SCMA has been approached by a number of political parties in recent months to help inform their manifesto development for the Scottish Parliamentary election, reflecting the increasing interest in childminding and our work.
Instead of publishing our own manifesto, we are sharing our
Top 5 Priorities for Childminding which we have been feeding into these discussions:
- There is a critical need to extend the Programme for Scotland’s Childminding Future on childminder retention and recruitment to maintain and increase childminding places for families and communities. Childminding is at a tipping point, and although significant progress has been made in reversing the decline in the childminding workforce there is a critical need to extend Funded Time Off the Floor to the whole childminding workforce to improve retention and to continue to deliver SCMA’s demographically-targeted and supported model of childminder recruitment around Scotland.
- Childminding needs to be valued and recognised as a unique, high-quality form of registered childcare (spanning pre-school and school-age), family support and as a community asset, with proportionate childminding-specific quality-assurance (joined-up nationally and locally to prevent duplication).
- We must work collectively to increase the level of pay for all childminders to support their business sustainability, retention and recruitment, the provision of childcare for families and the delivery of a range of national policies. Subsidy is also required in remote and island areas where there is a need for childcare, but not enough demand to support business sustainability.
- After-school childcare shouldn’t be an after-thought. The funded entitlement for two to four year-olds (and focus on statutory provision) has dominated the childcare policy landscape since 2016 to the detriment of providing childcare for other ages. While this is an important age for children’s learning and development, working parents/carers have childcare needs from 0-12 years and beyond traditional nursery opening hours to enable them to work which childminders are very well-placed to support – and parents should be able to choose which form of childcare best suits their family’s needs.
- The number of childminders delivering funded Early Learning and Childcare (ELC) must increase particularly for ‘eligible two year-olds’ (low-income/vulnerable families) and to support parental choice and childminders’ business sustainability. Complex procurement exercises should be discontinued in favour of streamlined open application (building on the good practice which exists in some areas) accompanied by regular monthly payments to childminders to support their business sustainability.
We wait with interest to see how strongly childminding features within party manifestos.
Read more about our
Top 5 Priorities for Childminding.