welcome to the 25th meeting on education children and young people committee in 2022. Our first item of business is an evidence session with local authorities on funding for early learning and childcare, and that will help inform our pre-budget scrutiny. I would like to welcome from Scottish Borders Cysyll Margo black, early years manager, children and young people, and Kirsty Maxwell, the finance business partner for education and lifelong learning finance and corporate governance, good morning, and from Argyllum Bute Council, Wendy Brownlee, head of education performance and improvement, and from Fife Council, Carrie Lindsay, executive director of education and children services, and Stuart Westwater, the quality improvement officer in early years, so good morning to you all. I have a bit of housekeeping before we begin. Our session is hybrid today with all of our witnesses participating virtually. I've asked members of the committee to try and address their questions to a particular witness or witnesses. It may be, however, that others wish to respond to the same question. So can I ask our witnesses to put a capital R in the chat box when you wish to speak? The clerks, more so than myself, will be monitoring the chat box but will bring you in when we can. I want to reassure you that it isn't necessary to respond to every question, and if you don't think that you have anything to add on a particular question, that's fine. Please just let us know. Finally, if you are asked a question but don't have the information to hand, as I said, it's okay to say that, you will have the option to follow up in writing after the meeting. Okay, so we will crack on with the session now. Thank you. Can we go to our first questions of the morning from my colleague Graham Day, please? Thank you, convener, and morning to the panel. I ask my initial question as directed to each of the three councils. If I was a parent living in your areas, where would I go to to find your strategic plan, and how detailed is it? Who would like to take that one first? Can I maybe perhaps put Carrie on the spot for that one? Is that okay? Carrie Lindsay, thanks. Yeah, no problem. Good morning everyone, and thanks for having us here today. I think that in the planning process that the plans have changed quite a lot, they have to be submitted to the Government, and we make sure that we are updating our plans on a regular basis. I think that it's a really good question, Graham, about where would a parent be able to find that. What we do in Fife is we would share some of that information when we're going out to consult, and also within our admissions process we wouldn't be sharing the whole plan, because it's a lot of pages long, so we would share elements of that information with our parents when we are asking them to look for an admission place in any of our nurseries. I think that there is a question about whether or not the strategic plan should be online and made available, and I think that that's certainly something that we can take back and consider. As I said, they tend to be quite technical plans, because there are a lot about the buildings and about the workforce planning, and I think that parents are interested in some aspects of that, but perhaps not all aspects. As I read it, the process must take place once every two years, so is there no retrospective element involved in this where you reflect on what you have delivered, what you're going to change, and that that is then made available for parents and anyone else to read? Absolutely, so we do consult, as you say, on a two-yearly cycle, and we take reports to committee that are public reports and that are available to parents, so that information is there about what we've done, what the process has been like in terms of parents' feedback, and about any changes that we're making to the models. That's done on an annual basis, and it's certainly my authority to committee, but it's not online as a separate document, it's within a committee report. Can I ask the other two councils then how they approach this, because it sounds like there is no formal process that's followed here? Wendy, would you like to come in first? I've noticed that Wendy and Margot have both put ours, so we'll come to them now. Thanks very much, and again, just to echo Cary's words, thank you for having us. Similar to Cary, we take papers annually to area committee, we also publish aspects of our plan on our website. It's currently not live on our website as we've taken it down to update it and reflect the information that was published on the 6th of October. As Cary said, we have four distinct areas across Argyll and Bute, and on our rolling process we consult with parents in each of those areas. That's because each of those areas has very different needs and very different demographics with regards to childcare. We analyse each of those areas separately and then inform the plan and change the plan accordingly. We're in the process of updating and we'd hope to have that plan in draft, but then available after our December committee sign it off. Very similar to Wendy and Cary, our plan is actually being formulated at the moment. We were waiting for the best document to come out, which will help inform that. We also, as we expect our plan to be for the next three years, we need to know where we will be financially in terms of are we going to be able to develop any new provision. We haven't in the past made it available as a whole to parents, elements of it, yes. We completed our statutory consultation on most recent one earlier this year and those comments are helping inform the plan we're currently working on. That will then be signed off by committee and will be, I suppose, available to parents via committee papers. Okay, thank you for that. I guess, moving on, it's self-evident that how each of your areas will deliver on the four strategic priorities will differ. Get that, absolutely. I'm quite interested in how you account for how you do that, but also perhaps more importantly how it's made obvious to people who take an interest in this, where your ELC offer, where it sits alongside other local government work impact and things like family support, employment, poverty reduction programmes. How do you pull all this together to say, this is what we do? We'll go back in the same order of snap with Cary Lindsay. Thank you, Cary. At the local authority level, we are looking holistically about how we support families, so you're absolutely right that we need to make sure that we join up the policies that we have. Things like the whole family wellbeing fund that we're currently looking at, the early learning and childcare, the work that we're all doing in social work with our children and families team where we're changing due to the promise. I think that all of those policy directions allow us to look more holistically at how we make sure that, from not through to 18, we've got a holistic programme in place to support families. Your question about how would parents be aware of that? We're certainly in the process of working with our first sector colleagues to get our parents involved and communities involved in giving us feedback about what the experiences are like for them, so that it isn't a case of feeling that we're very disjointed and that we're driven by external policies to deliver for families and communities. We're actually thinking about putting the family and the children and young people at the heart of that. Early learning and childcare is very much part of that. I think that the childcare element when we're trying to get families back to work, where we've got processes in Fife, for example, we've got a project called making it work, which is about helping families back into work, and childcare is a really crucial element of that. It is very much looking at all of those policy drivers together and thinking about how the family feels in the middle of that, and making changes as we go. Certainly looking at our flexible model in Fife, we're getting feedback from our parents around that, whether it suits them in terms of their working patterns. Obviously, if we're looking to support other areas of families' lives, not just the childcare, but if some people need a bit of extra support, again it's that holistic look at how we offer that. Through our early learning and childcare settings and beyond, because all of those things don't stop when a child moves into a school setting. Wendy, are you able to come in to respond now? Certainly, thank you. Similar to what Cary has said, we use a range of mechanisms. We've found in particular that social media is highly effective in sharing with parents the supports that are out there. It doesn't admittedly then share all of that information in one place. We also use our own end-to-end communication to send that information out. Once children move into primary schools, primaries and secondaries use similar communication, but we also work with family liaison officers to identify families potentially more at risk and more needing to access all of those services. A wide range, but admittedly not everything in one place, but a wide range of communication. Thank you, Wendy. Margo, would you like to respond to that support from Graham? In addition to what my colleagues have said, borders are very rural and there are many disadvantages to that, but one of the advantages is that the early years workforce across all sectors is quite small. We have a strategic early years group, which is multi-agency, and we have early years networks in each of our localities. There is a range of different ways of communicating with parents and we try to make that as seamless as possible so that no matter where they go, they get the same information or they get signposts to the right place. For example, we will be going to Enrolment week in November and we work very closely with our health visitor colleagues and our social work family support colleagues to make sure that parents are informed if they are not accessing our website and they do not see the advert in the paper, that they know what is happening and what they need to do and get the right support at the right time to do that. Thank you very much, panel. Can we now move to questions from Ruth Maguire, please? Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. I'd like to ask about flexibility for families. Cary Lindsey mentioned that they have a flexible model in Fife. I wonder if you could share a bit more about that with the committee. Then I'm interested in hearing what the challenges are in providing that flexibility. Whenever you put in flexibility and choice and you raise expectations around that, you also bring some disappointment because whenever you have choice, you have some people who perhaps cannot get their first choice. We've certainly worked really hard to try to make sure that we have models that communicate to parents and that they understand what those models look like. Sometimes when we talk about flexibility in the local authority, that means that there's a range of different models. Sometimes when parents talk about flexibility, they would like that to be so that they can almost pick and choose an hour here or a couple of hours there. The way that the models currently work, that's really difficult to do. I'll just bring in Stuart Westwater, who's my equal improvement officer, who might be able to just describe a little bit about the flexibility. Two seconds. I think that Ruth Maguire wants to put on a further question to clarify. Sorry, we're having a bit of a challenge here. We've all forgotten how to do hybrid. I've forgotten how to do hybrid, that's it. If I might interrupt you too quickly, we're going to bring in your colleague to say specifically what the flexibility was. Okay, that's helpful, thank you. Thank you, Stuart. Good morning, panel. Examples of the flexibility that we offer. We take our local authority into what we call local nursery areas. Across those local nursery areas, we try to offer a range of term time and full year models within our own local settings. Alongside that, we match in our private and voluntary sectors. Within the one area, we'll have a range of models that are suitable for families to choose from. I need to press you a little bit on that. Imagine that I'm a parent in Fife without using the word models or flexibility. What are the different things that are on offer to me? All our information is on our website for parents. That includes information about taking up various sessions or types of sessions with local authority sector. Or, in the private and voluntary sector, we also include information about our childminders as well. Term time models would be from a 93 aspect. We also offer models in our local authority, which are full year, which could be extended mornings or extended afternoons. We also offer a two and a half day long model of 10 hours, one to Tuesday, full day, Wednesday, half day, Wednesday afternoon, half day, Thursday, Friday. That's helpful. I would be interested to know if there's demand for funded places on evenings and weekends at all. I'm not sure who would be best to answer that, does anyone? In terms of evening demand. Carrie, may I perhaps? I think that our later afternoon model, if we can put it that way, is an extended afternoon model that runs till