Early years workforce
The expansion of funded early learning and childcare (ELC) has created thousands of jobs across Scotland and the ELC workforce now exceeds 46,000 people.
Recruiting and investing in ELC professionals
We ran a national recruitment campaign to attract people to a career in ELC, ensuring they were supported and able to develop in their roles.
We also worked with the Scottish Funding Council and Skills Development Scotland to create additional capacity in the college and work-based learning sectors to train the additional staff required, including funding additional graduate level training places and Equity and Excellence Leads to support leadership within the sector. We have successfully recruited around 8,000 additional professionals, with the workforce now exceeding 46,000 people.
Investing in skills
Delivering a high quality early learning experience for children requires a dedicated, skilled and well-qualified workforce and we have invested in the workforce as we have grown it. Our national early learning and childcare induction pack supports new staff and provides advice and information to help them develop their skills and understanding.
In collaboration with leading partners, further learning opportunities are provided to support professionals throughout their career journey and continually enhance practice, for example through the suite of free continued professional learning (CPL) modules and a National Directory of CPL.
Pay and conditions
We encourage fair work practices across the ELC sector, including ensuring that staff are fairly remunerated.
To support this we provide local authorities with sufficient funding to allow them to set and pay sustainable rates to funded providers in the private and third sectors that enables the payment of the real Living Wage to ELC workers delivering the funded entitlement.
Equity and Excellence leads
Part of the early learning and childcare (ELC) funding we provide to local authorities supports the provision of Equity and Excellence Lead posts in every local authority area. The distribution of funding is based on the number of ELC settings in areas of multiple deprivation (using data from the SIMD (Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation). These are highly qualified posts, that can be either a teacher or early years graduate with or working towards, for example the BA in Childhood Practice. National policy for Equity and Excellence Leads responds to evidence that:
- improved outcomes for children depends on high quality provision;
- key drivers of quality are a high quality workforce and strong pedagogical leadership – research shows children have the best experience in ELC where there is a range of staff with complementary skills and higher level qualifications, and;
- those who benefit most, are those that experience the most disadvantage
Read more: Rapid evidence review: Childcare quality & children's outcomes, by Public Health Scotland.
Equity and Excellence Leads play a critical role in supporting children to close the poverty-related outcomes gap by:
- being an additional resource over and above usual staffing for a setting;
- not being tied to a settings' adult-child ratios and therefore having greater flexibility and reflection time for this purpose;
- working directly with children and families and not focusing on managerial responsibilities;
- leading and supporting pedagogy in a setting, upskilling fellow practitioners.
Beyond these broad parameters, local authorities have freedom to utilise Leads depending on their local needs and the Leads’ experience.
Future development of early learning and childcare
Within the 2023-24 Programme for Government, we have made a number of commitments that will help us work towards our ambition to expand access to funded early learning and childcare (ELC) to more children and families, starting with those who would benefit most, by the end of this Parliament.
This work will build on commitments that were made in the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 Programme for Government that saw the Scottish Government expand access to funded ELC to those families who benefit most.
We have committed to work with local authorities and our partners in the ELC sector to expand our childcare programme as part of our national mission to tackle child poverty.
We will begin work to develop an expanded national offer for families with two-year-olds, focused on those who will benefit most. This will build on the foundations of the existing 1140 programme, which makes high quality early learning and childcare available to around a quarter of the most disadvantaged families with two year olds.
To support our commitments, we will also grow the childminding workforce by 1,000 more, building on existing childminder-specific recruitment and retention pilot activity, to ensure that more families can access the high-quality, flexible and unique experience of childcare that childminders can offer.