Access to childcare services ‘has strengthened relationships and wellbeing for children and parents’, new report finds

29 Sep 2022

Media Release

Projects across Scotland supported by the Access to Childcare Fund (ACF) have made a difference to families’ lives, bolstering children and parents’ health, relationships and financial security.

That’s the key finding of the final report into phase one of the ACF, which also reveals that access to childcare opened up new work opportunities and reduced costs for many participating families.

Funded school age childcare provided through the projects offered a safe, supportive place for children to come together and, while families may have experienced difficult times through the pandemic, children were able to have fun, make new friends, get outdoors and play.

Click here to read the report

The Scottish Government’s Access to Childcare Fund was designed to increase access to childcare for those families most at risk of experiencing child poverty.

Between October 2021 and March 2022, the Fund invested more than £2 million into 15 projects across Scotland. National charity Children in Scotland managed the fund on the Scottish Government’s behalf.

A short film about the Fund and projects it supported has been produced (click the link on this page to watch the film).

The final report into the Fund provides an overview of its impact and shares learning from funded projects. Its key findings and recommendations include:

Funding must be targeted at subsidising childcare costs so families on low incomes are no longer locked out of services
Childcare services must have longer funding periods to enable them to develop, plan, deliver and evaluate their approaches
As specialist services for children with additional support needs are particularly expensive because of the greater number of skilled staff required, additional funding must be available across Scotland to ensure children with ASN get equal access to school-aged childcare
Support for targeted and specialist childcare providers must be given to help all families access these services. Targeted services for minority ethnic families, for example, help to foster inclusion
Evidence from projects should be explored to show how incorporating whole family support into services from early years to school age can increase the uptake of places and may enable progression from poverty
Childcare should be recognised as an important part of the wider children’s services landscape, and childcare providers should be included in children’s services planning processes
Transport must be viewed as part of a holistic childcare offer. Transport provision can help families overcome childcare barriers including cost, lack of transport options, and parents/carers work or study commitments.

Welcoming publication of the report, Children in Scotland’s Head of Policy, Projects and Participation Amy Woodhouse said:

“The Access to Childcare Fund experience has taught us many valuable lessons, including the importance of relationships, the complexity of poverty, and the fact that childcare does not exist in a vacuum but is deeply connected to other basic needs in families and communities.

“Children and young people have had a lot of valuable things to say about their experiences of the childcare provided through the Fund. A recommendation of the report is that childcare providers should consider how they incorporate children’s views into service design, delivery and evaluation. We are hopeful that Scotland’s move towards incorporating the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child will provide further impetus for this.”

Access to Childcare Fund Lead Alison Hay said:

“Although funded projects had to operate in the most challenging of circumstances, the Fund has shown that our vision for childcare as a service that nurtures the child and the wider family, exists as part of a wider community, and is responsive to individual needs, is possible and achievable.”

Children’s Minister Clare Haughey said:

“This report shows that almost 1500 children from 1000 low income families were supported through the Access to Childcare Fund (ACF) between October 2021 and March 2022.

"The Scottish Government is committed to building a system of school age childcare, where the least well-off families pay nothing. This evaluation of the ACF will help our understanding of what families need as we take our next steps.

"I would like to thank Children in Scotland, the projects, and the families involved, who provided valuable input for this report.”

More than 1479 children from 1000 families were supported through the Fund. It supported projects to test out new approaches to childcare, including expanding services through providing free and subsidised places; increasing the hours and days of operation; and increasing the types of services on offer.

In the context of a challenging winter, the cost of living crisis, and evidence of how projects supported by the Fund reacted to rapidly changing circumstances, it is hoped that the report’s learning and recommendations can be widely shared.

(ends)

Media contact: Chris Small, Communications Manager - Children in Scotland, csmall@childreninscotland.org.uk.

Notes for editors

About the Access to Childcare Fund

The Scottish Government’s £3 million Access to Childcare Fund (ACF) was opened in July 2020. The purpose of the Fund was to support childcare solutions that enable more accessible and affordable childcare for families with school-aged children and to help to reduce the barriers parents and carers can experience in accessing childcare. These barriers include the cost of childcare, the hours available, and accessibility for children with additional support needs. The awards aimed to make services more accessible and affordable for low-income families, particularly the six identified priority family groups most at risk from living in poverty and as set out in the Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan.

The Fund was managed by Children in Scotland, with strategic input from an expert steering group. Both evaluation and improvement were at the heart of the Access to Childcare Fund and Evaluation Support Scotland (ESS) has provided significant input and support to services throughout. A mentoring and peer network also operated across the projects. The fund was launched shortly after the Covid-19 pandemic took hold in Scotland, and in the context of a number of national lockdowns and ongoing restrictions.