about 6 o'clock. There weren't as many parents that were interested in that model. Certainly, in the consultations, we do ask those sorts of questions, and there are open boxes as well for people to see what they're interested in. I think that to deliver some of a weekend or an evening type of facility is quite a different way of operating. We've not seen significant numbers of parents that would be looking for that, but that's just our experience in Fife. That might be different elsewhere. Wendy is keen to come in as well, thanks. We've similarly had no requests for evening childcare, but I just wanted to touch on flexibility in rural localities. As Carrie and her colleague have described, in our towns we have a similar model. We very much rely on partner providers to provide those extended hours. When we started our 1140 provision across Argyll and Bute, our council settings, apart from our four standalone settings, focused only on 93 term time. That was to ensure that our partners were financially viable and had the wraparound options. Increasingly, there has been a need in more rural areas for extended provision. We are now exploring that and have changed our delivery model in a number of places. However, it becomes very difficult for us in our rural authority with a number of provisions offered with children, with under five children and in fact a number of provision with two children. We have tried very hard to recruit childminders who can provide a bit more flexibility, but in many of our islands and our rural settings it's not financially viable for partners to operate and we have to operate our own provision. Staffing those provisions to offer that type of flexibility can be a real challenge, but it's something that we regularly review parents' requirements against their delivery models. In the rural areas that you speak about, in Argyll and Bute you have island communities as well, is the main challenge the lack of provision or the lack of demand to justify the provision? That varies from area to area, if I'm honest. I would say right now the biggest challenges in recruitment, recruiting suitably qualified staff. Where the demand is there, we're now beginning to undertake tests of change to see what the financial viability is and the uncertainty around the financial settlement and our reduction in financial settlement. We have to be very careful that we're not setting up a service that we then are unable to sustain. Stuart McMillan, if you don't mind, wants to come in on this. Hi, I just wanted to echo what Wendy had said there about flexibility and choice and understanding the system around that, as well as our biannial consultation with parents. We also, in five, as a local authority, through our admissions policy processes, measure how the local authority is meeting the choices of parents and year on year track if parents are receiving, how many the percentage of parents that are receiving their first choices. That gives us an idea of where there may be any pressures within the system or we may need to adapt. I'd be interested to hear from Margo on the sort of rurality perspective side of things and choice for parents. Margo, are you able to come in? Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, we have worked very hard to try and offer a flexible package, so if as a parent you came to us, we would establish first which area you were looking for. There's no catchment for nurseries, so we have parents who choose to have their children in a nursery or in a childcare provision that isn't necessarily in their own home locality, and that's fine. We have within each of our high schools a local area, a local authority year round full day provision, so that option is there within each high school catchment. In addition to that, there is a mix of child-minders, voluntary managed groups and private nurseries. Every year we ask for a statement of intent from all of our funded providers, so they're telling us before we enrol exactly what hours they're open, because some of the play groups don't open all day, for example. And we then are able to share that with parents, so they see very clearly at enrolment what's available where for them, and we're obviously able to give them some guidance and some support on that. In terms of evenings and weekends, other than through Covid where we had child-minders and some nurseries that provided that service for key workers, we haven't had any requests. It hasn't been indicated to us by parents that that is a need. I think that it's very much a chicken and egg situation and that parents wouldn't take a job that required them to work evenings unless they knew the support was there for somebody to look after their children. In the borders, although we have a lot of incomeers and a lot of movement still in population, there's still a lot of family and extended family that are providing childcare. I know Carrie wants to come in, so maybe she can be first to answer my question. I'm from the Lothians, and that's where I represent. We're also a big commuter traction. We get people coming in from all those surrounding local authorities. You've said that there's no catchment for nurseries, which we all know, but I'm curious in terms of should we be considering cross local authority border provision, because I've got someone in my area that lives in Edinburgh but works in East Lothian and cannot pick up and drop off that child around their working time. I was also following on from the perception that the families have to use the local nursery nearest to them. The communication that it is as broad base and open as it perhaps is isn't really reaching the ground and we get a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. I'm curious as to what your thoughts are around that and perhaps Carrie to put you on the spot if you don't mind if we go there first and you can maybe respond to Ruth's questions at the same time. I'm absolutely happy to do that. I might just say what I was going to say on the last question and then come on to that if that's okay, convener. I'm just going to say about the childminders being really important. I think we're increasing the use of childminders in Fife. We currently have over 80 childminders that we're using to provide that flexibility for some people where that works better. I think that it is about looking at what we can offer that meets the needs of parents and we're certainly listening to parents and making sure that we can do that to the best of our ability. The cross-border provision is an interesting question. I think that we've had lots of discussions around cross-border over the years and Edinburgh is a particular example of that where a lot of people from all different surrounding regions go into Edinburgh and it makes it very difficult for somebody like Edinburgh to be able to manage the provision that they would be giving to parents if they don't know the numbers because of the extra people coming in from all round about. Some of my colleagues might want to mention a bit more about cross-border because we have looked at that and how we can use payments across-border to be able to support some of that. I just wanted to touch on the local nursery aspect. I think that we're certainly in Fife and it's different everywhere because geographically across Scotland it's so different. I think that that's maybe why it's quite hard to say to parents that this model is what you'll get everywhere in terms of how you choose your option of what is going to suit you best. In Fife, we have local areas. They're not catchments, they're local areas, but they're quite wide areas. I think that as Stewart described earlier, that's in an attempt to give a range of options in one area. If a parent wants to go to another part of Fife, they can still do that, but unfortunately if that area is oversubscribed, then the people that do live in that area would be considered as a priority over the other people. I think that that's sometimes that we need to manage the places that we have, but sometimes where people can't get something because the local families have been able to access that. Sometimes those local families perhaps don't have transport and I'm able to go further afield, so we have to have some way of managing that. Wendy, you'd like to come in now, thank you. Yes, thanks. We do have obviously completely different geography, but we do have some cross boundary agreements in place. They in fact have been in place prior to a 1140 implementation, but we've reaffirmed them. I think that a good example of that is a professional family who have to work a fixed pattern on Tyree, and we have an agreement in place with Glasgow City, and those children were able to access their childcare. We also similarly have arrangements in place with Highland and with Westin Bartonshire, especially with the MOD families in the Helinsbury area, and that works really quite well for us and has done pre-1140 and now continues to be effective. I can see how it would be difficult for everyone when we have good level of partners in Helinsbury in particular and good availability, so we don't have the pressure on places there and the numbers are fairly reciprocated across that arrangement. Thank you. In response to those, that's great to hear that that cross-border work is happening in Argyll and Bute, but again it's the local authorities taking the lead in managing that, and Carrie Lindsay has referenced how complex that might be for Edinburgh with all the different local authorities coming in and the volumes that they have. Do you feel that perhaps something where the parents were in control of the funding, like a voucher system that they were then able to go and have the agency to choose where and how the hours were delivered, perhaps could work more effectively rather than being at the control of the local authorities? Perhaps Wendy first and then Carrie. I would say that with funding followed the child, that is in place, but as Carrie said there are children who we have to have an admissions policy, we have to have oversight because otherwise you could get to the point where individual nurseries would actually be selecting the children whereas if we take a holistic view and the parents register with us they express their top five preferences and only in a couple of locations is that in place. Do we actually have to go to the second or the third preference and that is about that oversight and making sure that parents get what they want so a parent can register with us and tell us that they want to be in a partner provider for so many hours a week. If they want to be with a child minder and they may also, we have in some occasions had children split over three placements also in a local authority nursery, so the flexibility is there but it's just about ensuring that the capacity is also there. I think that the system that is in place just now manages it for the benefit for all rather than leaving that to the discretion of nursery managers when parents are chopping on their door asking for a place. I agree with what Lindy said. I think that the capacity is an issue and that we did look at vouchers when we were setting up even 600 hours and then moving into 1140 hours. It was something nationally that we did discuss. I think that we opted for the funding following the child because some of the systems where we saw vouchers were kind that what happened was parents had to move from one nursery to another nursery to find if they could get a place. If one nursery, if nursery X was oversubscribed and that's where they wanted to use their voucher, they then had to go and find another nursery. I think that for some parents that was quite off-putting. For other parents it might not be so if they're able to cope with that complexity but for some parents that certainly wasn't going to be helpful for them. That's why the funding follows the child model should allow the principle of a voucher where you can go wherever you wish to take your child if there's capacity in that setting and following the admissions policy. I accept that there are conditions around that but that would certainly be what we've viewed when we worked with the Scottish Government to set this up. I suppose that the complexity of having families that I've dealt with with the local authority, maybe it's an Edinburgh thing, the complexity that they have to face getting their child into a funded space in my city is quite an embarrassment. I've got lots of families that have nothing at the moment because the flexibility is not there. Can I set that aside and move on to some questions from Willie Rennie, please? Thank you very much, convener. I think that if we start off with a question to Wendy, it's about funding and pay rates for staff. Why are staff in private and voluntary sector nurseries paid so much less than those in council nurseries? I'll make a snap to it anyway. The national standard ensures that local authorities pay partner providers a sustainable rate. That sustainable rate is to ensure that partner providers are able to pay the national, the real living wage. That's the standard that's set out. Most of our partner providers have the provision to sell additional hours and wrap around care. It's for them to use that income to determine what rate they pay their staff at. The national standards determine