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In recent years, we have made significant progress on delivering a major expansion of funded early learning and childcare. We work closely with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, with our local authority colleagues, and with the private, voluntary and independent sectors on expanding that offer of free childcare. There has been significant investment in infrastructure—some expansion of nurseries and some building of new nurseries—to ensure that we can make that offer to local communities.

We have proved that, when we set targets for provision of early learning and childcare, we can meet them. Obviously, we have provider neutrality for funding, which takes account of the fact that, outwith the nursery infrastructure, the childminding industry represents a huge offer to children and young people at the pre-school stage and in the early years of school, as well as in wraparound school care. Obviously, there is always work to do to support that infrastructure and industry to ensure that there are places for children, as we expand that childcare offer.

You have covered most of what we are doing, with the exception of the care-experienced young people’s grant, which is an annual £200 grant that will benefit about 50,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 26 who do not have access to the family support networks that some of their non-care-experienced peers can access.

May I add something before Ms Mackay gets to her questions?

We are working closely with The Promise Scotland and partners across local government, social justice, health and the third sector to design and deliver the funding. We are expanding our engagement to test ideas about where the funding will have the most sustained impact. We spoke earlier about having the voice of lived experience at the absolute heart of that. We need to understand and reflect the opinions of families—that is absolutely crucial—and the experiences of those who help us to deliver family support, to ensure that it has the impact that we want it to have.

We want an on-going process of learning and development over the course of the funding. The intention is not to set in stone the profile of the spending for the next four years; rather, we want to listen and learn about what can best support transformation and have the greatest impacts for families, and to allocate the funding accordingly.

It might be helpful to ask one of the officials who are with us to give a bit more policy detail on how we anticipate measuring the impact of the funding. I ask Gavin Henderson, who is deputy director of keeping the Promise, to expand on the answers that the cabinet secretary and I have given.

The independent evaluation of Scotland’s baby box, which was published on 13 August last year, highlighted the scheme’s positive impact on families, particularly first-time younger and low-income parents, with a 97 per cent satisfaction rate for the box and its contents and 91 per cent of families reporting financial savings, which is obviously very relevant to the committee’s inquiry.

The evaluation also highlighted key impacts, including saving money on essential items that are needed for the baby and learning about positive parenting behaviour, such as bonding with the baby through playing, talking and reading. Indeed, more than half the families reported reading to their baby earlier as a result of the baby box, which is obviously good for promoting attachment and positive parenting and for child development, particularly in speech and language. As we know, reading to younger children can help them to develop those important skills. I think that we have demonstrated through both the research and parental uptake of the baby box how valued it is.

I want to go back to the cabinet secretary’s point about our having to mitigate some of the impacts of decisions that have been made elsewhere on reserved benefits. In the past couple of weeks, we saw statistics about the number of children who have been affected by the benefit cap that the Westminster Government introduced a few years ago. In essence, their families do not receive benefits for more than two children. In my constituency, at least 215 children have been affected by that. The impact of it on family incomes is huge in one constituency in Scotland.

We must consider the effects of child poverty and what the Scottish Government can do. We are not powerless; we can do things to alleviate child poverty but, at times, it feels like we are fighting with one hand tied behind our back.

As a precursor to the family wellbeing fund, which we might come to later in the meeting, the Deputy First Minister announced at the weekend £3 million for local authorities and £255,000 for a small number of third sector organisations, to provide cash support to families who are currently in need. There is an on-going commitment from the Government to do what we can when we can to mitigate—

Absolutely. We are looking at targeting what families need at that point in time, whether that is help with utilities, clothing or food.

My figures are slightly different from yours. There was a drop between 2019 and 2020, but it was a drop from 11 per cent to 9 per cent, rather than a drop to 2 per cent. In 2021, it increased to 13 per cent. Given the impact of Covid and the circumstances in which they were living, one can understand why parents did not register for the childcare that they were eligible for, or why they were reluctant to do so.

Childminders and the Scottish Childminding Association are key partners with the Scottish Government and local authorities in delivering the 1,140 hours and developing the wraparound care that we have committed to, and we are working closely with them to understand why childminders are giving up the profession and to help with recruitment and retention. As they are an absolutely key part of the ELC workforce, we are committed to working alongside the national association to understand what attracts people to childminding, to ensure that it is seen as an attractive career option, and to not only expand the workforce, but retain the current workforce and understand why people are choosing to leave.

Last week, the committee heard evidence from my colleague Kevin Stewart, who is leading on the national care service. This week, the responses to the call for evidence and the consultation will be published, so I do not want to pre-empt those. Children’s services were included in the consultation, and, from my conversations with stakeholders and others, I am sure that a wide variety of views will have been submitted.

The Government is committed to keeping the Promise, to ensuring that children in Scotland grow up feeling loved, safe and respected, and that the wraparound services that they receive are appropriate to them.

I have no doubt that there will be challenges with the introduction of a national care service. There will be inevitable changes to social work, even if only adult services are covered by the national care service. We are very mindful of that. As with the challenges of addressing child poverty, the commitment to the Promise is a cross-Government commitment. We are mindful of unintended impacts, so we will develop the national care service in a way that does not lead to unintended consequences for other systems and services.

There is a principle of provider neutrality. A parent who has an eligible child can choose from a variety of early learning settings. That could be childminding, a nursery placement or an outdoor nursery.

It is important to remember that, even during the time of school and ELC closures for most pupils and young people, those facilities were there, not only for our key workers so that they could maintain services, but for vulnerable families who were identified by local authorities, because they know them best. Those families were, therefore, still able to access that funded ELC and school-age care.

As I said in response to Sandesh Gulhane, we have made significant progress in delivering a major expansion of provision, and part of that happened during a pandemic. That is testament to the work that many people have done to ensure that we could deliver 1,140 hours in August last year, and we have seen an increased uptake in relation to eligible two-year-olds year on year, which is encouraging. Obviously, there is still more to do and we want to ensure that everyone who is eligible for that provision is able to access it if they choose to do so, accepting that some parents of two-year-olds do not want to use that childcare.

We have done some work to ensure that the services that are in contact with families are aware of the childcare offer and can inform families about it. We are also working with the UK Government to look at UK-level data sharing. A UK Government consultation is calling for views on data sharing with the Scottish Government in relation to families that are recipients of eligible benefits so that local authorities would be more able to communicate directly with them, because there have been general data protection regulation issues, with systems not being able to speak to one other. My understanding is that that will require some legislation at Westminster.

As the cabinet secretary said, we also need to get alongside those eligible families and understand what the barriers are to them accessing the childcare offer.