deliver 1,140 hours in August last year, and we have seen an increased uptake in relation to eligible two-year-olds year on year, which is encouraging. Obviously, there is still more to do and we want to ensure that everyone who is eligible for that provision is able to access it if they choose to do so, accepting that some parents of two-year-olds do not want to use that childcare.

We have done some work to ensure that the services that are in contact with families are aware of the childcare offer and can inform families about it. We are also working with the UK Government to look at UK-level data sharing. A UK Government consultation is calling for views on data sharing with the Scottish Government in relation to families that are recipients of eligible benefits so that local authorities would be more able to communicate directly with them, because there have been general data protection regulation issues, with systems not being able to speak to one other. My understanding is that that will require some legislation at Westminster.

As the cabinet secretary said, we also need to get alongside those eligible families and understand what the barriers are to them accessing the childcare offer.

My figures are slightly different from yours. There was a drop between 2019 and 2020, but it was a drop from 11 per cent to 9 per cent, rather than a drop to 2 per cent. In 2021, it increased to 13 per cent. Given the impact of Covid and the circumstances in which they were living, one can understand why parents did not register for the childcare that they were eligible for, or why they were reluctant to do so.

Childminders and the Scottish Childminding Association are key partners with the Scottish Government and local authorities in delivering the 1,140 hours and developing the wraparound care that we have committed to, and we are working closely with them to understand why childminders are giving up the profession and to help with recruitment and retention. As they are an absolutely key part of the ELC workforce, we are committed to working alongside the national association to understand what attracts people to childminding, to ensure that it is seen as an attractive career option, and to not only expand the workforce, but retain the current workforce and understand why people are choosing to leave.

As I said in my previous answer, we are working with stakeholders to shape and design the whole family wellbeing fund for 2022-23. We recognise that early intervention is essential to ensure that children can safely remain in the care of their families when they are at risk of becoming looked after or are looked after at home. To fulfil our commitments to the Promise, we have to understand the impact of trauma on family relationships and how we can drive a reduction in that. We will continue to engage with stakeholders and listen to those with care experience, to understand how we can support that critical work.

Through the children, young people and families early intervention fund, which is more commonly known as CYPFEI, funding is provided to more than 100 organisations—some of which the committee will have received evidence from—to promote wellbeing, prevention and early intervention activities and improve parenting and family support. We have committed to funding those organisations until 2023. In April 2023, as we committed to in this year’s programme for government, we will launch a £16 million third sector fund to replace the CYPFEI fund and the adult learning and empowering communities—ALEC—fund. Therefore, as I said, there are on-going commitments to continue to work with the sector.

As a precursor to the family wellbeing fund, which we might come to later in the meeting, the Deputy First Minister announced at the weekend £3 million for local authorities and £255,000 for a small number of third sector organisations, to provide cash support to families who are currently in need. There is an on-going commitment from the Government to do what we can when we can to mitigate—

Absolutely. We are looking at targeting what families need at that point in time, whether that is help with utilities, clothing or food.

No—I am happy to answer as the minister.

I talked earlier about our cross-sectoral work in the children and families collective leadership group on the impact of the pandemic on children and young people. We looked at the real-time data and how, for example, services were responding to children, young people and families. It is important to remember—I am sure that you will be aware of this—that the early years workforce, including ELC staff, health visitors and allied health professionals, has continued to support parents and carers over the course of the pandemic, although people might have been working in different ways.

That said, we know that there has been an impact on social and emotional development with the pandemic, and we will continue to look at the controls and measures that are in place to contain it and whether they need to be adjusted further to minimise any developmental harm to our young people. Many children in Scotland have had a significant part of their nursery experience cut short due to Covid. A key part of early learning for children is learning how to socialise with others and about group dynamics. Lots of our wee ones will have missed out on that and, as you have suggested, the evidence is beginning to show the pandemic’s impact on a range of children’s outcomes, including speech and language development. Indeed, that is why I highlighted the issue when I talked about the books in the baby box and our encouraging parents to read to their children, which is something that they can do at home and which is so vital in stimulating children’s imaginations and encouraging speech and language development.

It is for all those reasons that we prioritised keeping ELC and other vital services open, with appropriate safety measures in place, and the delivery of 1,140 hours of free childcare, although I should say that a lot of the planning and development work was going on during the pandemic.

We will continue to work with partners to support nurseries, primary schools and other services and help our young people and children to recover from the impacts of Covid. I know that the committee has heard evidence on the importance of play in children’s health and wellbeing as the recovery from Covid goes on. That was, of course, vital in pre-Covid times, too.

We have made a number of commitments on play, including the £60 million investment in renewing play parks. We invested heavily in outdoor play, as it was safer for children to play in the outside environment. We know that that helps to maintain children’s physical health and to stimulate their imaginations, and that they get lots of other physical and mental health benefits from being outside. Last year, we supplied nurseries with funding so that they could provide outdoor clothing for children who might not have it. That enabled them to get outside, too.

We have invested in training for our ELC staff so that they can develop their skills in outside play. There has been a huge expansion in outdoor nursery provision, including among local authority nurseries. I have been to some of those facilities and have seen the impact that they have on children in stimulating their imaginations and helping them to develop the skills and social interaction that they might not have had the opportunity to develop during the Covid pandemic.

We will look at all suggestions that are made by our third sector stakeholders, and we will look to embed social and emotional recovery in all our Covid recovery plans. I am certainly happy to look at the evidence that Mary Glasgow gave. Children 1st is a key stakeholder, and it gives the Scottish Government lots of advice and help in developing policies. We will look at all the evidence that the committee receives and at the recommendations in the committee’s report when responding to its inquiry.

As I have said, the Scottish Government is absolutely committed to keeping the Promise to care-experienced children and young people. It is also committed to supporting young people who are in care or leaving care; that is enshrined in the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 and in the measures that we have outlined in previous answers.

On collecting data, one thing that we spoke about often during my time as a member of the Health and Sport Committee was the collating of accurate and relevant data and ensuring that we have data that shows us the outcomes for children and young people who are leaving care, so that we can target interventions towards them. Having such data is key to driving forward the improvements that we want in the care service.

We have talked today about the whole-family wellbeing fund providing support and a wraparound service. Providing the individual support that a person needs is key to ensuring that transitions occur as seamlessly as we want. We want the flow between services to be as easy as it can be for a child or a young person and their family. It is certainly our ambition to work towards keeping the Promise, as the Scottish Government has committed to doing.