that the funding that we provide enables them to pay the real living wage. Is that fair that they're paid so much less by the state than the council nurseries are for doing exactly the same job? It certainly puts a pressure on them in terms of recruitment. The funding that we provide, we uplifted our payments last year and will be uplifting them again twice this year, but we also have to make sure that they are affordable for us as a council. With the drop in our funding of over £1 million in this interim year of settlement, we've had to draw on underspend from last year. If our funding settlement remains the same or drops, then that will be a pressure to the council budget to make any further payment. To answer the question, I don't believe that it is fair, but we're operating within the funding envelope that we're provided with. In fact, often we're operating out with that and are having to subsidise that rate. Are you seeing staff in private and voluntary sector nurseries leaving because they're not getting paid enough? Are you having a reduction in capacity in that sector? I can't say that we've seen a reduction of capacity in that sector. What we do see is when we advertise local authority posts that often we attract colleagues from the private and voluntary sector to fill them and that it can be more challenging for our very valued partners in those sectors to replace them. We haven't, to this point, seen a diminishment in provision offered by that sector. Do you think that it's fair and have you seen staff leaving the private and voluntary sector? Probably wouldn't be wise for me to comment on fairness, because it's about market forces. I would say that at the start of the 600 hours, if we remember that far back and I know that Willie was interested in that then too, at the start of the 600 hours and then into the 1140 hours, what we did definitely see was a movement from our private sector providers and voluntary providers into the council. That was partly because there was a requirement for large numbers of staff to be in local authority provisions. We worked really hard with our private and voluntary sector partners to try to ensure that we weren't seen to be taking their staff but we were working with them. Our workforce planning is not just about how we plan for our local authority nurseries. For example, we have modern apprenticeships that we run across Fife and those run in the private nurseries as well as in the local authority nurseries. It's in an attempt to think about the workforce in totality. Market forces dictate what a business will pay and a private nursery is a business, so market forces will dictate that. They have to be financially viable to be in partnership. The wages that they choose to pay allow them to be financially viable. We haven't seen a lot of partner nurseries that no longer want to be in partnership with us. It's not just about what they pay their staff but they get a lot of support from local authorities as well to allow them to continue with their business. It's not just about the payment or the sustainable rate that's necessarily what's offered to support them. We do certainly work with them and look at our workforce across the whole of Fife, across all the different people that need early years practitioners to be able to deliver for our families. I mean, there is no doubt that I've spoken to nurseries including in Fife who are reducing their capacity because they can't get the staff. They've got constant turnover and it's in part because jobs elsewhere including in council nurseries are paid so much more. I mean, the examples are pretty stark. In Falkirk a local authority head of centre has paid 71 per cent more than their private nursery manager equivalent despite working fewer hours. I mean, it's an astonishing difference and it's no surprise that that's happening. It's not really about market forces though is it? If the state is paying the bulk of the revenue now to private nurseries whereas in the past there was an ability to cross subsidise because the state hours were less, you could see the cross-subsidy working then. It's debatable whether it was fair at that point for private customers to subsidise the state to such an extent but if the state is expanding so much there's no room for cross-subsidy now so it's not market forces. It's about what the state is prepared to pay for that service. I would urge you again just to think whether it is fair that the state is discriminating in this way between private and council nurseries. I know that you're reluctant to say whether it's fair or not but it's pretty obvious, isn't it? I'm not going to say whether it's fair or not. I don't think that's my place to say that. I think it is different. It's absolutely different for the range of reasons that I've described. If we were to change that we would be changing the whole model because there wouldn't be enough funding to make them completely equitable in that way so if we were to look at changing the whole model that's where that would have to be done. The examples that you give there are quite different in terms of perhaps what is being expected of some of the people who are running different organisations in terms of size, in terms of other responsibilities that they have. If I give, for example, one of my managers and one of my standalone settings, they would also be responsible for doing quality assurance in private nurseries, they would also be responsible for providing resources and materials to support training. There's a whole range of things that they would have responsibility for not just in running their provision and some of them are now responsible for two or three. It's quite hard to just compare those things when it's not necessarily like for like. I think that it's a good debate, Willie, and I think that it's something that will continue. I'm just debating whether it's 71 per cent more valuable. I'm just debating whether it's 71 per cent more valuable. We'll move on. I think that Kirsty wants to come in. If we can maybe ask if Kirsty wants to come in, we have asked in the chat bar and if not, I know we have. Here's Kirsty now. Thank you, Kirsty. Hi. I'll try not to start a coughing fit or you'll never hear me. I agree with a lot of the things that Carrie's been saying. Again, I can't comment whether it's fair or not. Again, if we were to pay the same in both issues, we would have to look at the model. We've got quite a lot of very small nurseries that have less than maybe 10 children, so our costs are probably higher for that. We're trying to provide the choice for parents in that area and make sure that there is a local nursery available if we do not have childminders or a private nursery. It is a completely different model. Without changing everything, I don't know how you can actually get parity. Stephen Kerr, please. I was going to say that if this really was a market, it would be first up in the queue to be investigated by the Competition and Markets Authority, because frankly, if you think it's a market, then let me disabuse you of that idea. It's not a market, and the reason it's not a market is because the local authorities are the funders of the private sector and also their competitors. As a result, there is undoubtedly a drift—I think that this is beyond anecdotal—that there is a drift, for example, in terms of staff. The PBI sector believes that they recruit trained people, give them experience and then the local authority comes along and hoovers them up because they offer them such better in terms of salary. Can I ask you about the engagement that you have had with the PBI sector? Are they telling you similar things to the things that Willie and I have given you in terms of our contribution to those questions? Maybe I can go first to Carrie and then to Wendy. I'm aware that Margo wants to contribute as well to this discussion online. I don't—Carrie first and then perhaps Margo? I think that both nationally and locally that we are really keen to engage with the PBI sector, we absolutely can't deliver 1140 hours without that and a lot of parents know that that's their choice that they would wish to use that sector. Absolutely, we engage in—Stuart could come on and say something about the different engagements that we have in Fife, but I know across the country that there are engagements with the sector. There are also lots of national engagements with the sector about the difficulties that they may face and I've been involved over the years in a number of those discussions about trying to make sure that we have the best solution to support the PBI sector. We definitely do engage. We can't always do everything that's being asked, but there is engagement. Yeah, but I'd like her to answer the question. The question I asked is about your personal engagement and what the PBI sector have told you about the conditions that they are facing. So my engagement would be through my early years team, so my call improvement officer who's with me today, Stuart. I don't know if you want to say something about the different forums that we have established in Fife. Stuart, thank you. Yeah, in Fife, we have recognised that engagement is very important for our private and voluntary partners in this. In the run-up to 1140, we had established a reference group of representatives to engage with. Currently, we have set up a range of operational forums where we encourage our private nurseries and voluntary organisations to attend and our childminders to attend securely so that we can hear the messages that they are telling us. Sorry, I'm just seeking the convener's guidance. I respect the fact that the authorities that are represented before the committee today, I understand from PBI partners across Scotland, you're among the best reputationally for some of these things we're talking about. But I would like to hear from you, Stuart, what they are saying to you, because I think part of the important reflection that we need to make here is about what that sector is telling you, because you are both the funder and a competitor and we need to hear their voices. We're not going to hear them in this session unless you reflect back to us what they've told you. Does that make sense? It might be challenging to say that, but we want to know what they are saying to you. What they're telling you and your engagement with, though. I can speak specifically about recent engagement with the sector, which has been around about sustainable rates. Taking on board the Government guidance on engagement methods with that, that were first published in the blueprint and then subsequently referred to in the interim guidance in May. We've very much taken that on board. We wish to hear from the sector because we know that setting of sustainable rates is a topic of often conversation when I go out to partners. I feel that it's very important as a representative of the local authority to provide specific forums for our partners to be clear on the messages that they want us to hear. What we have done recently, just at the beginning of the new session, is that we have surveyed our partners and spoke to them at length about the different engagement methods for setting sustainable rates. Our survey has just closed a couple of weeks ago where we were asking partners to specifically give preferences of choice on how they would wish to proceed going forward in setting sustainable rates. I hope that that answers some of the challenges and what we are hearing and how we are trying to address that in our own local authority. I've got Margo and Wendy both wanting to contribute to this question. After that, I think that we'll move to Michael Marra. Margo first, please. Yes, thank you. We engage very closely again in rural authority. We have fairly small numbers. We particularly recently had a paper going to increase rates to committee earlier this year and at the request of our P&V sector, we pulled that paper because they felt that we hadn't fully taken account of what their real costs were. My colleague Kirsty, who is on the call, worked very closely with a group to really get to the bottom of what their costs were and what they needed. I think that has been very successful. We have a team of early years teachers that support all our providers and will give more intensive support where it is required. We meet them all annually with the provider but also at least termally with all the managers of the settings. We have a small contract with the Scottish Child Mining Association to make sure that our childminders are represented because it's very difficult for childminders to have a voice when they're working through the day and trying to make meetings that work for them. We have a development officer who gives that support. What they are saying to us is that we were criticised at the start of the introduction of 1140. There was a real fear that we would take all their staff and they would have to close. That hasn't happened. There are certainly staff who prefer to work in the private and voluntary sector but we have introduced a modern apprentice programme. We've had 80 modern apprentices since 2019 on board so that has certainly helped mitigate that drain on their sector. The two big things that they tell us are losing staff and are not paying enough to keep them sustainable. I believe in