4 big issues facing early years in Scotland

The Scottish government’s commitment to nearly double free nursery hours from 600 to 1,140 was finally introduced in August 2021 - after Covid delayed the scheme by a year.

The move has been seen as a huge investment in the early years, with councils promised an additional £567 million in annual revenue funding by 2021-22 to deliver the expansion.

But questions remain about what impact the changes will have on children’s lives - with one key piece of research even finding that the increased number of free hours could have a negative impact if its leads to a dip in the quality of provision.

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We look at some of the key challenges facing the sector, ahead of an early years conference in Scotland on 2 March organised by the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE):

The Scottish government has ploughed eye-watering sums of money into the expansion of free nursery hours, but private nursery owners wrote to first minister Nicola Sturgeon earlier this month calling for a meeting to help resolve “serious flaws” in the rollout - which they claimed could lead to its “collapse”.

Early years in Scotland: Private nursery pay

The letter said private nurseries faced going out of business because local authorities were paying public sector nurseries up to £4 per hour more, which had contributed to a “staffing crisis”.

The letter said because council nurseries got more funding that meant they could afford to pay staff “in the region of 30-50 per cent more”, leading to “a mass exodus - up to 60 per cent in some nurseries - of trained and long-serving staff leaving”.

It is not a new problem. A government report into the early years workforce published in 2019 found that the main reason why early years workers were leaving their jobs was to get higher pay - but it found that independent nursery employees were far more likely to leave for a higher rate of pay than those in the public sector (79 per cent, as compared with 57 per cent).

The report said: “There is a trend for experienced ELC [early learning and childcare] staff to move from the independent to public sector, which can create retention difficulties for some ELC providers.”

Staff qualifications

In 2015 an independent review of the early learning and childcare workforce highlighted the “strong body of research” that “demonstrates the importance of higher qualified staff impacting on the quality of provision”. And it criticised “the popular misconception...that working in ELC does not require academic skills”.

However, in Scotland the number of teachers working in the early years has fallen sharply - between 2010 and 2020 the number more than halved from 1,543 to 729. Last year official figures showed there were 704 teachers working in the early years in Scotland.

There are other graduates working in the sector. In 2017 the Scottish government began collecting data and in 2021 there were 3,150 graduates other than teachers working in the early years - up from 2,074 four years earlier.

Still, it is a small proportion of the total workforce (around 28,000 people were working in Scottish nurseries in 2019, according to Scottish Social Services Council figures) and Professor Aline-Wendy Dunlop argued in a report in 2016 that it was “essential to sustain the expertise that teachers bring to the nursery team”.

She spoke about teachers’ knowledge of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, their understanding of child development and pedagogy, their ability to identify additional support needs, and their ability to facilitate “seamless transition”.  

Is it education or childcare?

The Scottish government has said it believes that one of the three main benefits of the expansion of free nursery hours will be “improving children’s outcomes and helping to close the poverty-related attainment gap”. But in 2018 a piece of research published by the Growing Up in Scotland (GUS) survey, which is tracking the lives of thousands of Scottish children, questioned this assumption.

The GUS researchers warned that if the expansion of free hours resulted in a dip in the quality of nursery provision, extra time in preschool “may well have more detrimental effects”. But even if that didn’t happen, they were still unenthusiastic about the potential impact of the expansiot on attainment.

The researchers said: “The analysis carried out for this report did not find any evidence to suggest that such an increase is likely to have any notable impact on children’s outcomes by the time they enter school, either positive or negative.”

Later this week Tes Scotland will publish an article in which Peter Moss, emeritus professor of early childhood provision at UCL Institute of Education and a speaker at next week’s RSE early years conference, hits out at the “deeply flawed” early years system in Scotland - which he says is “fragmented, incoherent and socially divisive”.

He makes the case for “a fully integrated and public system of early childhood education (ECE) from birth to six years”.

Care Inspectorate figures show that 3,574 “day care of children” services were registered with it as of the end of last year: 1,778 were run by councils, 1,058 were private and 735 were voluntary or not for profit.

Too much inspection?

Currently, two bodies are responsible for inspecting early learning and childcare settings: the Care Inspectorate and Education Scotland. They carry out individual and shared inspections of services for children aged 3 to school age.

Education Scotland says its inspections focus on “the quality of children’s learning and achievement” and that it has “a particular interest in how the setting is developing children’s skills and understanding in literacy, numeracy and health and wellbeing”.

However, those working in the sector in Scotland say the system creates a lot of pressure and that there should be just one inspection body for early years providers.  

The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) is bringing together world experts in an online conference focused on early years learning and development on Wednesday 2 March. More information about the free event can be found here.