The funded services were:

Action for Children, Moray
Clyde Gateway, South Lanarkshire
Flexible Childcare Service Scotland, Aberdeenshire
Flexible Childcare Service Scotland, Dundee
FUSE, Glasgow
Hame Fae Hame, Shetland
Hope Amplified, South Lanarkshire
Indigo Childcare Ltd, Glasgow
Inverclyde Council
Low Income Families Together (LIFT), Muirhouse, Edinburgh
Supporting Help and Integration in Perthshire (SHIP), Perth & Kinross
St Mirin’s Out of School Care, Glasgow
Stepping Stones for Families, Glasgow
SupERkids, East Renfrewshire
The Wee Childcare Company, Angus.

Click here for more information about the Fund:
childreninscotland.org.uk/acf-fund/

About Children in Scotland

Giving all children in Scotland an equal chance to flourish is at the heart of everything we do.

By bringing together a network of people working with and for children, alongside children and young people themselves, we offer a broad, balanced and independent voice. We create solutions, provide support and develop positive change across all areas affecting children in Scotland.

We do this by listening, gathering evidence, and applying and sharing our learning, while always working to uphold children’s rights. Our range of knowledge and expertise means we can provide trusted support on issues as diverse as the people we work with and the varied lives of children and families in Scotland.

ACF Final Phase One Evaluation Report

Our report into the Access to Childcare Fund identifies successes and shares learning

Click here to read

Enabling childcare that's more accessible

The Fund supports childcare solutions and helps reduce barriers facing parents/carers

Visit the website

2021-26 Manifesto

Our Manifesto includes key calls on poverty and improving access to childcare

Click here for more

Our projects

Our range of projects focus on young people's voices and participation

Click here for more

All local services providing childcare or play for children and young people need to be ‘here to stay’: funded on a long-term, secure basis, major four-year project finds

4 February 2021

MEDIA RELEASE

The final report of a major Scottish childcare project makes a series of calls about how to improve childcare in local communities and through changes to national policy.

CHANGE (Childcare and Nurture, Glasgow East) was set up in 2016 to create a sustainable childcare model with family and community involvement at its core.

Work on the project involved gathering the views of children, parents and local services; setting up a Hub to strengthen local collaboration and challenge childcare barriers identified by families; championing community initiatives and the need for more universal family support; and supporting ‘crisis’ childcare and food provision.

Following four years of work, the project’s final report, ‘It’s our future’: Childcare in Glasgow East, makes a series of recommendations about how to improve childcare, including:

All local services that provide childcare or play for children and young people need to be ‘here to stay’: funded on a long-term, secure basis
The number of available childminders should be increased so that families have more choice about how and when their child is looked after
Out of School Care services must be treated as a core service for it to be sustainable. This should include considering school and community buildings as everyone’s spaces
More opportunities for families to play and learn together must be made available, with all food-related work funded to be part of the mainstream offer
Parents and carers need childcare to enable them to attend emergency appointments and access public services
Families need to be able to access information about childcare that is easy to find and understand. The childcare and family support available must be made easier to navigate for both families and practitioners.

CHANGE found in its project work that local people frequently expressed fatigue about previous interventions that have not improved their lives, and that local staff dealing with stretched resources were often exhausted.

CHANGE staff were also conscious of how issues of class and poverty associated with the project area have been consistently framed in negative terms.

The report calls for the many positive aspects of life in the East End of Glasgow to be celebrated and better understood.

Sally Cavers, Children in Scotland’s Head of Inclusion and CHANGE project lead, said:

“The CHANGE project has sought to address fundamental problems about childcare including fragmented provision, cost, and the need for real community ownership and empowerment. We hope that this report captures the complexity and challenge these issues have presented – but also how much commitment, positivity and expertise communities in Glasgow’s East End possess in answering these problems.

“In terms of improving childcare for families, we need to be focused on the qualities of kindness and dedication we found in the community, and recognise that locally and nationally, we are making progress in improving access to affordable quality childcare.

“However, culture change and real transformation is still required for local services, and huge societal pressures exist for families and services, even more so following a pandemic that represented one of the biggest challenges for generations.”

“As we state in the report, it is our hope that the essence of Glasgow’s East End, combined with effective local and national policy drivers and the possibility of post-pandemic transformation, will result in local community childcare and support services that can thrive.”