borders that we have and continue to address both of those areas. I'll try to keep it fairly brief, just building on what Stuart and Margo have both said. The sustainable rate is the biggest issue that our partner providers discuss with us. Anecdotally, we have heard a couple of comments over the last few years about private and voluntary staff being attracted more to local authority settings. I think that it's unfair to say that PVI trains staff and then local authorities take them. We deliver free training to all of our partner PVI, including our childminders. We fund all qualifications that are required for all staff in the same equal way that we provide that for our own staff. We provide quality assurance into those settings, the same as both other authorities have stated. We've delivered modern apprentices in an equitable way. We've also offered foundation apprenticeships. There's a lot of support and additional training and advice and challenge that goes into our partner providers in addition to the payments that we make. Margo, first of all, I'd like to feed back to you that the sector rate that you do in the Scottish Borders Council area is very, very highly. I'd like to compliment you as perhaps setting a standard for the way that local authorities might interact with the PVI sector and particularly your mention of modern apprenticeships, which is an issue that deserves more focus. I think that the questions on the PVI sector really represent how important it is strategically. It's good to hear colleagues recognise that it's half of all nursery provision across Scotland. It's a huge part of the provision for families. We've talked about setting a sustainable rate, so the real living wage has recently increased by 10 per cent. Can I ask if the various councils will be uplifting that rate by 10 per cent that they provide to the PVI providers? As Stewart just described, we've just finished a consultation with our PVI providers, so we're not in a position at the moment to say what our sustainable rate would be. I don't think that it would be right for me to say that. Obviously, inflation has taken into account when we're looking at that, but that is the work that's on-going for all local authorities at the moment, so people might be further on in their process than us. That's a place that we're in at the moment. Can I ask them what was the rate of uplift last year, Carrie? I don't have that information to hand. I don't know. Stewart, would you have that information to hand? Yes. We raised the rate from £535 to £565, and that took into account was based on the rise in the sustainable rate over the past two sessions. I'll ask another question, so I'm going to try and work out the percentage increase there. If you have the number to hand or anybody else does, that would be useful to me. Off the top of my head, it was 9 per cent over the two years. Can I ask the same question of Argyll and Bute, in terms of what the uplift might look like this year? Wendy? Certainly. We're looking at two uplifts this year. I don't actually have in front of me what our last year figures were, so I apologise for that. We've uplifted in the first instance in back dating, and that information went out to partners last week. Back dating to August, the rate of £6.90 for two-year-olds and £6.11 for three and four-year-olds. On confirmation of that partners are paying the increased living wage, those will rise to £7.18 for two-year-olds and £6.35 for three and four-year-olds. There will, in fact, be two increases once that confirmation has been made. That's really useful. Thank you. You've made some comment already in terms of the evidence on the settlement for local government and how challenging it's going to be to meet the overall strategic objectives. Do you think that the policy objectives that have been set out can be met under the current funding settlement? Wendy, please. As you're on our screen. I think that that will be extremely challenging for us in Argyll and Bute. We will do what we always do, and we will be as creative as we possibly can. But some of the care inspectorate requirements that will be required to extend provision across our estate will be extremely challenging for us to deliver financially, but also in terms of attracting contractors, but also having buildings where there is space to make adaptations and alterations without attracting from the current service. So I do think that it will be challenging. That's partly why we've withdrawn our strategic plan to consider how we can best meet those challenges. Cary Lindsey, to ask the same question. The Scottish Private Nursery Association recently wrote to the Scottish Government saying, we do not believe it is the intention of the Scottish Government that its policy of 1140 hours of early learning childcare should fail, yet that is the outcome which the Government is facing. Does that ring true to you, Cary? Cary? I don't recognise that, I would have to say, Michael. In what we are seeing currently, I definitely don't recognise that. I'm not on the inside of where some of that information might have come from, so I couldn't really comment on that too much. I think for us at the moment, because there is a review on going about the budget and the distribution of the budget, that we're not yet aware of what our budget will actually be going forward, so we know for next year, but we don't know beyond that. So it's quite difficult to make any firm statement about whether or not it is sustainable without knowing what the budget is. I think that part of the difficulty around that is the changing demographics across Scotland, so that we know that in some local authorities, the number of three and four-year-olds will have decreased significantly, and in others it will have increased. But it's not quite as simple as a per head count, because your model obviously has to be delivered and you need your staffing to keep your facilities going, so it's not just about the numbers of children always. You'll understand that in terms of the process we're undertaking here, scrutinising the budget throughout the year, that in order for our committee to make representation to the Government, partially on your behalf in terms of sustainability, the kind of figures that you indicated are not available to us today would be very useful to us in terms of being able to make that representation. So I'd appreciate if you could provide that to the committee perhaps in writing after the event. I understand that you may have to go through the democratic process and fight first, but it would be very useful for us if we had that indication. Can I move on, convener, to issues of... I have a, hopefully, a fairly short question about deferrals. So I wonder if the various councils represented could give us any early indications around the impact of the expansion on eligibility for funded early learning and childcare for children whose entry to primary school has been deferred. What we're seeing is the impact of that on the budgets and the resources that are available. Perhaps Stuart Westwater, would you be able to give us any indication of what the early indications are? I think we're still on the early days of that and I don't have any information about the impact financially that that would have at the moment. The number of deferrals increased in your council. Sorry, I missed that. Sorry, I have the number of deferrals so young people, your family is choosing to send their children to school a later year. Has that number increased in Fife Council? That must be part of the calculations that you're undertaking. The figures that I have are that 20 per cent of children who could defer between August and December have chosen to do so. I'll pass back to Cary to talk more about that from a budget point of view. That raw figure represents 20 per cent. How many children is that? I don't actually have the actual number with me today but I can get that for you. Okay, but it's useful to have that number and also what that represents in terms of the trend, if that's possible, if you can provide that with the other information. Cary? We're part of a pilot in Fife, Michael, so we were obviously promoting the deferral and we did receive funding to support that. So there have been two pilots, so we are the second part of the pilot and I think that the information that we're seeing is that obviously parents are beginning to choose that the deferral now that has become more available to them. I think that there's a bit of work that we need to do to make sure that we're supporting parents to make the right decision for their child. I think that that's a bit of work that probably would be helpful for us to do so that parents in Scotland are really thinking carefully about that. Certainly the pilots are showing us that there is an increase. Again, I'm not trying to get out of the answer on the question but it's really difficult to say financially what the impact is because it really depends on every individual setting. So if there is already a space, a vacant space and a deferred child goes into that space then there's very little cost to that. If, however, there are five children who defer and want to be in one venue then that's possibly a full member of staff. So it is a complicated process to see what the costs are but we're certainly looking at that at the moment so that we can plan for the full roll-out of deferral going forward. Can I just break this? We're just mindful of the audience that we've got today and you have progressed on a little bit further than we were wanting to. I know that there are colleagues that wanted to have other questions before you moved on to that section. So with that in mind, with apologies can I please bring in Bob Doris now, thank you. It's actually going to be a very brief line of questioning because it's just moping up some of the questions. Three of my other colleagues have already had the opportunity to ask and then we moved on to two subsequent themes. I think it's fair, very briefly, convener, because Mr Marra, before we moved on, sought additional information from witnesses to best represent those witnesses for what our asset government may be during the budget process. I think for clarity we should be clear that's not how the budget process works. Of course this committee could make recommendations to government about additional funds for the sector. We'd have to also say where that money should be taken from. I think that's really quite important to put on record rather than using expectations for things this committee cannot deliver and that's really important. I did want to explore that differential a bit further between the local authority sector and the PPI sector. I'm conscious there's an on-going pay award for 2020 through 2023 for local government employees, which I think includes childcare workers as well. If I've got my number rate that offered currently on the table sees an award for some of the lowest paid childcare workers and local authorities of around 9.43%. That's what that would come out as for those on the real living wage. When setting the rates for the PPI hourly rate, what modelling work does each local authority do to make sure that the PPI can pay that 10.1% uplift in the real living wage? So what modelling work do you do? Can you share that with the committee a little bit and see how you make sure that can happen? So far what we've got is our intention is sustainability in the sector but we can't actually see how that's done. Perhaps Wendy, could you say a little bit about the current pending pay award for 2022-23 for educationalists in early years and your local authority and how that washes through to the PPI sector? I've got Wendy, I've got Carrie and Margo also with an R in the... Okay, just so we all know. Thank you, Wendy. Yeah, I have to admit it's not my area of expertise. We use the Epsys Moray model of gathering all of the information and I'm trying to understand fully our PPI sector's costs ensuring that we build investment for them as well as part of the uplift. That was quite difficult to get all of that information from our partners and there were quite significant gaps in that information and we had to make some assumptions with that. I now have in front of me, in fact, to figure, so last year we paid for two-year-olds £6.18 an hour and after the double increase this year that will go up to £7.18 an hour, so that is in fact an uplift of more than 10 per cent for three and four-year-olds. We were paying £5.51 an hour and we will, after the double uplift, be paying £6.35 an hour. I think probably Carrie might be the better person to answer some of that question for you, sorry. Okay, no, thank you. We've got Carrie, Margo and Kirsty all contributing in the chat bar to this. If we just go through that, that would be great in that order. Carrie, over to you please. Thanks, convener. Obviously the awards that are given are national awards so they're awards that we then have to build into our budget. I think that the passing on of that award is again, I refer back to what we talked about in terms of the financial viability of the organisations and that is the work that is just being described there by Wendy and the work that Stuart described in terms of the consultation that we've been doing about the costs for our partner providers, our