SCMA members are invited to #TellSCMA about your thoughts and experiences on a number of critical topics, which will influence SCMA, increase and strengthen our support for you, and help us address the issues affecting childminders in Scotland.
As a result of your feedback to our previous surveys and our acting on this – together we have made childminding a national policy priority in Scotland.
We recognise how busy our members are and the many demands on your time, but sparing around 20 minutes of your time, you will help to inform us on what we will do on your behalf to further increases and strengthen our membership support for you. Your feedback is essential on a number of critically important areas, including:
- strengthening our CPL provision further
- developing our membership offering and practice support
- understanding where your business is now in terms of sustainability
- capturing a further snapshot from those delivering funded ELC to understand the impact of new developments – including the inclusion of the deferral year and budget cuts around the country.
Watch Graeme's video message
HERE where he explains why
YOUR voice is critically important.
Have your say and #TellSCMA!
CLICK HERE to complete our #TellSCMA Childminding and You Survey 2024 today.
The deadline for completing the survey is Sunday 27 October – it is completely anonymous and will only take around 20 minutes of your time.
Your views and experiences are really important to us, your responses will be anonymous, this survey will make a difference - and as we have done previously - we will act on the findings.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
You said…. We did!
Here’s a quick reminder of the actions we have taken in response to your feedback in previous surveys.
In 2020 we undertook our first #TellSCMA Childminding and You survey, which covered a range of different areas on which we needed your input to reduce our asks of you. 38% of you responded and provided us with invaluable data on which to develop our work. In response to your feedback, we…
- invested in a new learning platform for members and have strengthened, widened and increased our Continuing Professional Learning (CPL) output including in different forms e.g. webinars and bite-size chunks, and we continue to refresh and update our childminding-specific content on a rolling basis.
- shone a light nationally on the disproportionate impact that an increase in paperwork, bureaucracy and duplicative quality assurance had been having on your workloads and established data to confirm that this was the main reason childminders had been leaving or were planning to leave our workforce.
- used your experiences of childminding to inform campaign materials to recruit new childminders in areas where they were desperately needed, piloting our approach first in remote and rural and then in urban local authority areas. To date, we have supported new childminders to establish 85 new childminding businesses, with another 15 working their way through the registration system and more in progress in areas without any or not enough childminders.
In 2022 we repeated this approach and you provided an even greater response with 45% of you taking part. In response to your feedback, we…
- collected your experiences of inspection and quality assurance to inform our organisational response to the Scottish Government consultation on the future of inspection in early learning and childcare and school age childcare services in Scotland. This contributed to the Scottish Government charging the Care Inspectorate and Education Scotland with developing a new Shared Inspection Framework which would be more proportionate and specific to different providers including childminders and with a significant reduction in paperwork – all things which you told us were important to you and which we then advocated for nationally on your behalf.
- collected data on your business sustainability and the extent to which your businesses had recovered after the pandemic. This included capturing new data on the number of childminders who could afford to pay themselves the Real Living Wage (only 13%) and which also reported that during the Cost of Living Crisis 60% of members who responded believed they would have to turn their heating off in the evenings when their families were home to be able to afford to heat their settings during the day when children were present. This was very powerful and focused minds nationally on the needs of childminders; and
- the latest snapshot of members’ experiences of delivering funded ELC, which together with our workforce projections reported the need for urgent intervention.
Two years on from our last #TellSCMA survey, it’s time for us to gather feedback from you again on the matters that are most important to you. As always, you can be assured that your responses will be read in full and will make a difference.
CLICK HERE to complete our #TellSCMA Childminding and You Survey 2024 today.
The deadline for completing the survey is Sunday 27 October.