Access to Childcare Fund: phase 2 - evaluation report

10. Key lessons and conclusions

Overall, the evidence collected as part of this evaluation indicates that ACF Phase 2 projects met the aims of the Fund – to provide SACC that is accessible, flexible and affordable for low-income families. Processes that facilitated these objectives were also shown to positively contribute to the intended outcomes for families: parental employment and/or training; parental health and wellbeing; financial circumstances; child health and wellbeing; and child relationships. Notably, through supporting parents with entering, sustaining or progressing in work, projects were also seen as having a longer-term impact on families’ financial wellbeing and reducing their risk of experiencing poverty (in line with the aims in the Tackling Child poverty Delivery Plan).

Considerations for creating a wider system of SACC

While projects trialled a variety of different approaches and models of SACC, there were some cross-cutting themes that influenced their ability to successfully achieve the intended aims and outcomes. The following considerations will be important when designing a wider system of SACC.

Staffing the offer

While staff were critical to the delivery and impact of SACC, projects had experienced difficulties with recruitment which, for some projects, were ongoing. This was particularly relevant for recruiting staff to care for children with complex ASN, which required staff with more specialised skills and expertise.

There was a perception that staffing challenges were more acute in rural areas, due to a smaller workforce pool and the unique barriers presented by a lack of infrastructure. Rural areas were also seen as being more vulnerable to economic shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, for example one project lead pointed out that many childminders in the rural area that they operated in had closed during this time (and not reopened).

Fostering strong relationships

Strong relationships between families and staff were viewed as a vital part of delivering SACC. Families described situations where individual staff members had made the difference between them signing up for provision or not, or to children wanting to attend. Project leads highlighted the importance of relationships in understanding families’ needs, effective communication and reducing stigma. This was underpinned by the recruitment of high-quality staff, but also by retaining them in order to provide the consistency needed for building trusting relationships with families over time. Therefore, investing in the SACC workforce is an important consideration for wider roll-out which could help overcome recruitment challenges as well as facilitate the formation of relationships. Factors to consider include: pay, conditions, training and development and job security, as well as making staff feel valued, supporting staff wellbeing and maintaining morale to avoid risk of burnout.

Family support

It was widely acknowledged that the low-income families accessing ACF projects were typically facing multiple challenges alongside access to childcare. In some instances, these issues constituted barriers to accessing childcare in the first place or negatively impacted on the outcomes ACF projects were intending to achieve. Therefore, in order to benefit fully from SACC provision, parents needed support with a range of issues including poverty and the cost of living, mental health problems, alcohol and substance misuse, and various practical issues such as those relating to housing or personal finance. While some projects put in place active family support measures, all projects described providing some form of family support when working with families.

Family support elements of projects received very positive feedback and were appreciated by families who took part in this research. This was backed up from project leads and stakeholders who commented on the positive impacts they had observed from providing family support, and how outcomes were rarely achieved solely through provision of childcare alone.

Providing effective family support depended to an extent on building strong relationships with families as well as good partnership working. When projects employed a dedicated family support worker, this was seen as an example of best practice that increased the impacts for families.

Partnership working

As mentioned previously, partnership working is when local authorities, public sector and third sector organisations come together to deliver for the needs of families, and this took different forms across the funded projects. Partnership working emerged as another strong theme across projects that related to the successful engagement of, and provision for, families. Partners played a key role in maximising the reach and accessibility of projects via referrals. Partnerships also helped projects to achieve outcomes for families by providing additional sources of support to which project staff could signpost the families they worked with. When projects had stronger relationships with partners, maintaining regular communication and having steering groups, these benefits were enhanced. Wider external issues, however, such as staffing challenges and high workloads within partner organisations, could negatively impact on these relationships.

Inclusion of children with ASN

While only two projects catered solely for children with ASN, children with varying degrees of additional needs attended every project.

Whether these children attended bespoke services or were integrated into mainstream services, there were additional considerations around delivering SACC for children with ASN. These included: providing extra staffing/resource; recruiting staff with additional training (or providing this); tailoring activities to meet different children’s needs; creating a suitable space and atmosphere, and including additional accessibility support, for example including transport in provision was particularly important for this group.

Monitoring and evaluation

Monitoring and evaluation enabled projects to assess how well their processes were working and adapt to better meet the needs of families over time. However, as noted in Chapter 3, projects experienced challenges around collecting the required information (due to both a lack of staff capacity as well as sensitivities around recording personal information) and a limited understanding of methods of evaluation.

Lessons around conducting good monitoring and evaluation in the future included:

• Providing support to projects around evaluation methods (previous input from Evaluation Scotland was received positively).
• Establishing a peer network for SACC services to share learnings.
• Clearly communicating the requirements and expectations from Scottish government around monitoring and evaluation.

Sustainability

There was a general concern expressed by project leads about the long-term sustainability of many features of the ACF-funded projects that made them accessible, flexible and affordable to families. This was particularly mentioned in relation to providing funded places.

“How can you keep it going? One of my answers always is: funding. Funding has to make it sustainable because there is no real other way that they [low-income families] are going to pay. So, it is maybe that funders have to think about longer term funding, and that's the sustainable way of meeting the targets and criteria.” (Project lead)