PBI sector. They have to be able to show that they are financially viable with the budgets that we are giving them in order to be able to go into partnership with us. The work has to be done before they are able to submit their paperwork to us to say that they are financially viable. That will be part of the process that we will be looking at in terms of looking at their costs. Carrie, can I just check? How do they know that they are financially viable if they don't know what that was going to be in the early rate before they submit to work in partnership with you? Surely this has to be co-produced. So do you have that discussion ahead of setting those early rates? Yes, we're having that discussion now. That's the discussion that we're currently having now before they submit for their next partner. Margo, would you like to come in now, please? Yes, I'd actually put my indication in the chat box to talk about deferral numbers, but I will pass on to Kirsty Maxwell because she's the one that has all the knowledge about this in borders. Thank you. Kirsty, then, over to you. Hi. We, as Margo said earlier, we initially took a paper to council earlier in the year about rates and it was pulled because the PVIs were not happy with where we were at. So, as a result of that, we then had very in-depth conversations with them, where they were very kindly after a lot of talking and building some trust that they would share their management accounts, their costs. I also got them to share their staffing models with me so that I could build a model for each individual PVIs that I worked with to come up with a reasonable rate for that. That specific setting and then looked at that in the whole with the different settings to actually come up with an overall rate, which I then discussed with them. From that point of view, because we've gone to such a low level of looking at things, we were actually able to come up with something that worked for them and that we then managed to take to council and have approved back in August. As a result of that, we were also asked because of the group bringing forward of the revision of the real living wage to September, we have got some further work that we're currently undertaking to look at what the impact of that increased rate is on whether it is a 10 per cent rise or whether it's something slightly different from me. So, we're working on that at the moment. I think that Bob has another quick question. I know that it's an oxymoron me and brief questions, but I'll try to get this one brief. So, actually, it does sound as if there's quite substantive meaningful dialogue. The sector may not be getting everything they want. They may still be dissatisfied, but there's the ongoing meaningful dialogue. Are all three local authorities committed to closing the pay differentials between the local authority sector and the PVI sector? I appreciate all the evidence that suggests that financially it won't be possible to completely close that gap. Is there a commitment year in, year out to see that gap narrow? If so, how we monitor that? If not, why not? Okay, who first? Will we go to Kirsty first? Is that possible?  No, that's fine. I can't comment on whether we're trying to narrow the gap or not, because I'm literally working with their costs, so I haven't actually taken any of that into account, so I realise that that doesn't help you. Does that help? Let's assume that's not with the local authority right now, because that is helpful. Does anyone else want to respond to Bob Doris on that one? Carrie, are you moving towards a mute bar, or are you just... No? Okay, Carrie. Sorry, I was just putting an ad in the chat. We're driven by what the budget allows us to do, so the budget that we are provided with, we have to be able to deliver for our children and families across the local authority. I think that, as you quite rightly outlined, Bob, we're really keen to work with our partners. We can't deliver this without our partners, so we want to work with our partners, and we'll move towards a sustainable model. However, the budget allows us to do that. I would assume that that would narrow the gap in some way, but whether that would ever be able to narrow it in the way that you're asking for would depend on the budget that was provided to local authorities. We've got Wendy wanting to answer as well. Bob, is that okay? Wendy, over to you. Thanks. I think it's important just building on what Carrie says. You know, we are at absolutely committed to a sustainable service and paying a sustainable rate, but it's important to note that often private PVI sector have other incomes and congenerate other income, and we are not the sole supplier or contributor to that. It's also within their gift, not just ours. Thank you very much. Can we move to some questions now from Willie Rennie, please? This is just a couple of brief questions. It's about the fee rates for two-year-olds versus three- and four-year-olds, because some councils, including Argyll and Bute, pay a different rate because it recognises the different ratios and requirements that are determined for two-year-olds. But some councils, like Fife, offer exactly the same rate for two-year-olds and three- and four-year-olds. Why is there no differential in Fife? You're absolutely right that there's different ratios and there's different ways, different systems that we have to set up for two-year-olds. When we did our work way back at the start of all of this, we didn't place two-year-olds with our partner providers because it was so new to us all, and we've gradually developed that service into our settings. The discussions that we had appeared that it was appropriate for us to do what we've done. I've not been involved in any of the recent discussions, so maybe I'll just pass to Stuart to see whether or not our PVI sector feels that there's something that we should explore there in Fife. That's something that I haven't heard, but it is something that we are aware of, having looked at other authorities, and in this round of consultation with the sector, we are going to start exploring that. On finance and costings, can we move to some questions from Stephanie Callaghan, please? Thanks very much, convener, and thanks for being here today, panel. Wally's just spoken about the different rates for different age groups because they require the different ratios. I'm wondering about any additional costs related to children with ASN and how that is managed randomly to us, Carrie. Lucky Carrie, Carrie over to you. It doesn't seem to be that random, it seems to come to me quite a lot. There is a budget for additional support needs to support that comes directly to local authorities, and certainly we work with our settings to do that, but that would also be part of what you'd be looking at in your sustainable rate. Obviously, there could be children with additional support needs in any setting, but if there are children with significant additional support needs, there is an additional support needs budget that they can access in that way. Wendy's put an R in the chat bar as well, please? I think that when we talk about additional support needs, it's important that we don't always just jump to the financial, to finance being the solution. We have a team who work across our own settings and our partner settings, and what we do is go in and we will work with the settings and the practitioners and assess the needs of the children. Sometimes there can be support around about the environment and changes to the environment and the approach that is taken. The first answer is not always to put funding in place, but similar to Carrie, we have an ESN budget that can be accessed by partners. We provide ESN staff to our own establishments, but if a child needs additional support and there is a budget requirement and a PVI provider, we provide that funding. We have also got Margo, who wants to come in on this, and then Stewart. Thank you. I was going to echo what Wendy says about it's not just about money and we put a lot of work into building staff capacity in all our sectors to support children better. We did recognise last year that coming out of Covid, there was more, possibly, distressed behaviour, there was more of a need for children who didn't have so advanced communication skills, and we gave all our PNV groups a per capita amount to use as they saw fit to best support children coming out of the pandemic. That might have been extra staffing, it might have been resources, it might have been on more specialised staff training out with what ourselves and our health colleagues offer as a matter of course. We also have a budget that's in each cluster for additional support needs, and we have meetings around a child and a joint decision is made on where is the best place for a child and if support is needed for a child in our PNV sector, then we've had different models over the years, one where we've funded a full-time additional member of staff, one where we've funded additional part-time staff, and another occasion we actually put one of our own local authority staff in to support a child. So it's very much about what are the needs and looking at each case individually, it's not just about more money. Finally, we've got Stewart on this question as well, if you don't mind. Thank you, Stewart, over to you. That was just to echo exactly what Wendy and Margot have said, but it's not always just about the money, very much in our life. We've spent much time building staff capacity in the PVI sector, particularly around ASN through training. We also have teams of various different development workers and professionals who can assist and support services with children with ASN, and then on top of that we have budgets in life where PVI sectors, which they can access for additional staffing, should that be deemed appropriate. That's really helpful there. Margot has mentioned there as well about support for children to find the best provider that's most suitable for their child, and I'm wondering if that's something that everybody else does as well. I know she'd mentioned earlier on about working with health visitors, health professionals, et cetera, too, so just really to check if that's something that happens right across the board. The other thing that I'm interested in is what is the balance? Is the balance monitored between private providers and people that come to the local authority providers, as far as ASN is concerned as well? Is that something that you look at? We have significantly more children with additional support needs in our own settings. We find that parents appear to prefer a school setting, which means, however, that they don't get wraparound care. A smaller number in partner providers where wraparound care is required, but that's the split for us as predominantly local authority. I think that it's as much as 80 to 20. I'm not sure if Margot is still on. She's having connection issues, if she is, if she wants to respond. I'm here at the moment. I seem to keep dropping out, so I didn't fully hear the question, but just based on Wendy's answer, I don't have the figures of what the split is, and I suspect it varies from year to year. If those figures are required, I can get them. I'm not aware that we have as big a split as Wendy has described. We do have full-year local authority provision in each high school cluster area, where if parents particularly wanted local authority and needed the wraparound, they could access it there. Very, very briefly, convener. Just going back to Wendy, do parents feel that their options are limited? Is that a message that you're getting through, or is that a question that you're asking parents then? Sorry, I couldn't hear that. It broke up completely. Okay, I'll just repeat it for you then. Just when you were mentioning about not necessarily having the wraparound care, are you getting the message from parents that that's actually limiting their options? Has that come up, or is it a question that you ask when you're consulting? It's a question that we ask when we consult, and that's why we consult in different localities at different times so that we can address specific areas in each. We have changed our operating models in some areas to provide extended care more wraparound in response to that. Because we consult in a rolling programme, there's no longer no more than a year between each consultation in each area, so we're able to be fairly responsive. That's great. Wendy, you've frozen at the moment. We've got questions now from Cokab Stewart. Thank you, convener. The screens have gone blank. We're back. Thank you very much. I want to move us on to quality assurance. Obviously we want to make sure that there are very good and very high standards of childcare that's provided consistently across all local authorities for all our children. At the moment, we have a mixture between processes from Education Scotland at local authority level and the care inspectorate. I was interested in how valuable that is, how easy it is to manage and whether there would be a simpler way that would assist in continual improvement of quality and assurance. The background to that, I suppose, is that we're looking at a review and I know that Professor Muir commented on how we assess standards across. My question, I'd like to direct it at the