Expansion of funded early years childcare must focus on children aged 1 and 2, and be designed to reduce poverty as well as costs.
Despite the significant uplift in funded childcare available for families with 3 and 4 year olds in Scotland, families experiencing poverty still struggle to afford, and therefore access childcare, particularly for younger children.
As a result, there is still work to do in designing an early years childcare that gives children the best chance of growing up free from poverty.
And we start from a strong platform, parents value their existing childcare highly. This report shows that across all income groups parents report benefits to their children's social and learning development.
However, this report also shows that a ‘do nothing’ approach to early years childcare would leave behind families on low incomes. The current system keeps low-income parents locked out of the labour market, stuck in less secure jobs, and childcare eats into household budgets, while child poverty scars the lives of hundreds of thousands of children.
