Our commitment to childminding: report

Re-establishing our plans and building on them

Childminders have an important role to play within the wider childcare offering. They provide a smaller scale care, nurturing learning environment for children in the earliest years and beyond. This unique home-based approach to childcare enabled the decision to allow earlier reopening of the childminding sector during the phases of recovery.

As the recovery has progressed, the time is right to consider those plans which had to be put on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic and identify how best to re-establish these as part of our commitment to a vibrant childminding sector.

Our plans for the coming months must reflect the period we have been through and the new challenges it continues to pose, as well as looking to the future we want to create for childminders and the families they support in Scotland. High quality childcare provision for children of all ages supports their learning, development and wellbeing as well as enabling parents and carers to participate in work, education and training.  We continue to look forward to delivery of 1140 hours of funded ELC across Scotland but we know, and this has been emphasised by the recent crisis, the crucial importance of childcare for all ages.

We are also committed to publishing a Strategic Framework for School age Childcare by the end of this Parliament. Childminders play an important part in the school age childcare landscape and we will work closely with childminders themselves and representative bodies in the development of that framework. This document includes the delivery of that Framework as part of our activity for supporting childminders. Following the publication of that framework it would be our intention to refresh this document to ensure that we are maximising our actions in support of childminding in a way which complements and adds value to our wider school age childcare ambitions.