QIOs first of all, so that would be either Carrie or Stuart. Then I would be interested to hear from Wendy as well. Stuart, do you want to go first on this one? Yes, yes, no problem. First of all, when we think about the expansion in 1140, we know that quality is tied up with the national standards, which are outlined in the paper today. Some of the measures against these national standards against the criteria are very firmly set against care inspectorate inspection rates of good or above. We do have Education Scotland who inspect and we do have care inspectorate who inspect. I think they both have their merits, their advantages and their benefits. For example, the care inspectorate will inspect more often than Education Scotland inspections happen, but Education Scotland inspections, as well as looking at the overall early learning and childcare and how good it is, will be really having a focus on particularly the learning development and the curriculum and how that's being developed as well. They both have their advantages and are both valuable. Stuart, can I push you to see what the disadvantages are there? I'm thinking that all three ways of assessing have their merits and they have different areas, but is there any merit in having one body that could encompass all the different areas? Would that be more helpful? That's probably not for me to say that. However, what I would say is that we do have a curriculum that is 3 to 18, and the curriculum for excellence is there for all of our learners. I think that there are absolute benefits when we think around about transition points, particularly in early years and that continuity of learning. I would be very keen to ensure that any inspection model moving forward didn't just look at the regulatory aspects of childcare but continue to focus on the quality of that learning and the building of the curriculum. Thanks, Stuart. I think that Harry wants to come in. Of course, I got dropped out there for a minute, so I'm hoping that I don't repeat anything. Stuart has just said some apologies if I do. I think that we have been looking across Scotland at a joint inspection model to see whether that would be better and that would be testing that out over a number of years. I think that to try to reduce inspection activity in that way is really beneficial. We should always be thinking about any of those models as being about improvement and not about being an onerous task that is only there for quality assurance purposes, because it is there for quality improvement purposes. People should be prepared and willing to talk about what they need to change in their setting. I think that, particularly for childminders, I mentioned earlier that we have over 80 childminders now that it can seem quite daunting, the different bits of paperwork that you need to complete for the different organisations that are doing some of the inspecting or the quality assurance processes. I think that it is something that we need to look at as to what the ultimate outcome would be of that. There would need to be quite a lot of discussion around that, but certainly the local authority is important that the visits that we do are about improvement and how we support our PVI sector to be able to improve that performance. I agree with Carrie's comments. A joint model and a joint framework, however, would be beneficial. It might improve proportionality, thinking about childminders, thinking about settings with one or two children in them, and we have a number of those up to settings with over 100 children. I think that a joint model and a joint framework, if that can be achieved, would help proportionality. I have a question regarding how you evaluate some of your outcomes and how the panel measures those outcomes in the funded ELC in your specific areas. After all, that is part of your statutory duty to improve the early learning centres. How do you go about that improvement programme, the monitoring and the feedback loop, and that continuous improvement for our young people? Perhaps to Margo first, would that be okay? Quick, get your headset on. I have been drinking water. We have a team of teachers who are regularly in all our settings across all sectors, including childminders, as well as delivering training. Every time they do visit, they complete a record of visit. The services are ragged, I suppose, in terms of what level of improvement may still be required. It is never static because staff change, because managers change. A setting can change quite quickly in terms of what improvements might be required. It is not something that you do one year and that is it. It is an ever-continuing process of evaluating how well the settings are delivering the curriculum and delivering funded early learning and childcare. Was there something else in the question that you asked? It was about just how you evaluate and improve your services on an ongoing basis. All our services have to have an improvement plan, so they submit an annual improvement report and an improvement plan, but that is a document that is revisited every time the early years teachers visit. Although class authority settings are part of school reviews as well, we also carry out reviews on the PVI sector. I might follow up later on the questions on reviewing the PVI sector. Stuart, do you want to come in? I just wanted to talk about measuring quality. That really begins with settings' own self-evaluation processes. As an authority, we support our own settings to ensure that they have robust self-evaluation processes in place. From our own local authority settings, they are making every year self-declarations evaluations against the national quality indicators. We also encourage our private and voluntary sector, including our childminders, to do that as well. Following on from that, we then build on that using a series of visits. Two settings be local authority settings or private and voluntary. In local authority, we have learning partnership visits, where trios of headteachers visit establishments and validate these declarations. With our private and voluntary sector, Cary alluded to earlier how we use our own principal teachers and our own standalone headteachers to provide support and challenge visits to the private and voluntary sector. Feedback is then given through discussion but also in writing. With regard to that feedback loop, we are just now back into the cycle again for this session where we are looking at where the sector has moved on from. Throughout the session, we then triage all of our services, all of our funded services, into requiring universal, additional or intensive support. Through our operational definitions in each of those areas, services are made aware of the types and range of supports that they can tap into. We are also, as guarantors of quality, how the local authority will support their continuous improvement. A quick follow-up. Do you not get a sense or do you not feel that there might be a perception from the PVI sector that there is a conflict in this when the local authorities are the funder, the partner, inspector and then perhaps making that nursery close down because they are not being able to deliver to a standard? Do you not see that there is a conflict there when your poacher-turned-gamekeeper, perhaps some of the other folks might want to comment on that? That is certainly something that we hear from the PVI sector. I can understand where you are coming from with that comment. I can talk about personal experience on that, having been on both sides of the fence. We would always be encouraging that any of our support and challenge visits are based on the quality of the relationships. We do not want our partners to say that we are doing something to them. We are there to provide them with the support and we make sure that their support is ready for us. Any action planning that is required to improve quality is done in collaboration. Indeed, the document itself is written collaboratively with the private and voluntary sector. Its voice is very much heard in any improvement that is required to be made. It is the same process for local authority nurseries, as Stewart described slightly different from the personnel that we use. It is exactly the same if they do not meet the standard that they would go into an improvement period in the same way as the PVI sector would. The quality assurance or the quality improvement, as we would call it, is really important that we do that across all of our establishments, because this is not about just assessing if a provision is able to stay open. It is about making sure that we do the right thing. I think that hybrid is catching up with us today. We have lost carry there. I was wondering if Wendy might be able to respond to some of my points there, if that is possible. Can you be lost for a bit there? I would put you on hold if you did not mind. Is there something we got part of what you were saying? Just to say that it is about the whole system, it is not about just the quality improvement or the improvement period. That would be the same for a local authority nursery and that would be our staff supporting them in the same way as we would with the private and voluntary sector, so it is that whole process. That is kind of my main point. Stewart is nodding away, so I will bring him briefly again before we go to Wendy, if that is okay. I think that it is important to highlight that quality improvement is not always about looking at things that are not going so well. It is also about being able to identify high-quality practice. In our own authority and life, we do lots of cross-sector working. We identify good practice happening in our own settings, as well as in our private and voluntary sector. We use those examples with all groups. Recently, we have produced a video from one of our private nurseries and shared that with our own local authority nurseries. That was a good piece of practice and quality improvement work that I have taken around the new guidance on personal planning. It is good that all sectors are learning from each other and that part of quality improvement is sharing in the good messages as well. Thank you, Stewart. That is great for that information. Can we move to Wendy, please, if that is okay? I have described exactly the process that we undertake. It is about an equity of approach and we apply the same cyclical approach to quality improvement across all of our settings, regardless of whether they are PVI, including childminders or local authorities. It is based on positive and good relationships and knowing your settings, your managers and your staff teams well. We reviewed over Covid and took the opportunity to review our approaches. We work with partners and staff with a range of staff from across all settings to agree what those approaches would look like. Stewart is right. We also take examples of best practice from our partner providers and share them in the same equitable way as we do for local authorities. However, I have to say that it is not a comment that I recognise within Argyll and Bute. Thank you very much for that, Wendy. Now, if we recall, there was a little bit of confusion a bit earlier on. We've got a bit more time on the agenda and I know that Margo had intimated that she had a response to one of the questions on the deferrals that she may want to bring into the committee now and we can pick up some questions on that theme after that. Okay, thank you. Margo, if you can recall that far back, that would be super. Yes, just about. I have the figures here. I think there was a question about the numbers. This year, we are part of the pilot, the deferral pilot. This year, we have 133 children who have deferred compared to 65 in 2019-20, so quite a substantial increase. The reasons for that are part of the pilot, so parents are more aware not that we have ever denied a child in additional years. We are aware of funding because they have deferred, but I think that it is a bit more accessible. Covid has undoubtedly had an impact and parents feel that children have missed a lot of their preschool experience. Michael, do you have a follow-on question on that? Nothing further on the deferrals, convener. I think that that extra information is very useful. Given that we have probably another 10 minutes, are there any other questions that we can open up? Michael Marra, Stephen Kerr and Willie Rennie. I think that it has been very useful to have the specific examples from the different councils. There has been a cause lab being very keen to highlight the £24 million reduction to the specific ring-fenced grant for early learning and childcare. I really want to try and get some information as to what the impact of that has been in this year. I will maybe go back to the boarders first if that is okay with Margo. Yes, could I pass that to Kirsty? Although Kirsty has gone black. Screen's gone dark, so I'm not sure. Maybe one of the other local authorities can respond first before we see what's going on with Kirsty. Wendy or Carrie? Oh, Kirsty says she's here. Right. We just can't see you, Kirsty. Maybe turn the lights on. The sun is even shining. Can you hear me okay? Yes, we can hear you fine. That's fine. We're actually quite fortunate because we lost funding with the money that was cut this year, but we actually had to defer all the