Childminding and SCMA’s commitment to strengthen and grow the childminding workforce has been hitting the headlines this summer, with a variety of high-profile media outlets featuring SCMA’s and the Scottish Government’s positive actions to turn around the decline which has been experienced in the childminding workforce in recent years.
SCMA is leading the way in championing childminding as a high-quality, flexible childcare option for children and families and is working tirelessly to strengthen support for existing childminders and to recruit new childminders where they are needed to bring about positive change for children, families and childminding.
As well as being at the forefront of this work, we continue to be a voice for childminding in Scotland – working to raise the profile of childminders nationally, ensure guidance and frameworks are relevant and proportionate to their unique settings, introduce new benefits and opportunities to support their high-quality practice, and provide tailored support to meet our members’ needs.
Linked to this we are reproducing the following message from Graeme, which was recently published in our summer Childminding magazine, so that a wider audience can learn more about our vital work.
It would be fair to say that last few months have been busier for SCMA than at any time since I took up post five years ago (including during the pandemic) and I’m pleased to say that this is a reflection of the increasing influence and impact that SCMA is having for members and childminding.
In May many of you around the country joined with us to celebrate Childminding Week, with over 40 BIG Teddy Bears’ Picnics (large and small) taking place around the country. The week itself was kicked off with our SCMA Conference – a half-day virtual event free for SCMA members.
Despite having competition in the form of one of the hottest and sunniest days of the year so far, the event attracted members from 31 local authority areas and our audience has grown year on year. We had another line-up of great speakers valued by members and the evaluation statistics from the event speak for themselves – 96% of delegates said their learning objectives were met, 97% found the online format beneficial and 98% would recommend our Conference to others.
If you want to see why this is becoming such a popular event with members join us next year to find out – and SCMA members can
login to the Membership Dashboard to watch recordings from this year’s Conference and access a range of useful resources and tools.
At our Conference we also launched our new strategy ‘
Changing the Narrative Stage 2: Childminding – Providing Solutions for Scotland’. As the title suggests, this three-year strategy forms the second stage in our ten-year journey which we started back in 2021 and lays out for members and others what we will be working on over the next three years.
A
short animation was produced to accompany this which provides a quick and easy way to find out what we’ve been doing for members, why we’ve been doing this and what more we’ll be doing on your behalf. We also recognise that some organisations promise a lot and don’t deliver, whereas in SCMA we believe we have stuck to our commitments to members and made real progress. If you’d like to find out more about what we have done, our
Impact Report provides a short overview of what we have achieved in the last three years.
Then, on 5 June 2024, Natalie Don MSP, the Minister for Children, Young People and The Promise, launched the
Programme for Scotland’s Childminding Future. This is a new large national three-year programme on childminder retention and recruitment, predominantly funded by the Scottish Government and to be delivered by SCMA, which we have worked hard to inform and secure. Through this programme we will continue to increase support for existing childminders to improve retention within our workforce while also recruiting new childminders in response to the acute shortage of childminders in many parts of Scotland.
This high-profile and priority programme includes some innovative pilots in the form of a childminding mentoring scheme (in which both mentors and mentees will be paid for their time) and piloting ‘Funded Time Off the Floor’ for childminders – the first pilots of their kind in the UK.
Many of you have previously highlighted that unlike Early Years Practitioners in nurseries, childminders don’t get time off the floor to undertake learning. We’ve listened, responded and we’ll be piloting different models - recognising that childminders have different business models, and that one size is unlikely to fit all.
These measures will be tested in manageable numbers in targeted areas with approximately 350 childminders participating in the retention pilots over the course of the three-year programme, so that we can ensure high quality measurement, evaluation and modification. The results will then be used to inform consideration about potential national scaling-up in future. We believe that these measures have the potential to be transformative for childminding. Further details, and opportunities to get involved in pilots in participating areas will be shared early in September.
Of course, we recognise that the national programme isn’t a magic bullet. We continue to work on other matters which have been adversely affecting retention. We continue to represent members’ needs in the development of the new
Shared Inspection Framework, being developed jointly by the Care Inspectorate and Education Scotland, to ensure that this delivers on the Scottish Government’s commitment to making quality assurance more proportionate and specific to childminding and with a major reduction in paperwork for all childminders (and not just those delivering funded ELC).
We also recognise that we are all living in changeable times, with three First Ministers in Scotland within the last 18 months and a UK General Election. Having established childminding as a national priority in Scotland, we will work to maintain this position.
We have also been delighted to launch
further new benefits for SCMA members. The SCMA Discount Marketplace provides members with the opportunity to obtain discounts at a number of high-street retailers, food and leisure facilities including B&Q, Dunelm, Argos, Currys, Tesco, Sainsburys, ASDS, M&S, River Island, Sports Direct, Nando’s, Café Nero, Pizza Hut, Cineworld, Odeon, Vue … and many more.
In parallel, we have also launched access to 19 FREE bitesize e-Learning courses from Flick. Courses include Food Hygiene (Level 2), Allergies, Forms of Abuse, Data Protection and GDPR, Health and Safety Risk Assessments and Time Management.
Read more about these benefits in the summer issue of your
Childminding magazine, which you can access via the
Membership Dashboard, where you can also tap into these new benefits and make the most of them.
Graeme
Graeme McAlister
Chief Executive of SCMA