The CHANGE project follows work and key recommendations by the Commission for Childcare Reform, which published its findings in 2015.

Click here to download the report

Click here to watch the short animated film and hear community voices on what needs to change

Media contact:

Chris Small, csmall@childreninscotland.org.uk

Further information:

Click here to read more about the CHANGE project
Click here to find out more about Children in Scotland

We Know What We Need

Watch a short animation and hear community voices on what needs to change

Click to watch the film

CHANGE project: final report

Read ‘It’s our future’: Childcare in Glasgow East

Click to download the report

CHANGE project: aims and background

Find out more about the project's ambitions, remit and achievements

Click to read more

CHANGE project: views and expertise

Read blogs about CHANGE, including comment from Senior Project Officer Robert Doyle

Click to read more

CHANGE project: partners

Partnership working has been key to CHANGE's approach

Click to find out more

Hope in hard times

Proposals for early years policy development drawing on the work of CHANGE feature in our 2021-26 Manifesto

Click to find out more

Commission for Childcare Reform

The CHANGE project was informed by some of the Commission's key findings

Click to find out more

Why our third sector deserves first class support

26 May 2020

In advance of next week's launch of our new Supporting the Third Sector Project, Vicky Wan explains why we want to support organisations to become equal partners in Children and Family Services – and be ready to respond to any future crisis

In her recent blog (click to read), our Head of External Affairs Jacqueline Cassidy reflected on the vital role of the third sector during the health pandemic and its phenomenal response to the challenges of COVID-19. This was later evidenced in the Scottish Government’s COVID-19: Supporting vulnerable children and young people – data intelligence report (click to read). The large range of examples in the report clearly demonstrate the third sector’s ability to sustain its local and national services by changing the model of delivery within a short space of time.

In her 8 April open letter to third sector organisations , Iona Colvin, the Interim Director for Children and Families of the Scottish Government, emphasised the critical role the third sector has in supporting the needs of children, young people and their families (click to read). But she also recognised that the third sector has an enormous amount of knowledge and intelligence about the communities it serves.

“Third sector organisations are uniquely well placed to help us to understand the nature of the challenges that children, young people and families are facing in their homes and communities at this time" - Iona Colvin, Scottish Government Interim Director of Children and Families

One of the reasons why third sector organisations are able to respond to the emergency rather efficiently is largely because of their long-established relationships with the local communities and their understanding of the challenges families continue to face.

Third sector organisations use their professional knowledge to swiftly adjust their own services. They know what the families need and more importantly what will work. Not only that, they share their skills and expertise with partners in the statutory and in the third sector, so together they are able to offer support in a whole-family holistic approach.

A support worker of a charity told us:

“I’ve been supporting this disabled young person for a while. The family was coping well before the outbreak. Since the lockdown, mum became very anxious that her disabled son would be infected with COVID-19 if he fell ill and had to go to the hospital. Dad is a key worker. Her younger son is now home-schooling but she doesn’t have time to help with his learning because she has to care for her older son nearly 24/7. She feels very guilty and stressed.

Through the local children’s services forum, I found out about a befriending service. Mum is now being supported on the phone every day. I also found out about a peer learning group organised by another charity. The younger son is now learning with other children of similar age.”

The benefits of collaborative working are apparent. However, an effective collaboration takes time to develop. Organisations need to have good awareness of services available in the area, a reasonable level of trust in the quality of each other’s work, and referral protocols without unnecessary bureaucracy.

In Scotland, we already have structures in place to support partnership working for many years.

The local children’s services networks, which are usually facilitated by the local Third Sector Interfaces (TSIs), bring organisations together so they can support their peers, exchange good practice, share resources, develop collaborative working arrangements and help shape local services.

Thanks to this established relationship before the outbreak of COVID-19, we can quickly and efficiently mobilise the third sector to deliver and maintain support to children as part of multi-agency plans during the pandemic. Also due to the communication channels already established via the networks, local organisations can continue to feed their experiences and concerns to inform strategic planning at national level, while they concentrate on meeting the needs of families at this difficult time.

Taking the learning from this, while it is important to continue to invest in the frontline service delivery to children and families, we should not undermine the importance of the structures that support and strengthen the third sector. If we do not resource and fund the local networks sufficiently now, are we confident that we will be able to respond as well, if not better, in any future emergency situation?

Our role

Children in Scotland is committed to supporting the Third Sector Interfaces and third sector organisations to become equal partners in Children and Family Services. This includes increasing local third sector engagement and strengthening local support structures through our new Supporting the Third Sector Project.