money. Overall, we've not actually had an overall budget. We've actually quite reasonably well, so we've actually utilised that as part of the normal budget, and we realise that we'll have to account for the amount that we've used for deferring, but we have used the rest as well. But what worries me is going forward, because obviously with the amount with the headroom that was identified last year, if the same happens again next year, then that will be quite challenging for us because we have effectively allocated our funding between the PVIs and our internal offerings. So, going forward, it does concern me. Specifically then on that question, you talked about setting, I think, that sustainable rate for the PVI sector. As a result of those kinds of cuts, have you had to make any cross subsidy into that pot from other parts of your budget? We haven't had to this time, I see, because we've used some of our—we've used it to try to use our deferral pilot money in a way that has helped us out. So, at the moment we have, as we're going forward, especially when we're looking at the additional increase we may need to make the work that we're doing at the moment, that will actually give us a slight challenge this year. But going forward, that's definitely going to cause us a challenge if things continue to rise at the rate they're rising with inflation and, obviously, if real living wage continues to go up at the levels it's going up at. Can we see what Wendy has to say as well? Certainly. Wendy. My boarders, we've been able to use our deferral pilot funding. We had an underspend, unfortunately, carried forward due to recruitment issues that we've been able to use as well, and also the delay in the roll-out of the full-school meals contributed further to an underspend. And we've used that money to mitigate the impact this year. The concern is moving forward if the settlement is maintained or, indeed, decreases further. Can we see what Carrie has to say before? Okay, Carrie, thank you. Thanks, convener. So, just to say that we didn't see a significant reduction in Fife for this year, and so we've been able to maintain what we're delivering. I think it depends if you change the models, I suppose, go back to that question from earlier on, that if you take the account of the views of the parents and they're looking for something a bit different, then it could be that your model becomes more expensive. As we're in a position where our birthrate is dropping quite significantly at the moment in Fife, so we're waiting to see what the next settlement will be, and we may need to change models and not be as flexible, because the more flexible you are, the more expensive it is, so we may have to change models depending on the settlement following the review. Thank you. Stephen, can you maybe give us a headline topic so we can frame this for the folks? I was impressed that Margot introduced that topic in her contribution earlier, and I just wondered if we could hear from Wendy and Carrie about what their councils are doing in respect to offering childcare practitioner modern apprenticeships. Thank you very much, Stephen. Carrie, as you're on screen, can we come to you first? We run quite a significant foundation apprenticeship through our schools, and we then try and encourage some of those young people to go into modern apprenticeships, but we've seen that it's more older people that we've been bringing into our apprenticeship programme. We've been running our modern apprenticeship, so it might be able to correct me here, but I think that for about four years now it has been a really popular programme. I train our own staff, which is really good, and whether they're trained, as I said earlier, in a private setting or in a local authority setting, it's allowing us to do that training with our own staff and make sure that they're able to deliver in the way that we would expect and hope in Fife. So it has been a really, really successful programme, as I said, both the foundation and the modern apprenticeship. I don't have the figures here with me at the moment. I don't know if Stuart does, but we could certainly provide the figures if that would be helpful. I think Stuart left. I'm not sure if he managed to come back in or not. I saw that. Oh, he's there. He's back. So we'll get Stuart before we go over to Wendy. Thanks. Sorry, that was just to say that the connection dropped there. Apologies for that, but obviously I'm back here now. I don't have the exact figure, but yes, it has been a very successful programme, a modern apprenticeship programme, and year on year we've built on that. And what we find is that the quality of staff is of a high standard, and the partnerships with local colleges and our own training organisations has really supported that programme very well. Thank you, Stuart. Wendy, over to yourself now, thank you. Similarly, we've had a programme of recruiting modern apprentices for the last four years. That number has been slightly smaller for us, so up until last year we had recruited 24, and a number of those were in Gaelic medium. It's been a very important resource to ensure that our Gaelic medium settings are fully staffed and all. We have a modern apprentice in one of our outdoor nurseries now, which again is of high value and importance in our offering. We have struggled this year to recruit. We've gone back out to advert. We're unsure of why that is, and we're in conversation with our local secondaries. We also developed early in 1140 our own foundation apprenticeships, which the early years team delivered in collaboration with council staff across our secondary schools. I'm interested in the profile. Cary, did you suggest that you would be successful at recruiting older people? It's been put to me that there's a bit of a cliff edge when you get to pass 19 in terms of the support that's available. I'm just wondering whether or not your success at recruiting older people is reflected in the PVI sector. Cary? We knew that we probably had a bit of an open door for us by younger people coming into the programme, so we particularly targeted two groups. One was older people, but also males, whether they were young males or older males, because we know that in this sector they don't have a very good gender balance. We saw both of those groups that we targeted that we did take in larger numbers, and they will be spread across. I know, for example, that some of the male targeted modern apprenticeships are in our PVI sector, so it will be the same with some of the older modern apprentices I would expect to. Obviously, every year it's different. You attract different people just according to how you bring them up, and we've done a whole range of videos and social media and all sorts of things to try to attract people to our modern apprenticeship programme, but as I say every year that's a bit different, but they are spread across all of the sector. The convener just prompted me to go to Margo. I wanted to go to her because I'm interested to hear what her responses are. Margo has indicated that she wants to speak, so over to Margo, please. I mean, we certainly do have probably 60, 50, 60 per cent over 19s, and that's been really useful for us. There is a higher cost of the council because the same level of subsidy isn't there, and I don't know the details of it, but the older you are, the lesser the contribution, I believe, that the college gets from Skills Development Scotland. We also have foundation apprenticeships in our schools, but I just wanted to highlight, and this is for us being a bit of an issue, I don't know if it is for my colleagues, that Skills Development Scotland will only fund what is now the level 7 SVQ as a modern apprentice qualification in social services, children and young people, and we get a number of applicants from people who are just not at that level. The SVQ to me is about building on somebody's knowledge and experience. It's not a training course per se, and I think some of the younger, less experienced applicants that we get would benefit from doing the level 6 SVQ, and we have in fact funded that as a council for some of those people to enable them to start their career in the sector. Is it predominantly younger people because of the reduced rates for those over the age of 19? I don't think that it is. I don't have those figures for the Pee, our private and voluntary, so I can't really say, but I'm aware that we have a wide demographic in all our training. We work very closely with our local college, and we age into an issue. I think that, convener, that might be a point of information that we might seek from the PVI sector in the representative bodies, because it has been put to me that that is an issue, on top of the other issue of them losing talent to the public sector because of the differential terms and conditions that they may also be losing at the apprenticeship level as well. Thank you very much, Mr Kerr. We do have another follow-up from Stephanie Callahan on the modern apprentices, if it can be brief, because we do have questions from Willie as well. Yes, just very briefly, convener. Wendy Margot both mentioned there about having their own foundation apprenticeships, and I'm just wondering, it made me think, you know, are these things been shared across the regional improvement collaboratives? Is there quite a lot of work there as far as sharing good practice goals and addressing any concerns? Wendy is nodding, so perhaps if we can go to Wendy first? Yes, I can certainly say that both the success of our foundation apprenticeships and our modern apprenticeships, and indeed we've shared our full foundation apprenticeship programme with the early years work stream within the northern lines. That's fine, that's super. Thank you. Oh, Carrie has put an hour on the chat bar there, jumping on in. Thanks, Carrie. Just quickly to add, we have foundation apprenticeships too, and I think that the early years network, which is a network from the Association of Directors of Education across Scotland, and the early years network have also had a number of conversations about supporting each other with the apprenticeships. And I know that each of the regional improvement collaboratives do have an early years element where they have and they bring people together, so there is lots of opportunity to share the good practice on those. Thank you very much for that. Now, over to you, Willie Rennie, please. In the last 12 years, the number of nursery education teachers has dropped from about 1,500 to 700. Does that not give an indication now that we're actually just into childcare rather than early learning and education? Perhaps Wendy could start. Sure, thanks. That's an interesting question. At the same time, and I don't have the figures in front of me, but I know that our centre's return this year has highlighted that at the same time there's been a significant increase in the number of graduates within the early years workforce. So, although there may have been a decrease in the number of teachers, the early years workforce has significantly increased the number of graduates, and there would be an argument that an excellent practitioner is indeed that. I started my professional career as an early years practitioner before I became a teacher and I think that I've always been, I suppose, always held in really high regard our early years practitioners and the quality of the work that they do. I think that what we've seen is that we now have a better structure so that we can promote the early years practitioners, so we do have the graduates, we also have early years development officers in fact, we have a lot of seniors, so there are a number of people with different qualifications. It's no longer like it just used to be a nursery nurse and a teacher. It's no longer like that. There's a whole range of different practitioners, different opportunities for people to go through the system. So I think that it gives a false impression to focus just on how many teachers it's more looking at the quality of the workforce across early years that have a range of different qualifications now. Okay, I've got one other question. It's why we're so terrible at getting two-year-olds to take up their provision. There we go. Carrie. The parents. The parents. Would you like to take a stab at that, Carrie? Punish the two-year-olds. As a final question for you. Part of the reason is that we don't know where they all are. Those eligible two-year-olds, if it was all two-year-olds, it would be a lot easier. And we have been trying to work with the DWP. That's been on-going for some years and we've now made a breakthrough where we are going to start to be able to be given information through the DWP. That's been organised nationally so that we can start to actually make direct contact with any of those two-year-olds that are not in place. We're really keen to bring them in and it is just about actually knowing where those two-year-olds are. So why have you done that in England where presumably the same rules apply and they've done that for some time? Why is Scotland so far behind? Some of the data protection with the DWP. I don't know the detail about how England managed to do that but we have managed to do that now so maybe it's taken us longer but we are in a position, I believe, that we're now going to be