CLACKMANNANSHIRE Council has not spent a third of the extra money it was given to fund additional nursery and childcare hours, according to a new report from the Scottish Government.
However, it seems no one in the Wee County missed out on the 600 hours of free early learning and childcare (ECL), available for three and four-year-olds, as well as vulnerable two-year-olds, since 2014.
According to the Scottish Government’s report ‘Financial review of early learning and childcare in Scotland: the current landscape’, published last week, Clackmannanshire Council was given an extra £4 million in the past three years to cover anticipated additional costs arising from increasing the provision from 475 to 600 hours per year in the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act (CYP).
But it only spent £2.7 million of the top-up, still managing to deliver on its commitments to more than 900 children.
According to the report, 103 per cent of three and four-year-olds took up the service in Clacks. As the report notes, the number stands above 100 as children registered to receive ECL at more than one centre may have been counted more than once, “potentially leading to a small overestimate of the true uptake”.
A Clackmannanshire Council spokesperson told the Advertiser: “The council has fully delivered on its commitment to provide 600 hours of early learning and childcare for three-year-olds and provision for vulnerable two-year-old children.
“This is provided in all nurseries, most of which are located in primary schools and close to where families live.
“In many instances adaptations had to be carried out in these schools to provide the additional accommodation and to meet the requirements of the Care Inspectorate.”
The Wee County local authority was not alone as between the 2014/15 and 2016/17 financial years, Scotland’s councils altogether increased spending on pre-primary education by £189 million, but received £329 million in additional funding.
However, the report notes: “While 2013/14 spend figures are used as a baseline for comparison in this analysis, it should be noted that it is not certain how pre-primary education expenditure would have developed in the absence of the additional funding that has been supplied.
“Local authorities have been subject to significant budgetary pressures and have sought to constrain expenditure on many areas of activity and it is possible that, in the absence of the CYP Act, that expenditure would have declined and that 2013/14 expenditure is higher than the true (unknown) baseline.
“To the extent that this is the case, the gap between additional funding and
additional expenditure reported here will be an overestimate.”
The Advertiser asked the council where it thinks the gap between funding and expenditure comes from, but that question was ignored.
Offering a range of possibilities, the report says some expenditure may not have been accounted for in pre-primary education figures where a nursery is co-located with a school – utility costs may be accounted for in primary school expenditure instead.
Another explanation is that resources existing before 2014 are now delivered differently or more efficiently.