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According to the Regulation of Care (Scotland) Act 2001, the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) is responsible for producing and publishing data and intelligence on the social services workforce in Scotland, including the early learning and childcare workforce. As an Accredited Official Statistics provider (meaning they comply with the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) Code of Practice for Statistics) they publish a number of reports that may be of interest to you.

The first is the yearly “Scottish Social Service Sector: Report on Workforce Data”. This report combines administrative data from the Care Inspectorate with data collected by the SSSC directly from local authorities to form a comprehensive picture of the paid workforce employed in the social service sector in Scotland. The report includes data on headcounts and staffing in the sector. The report also clarifies that it is not possible to calculate turnover as the annual collections do not capture data on staff who join and leave a service wholly between the reference dates. The alternative measure of staffing change to turnover used by the SSSC is the stability index (SI) which measures the proportion of staff who have been retained from the previous year and is contained within this report.

The SSSC also publishes an annual “Workforce Skills Report”, which looks at the current provision of qualifications for the adult social care, children's residential care and early years workforce, and demand for those qualifications. It also looks at barriers to undertaking qualifications.

You might also wish to note that the SSSC publishes an annual “Staff vacancies in care services report”. This report is jointly published with the Care Inspectorate, and provides data on vacancies reported by care services as at 31 December each year. It presents data on the number of registered care services with a vacancy, the number of actual vacancies that services say they had using whole time equivalent (WTE) data, and data on the reasons why services have reported that vacancies are hard to fill.

Finally, in April 2025, the SSSC published the “Register Leavers Survey Report”, which gives an insight into leavers from the social work, social care and children and young people workforce. It examines who is leaving the SSSC Register, why and where they are moving to. This report is based on data from 2,003 people who left the Register between August and December 2024. This is the first collection of this data, but the intention is to continue to collect this to gain a deeper understanding of why people leave the sector.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-37815 on 4 June 2025

The Scottish Social Services Council published their ‘Have Your Say’ Workforce Wellbeing Survey 2025 report on 22 April 2025. The survey aims to capture the experiences of people working in the social work, social care and children and young people workforce, to inform the development of national policies and strategies on how best to support the workforce, and to inform national workforce planning. We are considering the findings of the report carefully with partners.

The Scottish Government provides a range of financial and logistical support to early learning and childcare (ELC) practitioners seeking to upskill through formal qualifications.

(a) Financial Support

In 2024-25, the Scottish Government allocated over £8 million to support Skills Development Scotland to deliver Modern Apprenticeships in childcare.

A tuition fee grant of up to £1,820 is available via the Student Awards Agency Scotland (SAAS) through the Part-Time Fee Grant (PTFG) for individuals with a personal income of £25,000 or less. This funding supports eligible higher education courses and professional development at SCQF Levels 7–10, delivered by approved providers in Scotland. This funding is available to those working in childcare who are looking to study for a degree or college-based qualification.

The Scottish Government is also providing funding to enable 100 practitioners to study Masters degrees at the Universities of Strathclyde and Aberdeen to support their early years practice.

(b) Logistical Support

Practitioners benefit from a range of logistical support options to help them upskill while continuing to work in ELC. Many training providers offer flexible routes such as part-time, online or modular learning, enabling practitioners to balance study with existing commitments.

Work-based qualifications, including Modern and Technical Apprenticeships, allow staff to gain experience and qualifications on the job. In addition, many ELC employers support professional development by providing study leave, protected learning time and mentoring.

Practitioners can also access resources through the Scottish Social Services Council’s Continuous Professional Learning (CPL) portal, which offers a range of ELC-specific training opportunities and guidance.

The Scottish Futures Trust (SFT) monitors the 1140 expansion infrastructure programme on behalf of the Scottish Government. The most recent data collected from local authorities by SFT shows that in October 2024, £16,920,519 of the £476 million of capital funding provided by the Scottish Government was allocated to projects that were not yet complete. All of the £16,920,519, 3.6% of the total Scottish Government funding, remains allocated to projects within local authorities’ 1140 expansion infrastructure programmes. 877 projects (98% of the projects in the programme) have been successfully completed.

The National Standard and Funding Follows the Child policy framework was jointly implemented in 2021 by the Scottish Government and COSLA to support the 1140 expansion.

Operating Guidance on Funding Follows the Child and the National Standard sets out the Scottish Government’s expectations of local authorities and providers in delivering funded ELC hours. Whilst it is expected that local authorities will use the principles and criteria of Funding Follows the Child and the National Standard as a framework to shape local funded ELC delivery, it is for local authorities to ensure that this is delivered in line with their local service delivery plans.