able to do that. That's us. Thank you very much. I'd like to thank all of our witnesses for their time today and for the evidence that they've shared with us and apologies for some of the hybrid hiccups. We've kind of forgotten how to do that. So we will now have a short suspension and we will convene in 10 minutes time. Thank you very much. Welcome back everyone. The next item on our agenda is consideration of public petitions. The first petition for consideration is PE 1548, national guidance on restraint and seclusion in schools lodged by Beth Morrison. The petition is calling on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to introduce national guidance on the use of restraint and seclusion in all schools and full details of the petitions aims are provided in members' papers. The committee last considered this petition at our meeting on 4 May where the committee noted that a working group had been developing new human rights based non-statuary guidance to minimise the use of restraints in schools. In May, the committee agreed to write to the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills to seek an update on timescales for the publication of the guidance. The Cabinet Secretary responded and stated that the draft guidance would be put to public consultation. The consultation was launched on 21 June and closed yesterday. The Cabinet Secretary noted that the draft guidance focuses on the preventative support that should be in place to minimise restraint and provides detailed advice and safeguards that should be followed if restraint is used. It outlines restraints that should never be used on children and young people, such as prone and other high-risk physical restraints, and it clarifies that should any form of restraint be used it should be recorded. The Cabinet Secretary also explained that the Scottish Government will consider placing the guidance on a statutory basis should the non-statuary guidance fail to have the desired effect. In response to the Cabinet Secretary's letter, the petitioner stated that while some of the guidance is good, she is extremely concerned that unless the guidance is statutory, nothing will change for the staff or children affected. She also expressed her disappointment that the draft guidance does not have a dedicated section for children with additional support needs. She points out that children with additional support needs and disabilities are disproportionately affected by physical intervention. Can I ask members for any comments on the petition? I should acknowledge that the petitioner is a constituent of mine. I pay tribute to her because it is her tenacity that has ensured that quite significant strides have been made in this regard. She has achieved a very great deal in her efforts. We have guidance, which I understand has helped shape. It is now time for it to be allowed to be implemented and a period to bed in. Having said all that, I think that the best course of action or the appropriate course of action would be to close the petition with a couple of caveats. One would be to recognise that the Scottish Government has indicated that there will be a monitoring of the successful roll-out or otherwise. It does not rule out this being put in a statutory footing in future. We should perhaps write to the Government asking for an understanding of immediate next steps and how it will monitor and assess a successful implementation. That additional way, as a committee, we might consider in our legacy paper, suggesting to the successor committee that it might wish to return to the subject in the next Parliament to carry out a piece of work, perhaps if that is necessary, to review whether the guidance has served its purpose and the footing that it is proposed to be on has proven adequate. Thank you, Graham Day. I have also got comments from Mr Stephen Kerr, please. Larger convener, I tend to agree with Graham Day on this matter. I also pay tribute to the petitioner, whose tenacity and perseverance and courage in pursuing these issues is to be commended by all of us. I would share concerns about the lack of statutory underpinning. I have growing concerns about what is happening in our schools, not just in terms of restraint and the other issues covered in this petition, but also in terms of assaults on teachers. The lack of reporting is a growing concern for me personally. The only way that I think that reporting measures can be adequately supported is if they are in law. That is why the rest of the United Kingdom is going down this particular route, making it a legal duty to report. That gives us a sounder basis for assessing how the guidelines, which are to be welcomed, will be used and how they will be adhered to. I also think that it gives a basis for the Cabinet Secretary for the Scottish Ministers and the Scottish Parliament to assess whether that approach is working or not. I am happy to support what Graham Day has said, but when we communicate with the minister, if we write to the minister or the Cabinet Secretary, I would like the issues that are raised and highlighted by the petitioner and that I am focused on also to be included in that letter. We should recognise that significant progress has been made. The guidance is a massive step change from what was in place before. That is, in large part, down to the work that Beth and her colleagues have done. She has been a ferocious campaigner. I have met her several times and she has been ferocious with the campaign. Rightly so, because she has some personal experience of when it goes wrong. We have to make sure that the guidance works. Everybody should get behind the guidance to make sure that we can get the step change in training and support in schools to make sure that teachers are able to comply with the guidance. I think that we should focus on that initially. I think that I have sympathies with Stephen. I think that a statutory footing is something that we should be looking at, but I would like to delay too much longer. I think that we need to get on and make sure that the guidance is in place and is seen to have a united front behind it to make sure that it is effective. If we are finding that we need extra tools and leverage in the future to make sure that best practice is spread, we should return to the statutory footing. We should ask the minister what are the steps that we take to get to that position, how she is going to monitor it and make sure that we have sufficient resource behind it to make sure that teachers feel capable of implementing and following the guidance. I think that it is the right step to take at this stage. I can understand the frustration that Beth might feel at that, but we have great admiration for what she did. I think that we need to make sure that we capitalise on the benefits that she has delivered and make sure that the guidance is implemented effectively. I echo the tributes that were paid by other members to the petitioner and the work that she and our colleagues have done over the years. In general terms, I support the approach. I want to make clear that I am very supportive of the idea of statutory guidance as well as putting it in the statute book and making sure that that report is there. It feels to me that it would be proportionate to take that response, given the seriousness of the concerns. In terms of writing to the minister, I suppose that part of my concern is the timeframe. If we are looking to talk into a legacy paper and perhaps looking at this again in the next part, perhaps four years away, it feels to me to be at the far end of what an evaluation might be. I think that I would be comfortable if we were asking the minister very specifically what on-going monitoring on a year-by-year basis of the impact of this was taking place. I think that that would give me some confidence that the approach being proposed was the right one. I am looking around. Is there anyone else who wishes to contribute? I really welcome the conversation that we have had here. I think that it is quite easy to bring us all together on what we think should be the next step. I was a bit late putting my hand up there. Let's have an emphasis as well on children's additional support needs to be done proportionately. It's much higher. As I was saying, we have come probably to an agreement that we would like to close the petition, but there are some caveats associated with that. We want to make sure that what is intended with this guidance is what is happening in our schools and education establishments. If we are agreeing that the next step should be twofold, please let me know if I am picking this up wrong. We will write to the cabinet secretary with the points that we have outlined here. The wish that it may ultimately have to go down a statutory route, but in the meantime we want to make sure that it is being embedded into practice. We want to have asked the minister what they are doing in terms of on-going monitoring of the implementation, making sure that the resources are there in schools, to allow the teachers and staff to be fully trained. As Stephanie's point, I would also like to flag the reinforced additional support needs. Michael Marra's point that he raised is worthy of inclusion in any communication. You have mentioned that, but I think that an annual check-in with some on-going monitoring and qualitative information behind it would be very useful. I think that we would probably agree with that. That is great. We want the guidance to be embedded in with the caveats, making sure that the guidance serves its purpose, but also to reinforce our state that we are concerned with the lack of statutory underpinning. It is not at the moment going to stop us from closing the petition, but it is certainly on our radar. Does the committee agree to close the petition, write to the cabinet secretary with the next steps, asking what their next steps might be in moving forward with the statutory, how it will be monitored and the issues raised by the practitioner to be shared with the Scottish Government in that letter as well? To Graham's point, if we can also flag in our legacy paper that it is something that we might, our successor committee, consider to make, does that sound like a good approach? Are we all content with that? That's great. Thank you very much. Just to confirm that, that's what we're saying. The next petition on our agenda—I'm going to have a wee drink of water, if you don't mind—is a PE1692, the inquiry into the human rights impact of GERFIC policy and data processing lodged by Leslie Scott and Alison Proust on behalf of Times Trust and Scottish Home. The petition is calling on the Scottish Government to initiate an independent inquiry into the impact on human rights of the routine gathering and sharing of citizens' personal information on which it's getting it right for every child. GERFIC policy relies. The committee last considered this petition in May. The committee heard that in January 2020, the Deputy First Minister and then Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills had said that the guidance and material to support information sharing practice were being developed. In May, the committee agreed to write to the cabinet secretary to seek an update on timescales for the publication of this guidance. The cabinet secretary confirmed that the refreshed material had been published, explaining that the refreshed materials, including the statutory guidance for the assessment of wellbeing, were co-produced by working groups, including practitioners from relevant sectors. The statutory guidance on the assessment of wellbeing was subject to a public consultation and remaining documents, including the role of the named person and information sharing, were subject to direct engagement with key stakeholders. In their submission, the petitioners argued that the cabinet secretary's submission is irrelevant to the purpose of the petition. That is because the petition is calling for a retrospective and independent public inquiry into the impact of human rights of its routine gathering and sharing of citizens' personal information in relation to GERFIC policy, not to address possible future harm through any refreshed material. Can I ask any members for comments on the petition? My instinctive position would be that this is an appropriate point to cause the petition. The arguments have already been heard for and against an inquiry, and Parliament has previously considered that there was not the need to do that. The petition was held open for the purpose of the information sharing bill that the Government intended to bring forward to rectify the issues that came about as a result of the Supreme Court judgment on named person. The Government withdrew that bill in the last session. At this point, I understand why the petitioners still feel the way they do about it. The arguments around inquiry have already been heard and positions have already been come to nothing. It has changed since that point, and the reason that Parliament kept the petition open is no longer relevant. Does anyone else have any comments? Are we all in agreement with Ross's position? I just want to confirm that we agreed that we will close the petition. That is the public part of today's meeting at an end, and we will now consider our final agenda item in private. Thank you very much.