Local authorities are responsible for assessing and monitoring compliance with the National Standard by all funded providers, including their own settings, as part of their contract management arrangements and in their role as guarantors of quality. The Scottish Government has no locus for intervention in matters relating to local authority operational service delivery.

To support those children who benefit most from high quality early learning and childcare (ELC) provision, the Scottish Government made a commitment that, from August 2018, nurseries in the most disadvantaged areas would benefit from an additional teacher or degree-qualified ELC professional. These posts are described nationally as Equity and Excellence Leads (originally Additional Graduates) and have different names and job specifications locally.

Snapshot figures of graduate level posts in ELC are published annually in the Summary Statistics for Schools in Scotland publication. Data in the tables is gathered from centres (either local authority or partner provider centres) with children registered for the funded entitlement at the time of the Census. In 2024, this was collected from 9 – 13 September. As of September 2024, there were 356 (317 FTE) Equity and Excellence Leads in post, which equates to 73% of those that are funded.

The majority of the Scottish Government’s funding to Local Government is provided through the General Revenue Grant. As of 2024-25, and in line with the Verity House Agreement, this covers all funding for statutory ELC provision, including for Equity and Excellence Leads.

It is the responsibility of individual local authorities to manage their own budgets and to allocate the total financial resources available to them, including on ELC, on the basis of local needs and priorities, having first fulfilled their statutory obligations and the jointly agreed set of national and local priorities.

We are working with local authority partners to take forward an evaluation of the Equity and Excellence Leads programme, which will seek to identify good practice, any lessons learned and how best to support this critical resource going forward.

The Scottish Government is committed to ensuring that all eligible children have access to high quality early learning and childcare (ELC) in order to receive the support they need to reach their full learning potential, and to give them the best possible start in life. The Scottish Government and local government have worked in close partnership throughout the delivery of the 1140 expansion, underpinned by a joint policy framework and a multi-year funding agreement.

Questions about the scrutiny of ELC services should be directed to the relevant bodies:

• Local authorities are responsible for meeting their statutory duties in relation to funded ELC. Statutory requirements for the fitness of premises to be used for the provision of ELC are set out in Section 10 of The Social Care and Social Work Improvement Scotland (Requirements for Care Services) Regulations 2011.
• Under section 53 of the Public Services Reform (Scotland) Act 2010, the Care Inspectorate has statutory obligations to carry out inspections of all ELC and school age childcare settings that are registered with them. The Scottish Social Services Council is the regulator for the social work, social care and children and young people workforce in Scotland.

In 2016, prior to the expansion, it was estimated 11,000 people (9,000 full time equivalent workers) would be required to deliver the transformative early learning and childcare (ELC) expansion.

“Best Start, the strategic early learning and school age childcare plan 2022 to 2026” outlines four key priorities that will move us closer to achieving our vision that, through access to rich and nurturing early learning and school age childcare experiences, children, families, and their communities are enabled to reach their full potential and the poverty-related outcomes gap narrows.

Priority 3 is “Ensuring that the delivery of our priorities is supported by a sustainable, diverse and thriving sector and profession”. We recognise that we cannot deliver positive outcomes for children and families without a sustainable, diverse and thriving childcare sector. For that reason, we have taken forward actions including:

• making Fair Work central to the 1140 expansion to date - our investment to support sustainable rates and the ELC real Living Wage has already led to increases in pay across private and third sector providers;
• developing a range of new resources and learning signposting tools for the childcare workforce, including a new continuous professional learning portal and a new National Induction Resource;
• working with local government and our partners in the sector to develop long-term workforce plans that address workforce issues and ensure sustainable delivery of the 1140 funded entitlement;
• allocating over £8 million in 2024-25 to Skills Development Scotland to deliver Modern Apprenticeships in childcare;
• providing funding for 100 childcare professionals to study for Masters qualifications each year at the University of Strathclyde and the University of Aberdeen; and
• investing in the Programme for Scotland’s Childminding Future, launched in June 2024 and backed by more than £1.6 million in 2025-26.

The Skills Development Scotland Sectoral Skills Assessment Childcare Report 2024 contains both a mid-term (2024-2027) and long term (2024 – 2034) future demand forecast for the childcare sector. In both forecasts, employment growth in the childcare sector is predicted to continue and with a larger percentage growth than is forecast overall across Scotland. However, the forecasts also suggest that recruitment will remain challenging in the sector.