News

All-day childcare continues to rise

The number of full-day care providers has risen by 300 since the end of March, according to figures published by Ofsted last month. There are now 12,400 such providers offering 532,500 places - an increase of 14,500 places since the quarterly figures were last published. The increase continues a trend which has seen places for all-day care rise steadily since 2003.
The number of full-day care providers has risen by 300 since the end of March, according to figures published by Ofsted last month.

There are now 12,400 such providers offering 532,500 places - an increase of 14,500 places since the quarterly figures were last published. The increase continues a trend which has seen places for all-day care rise steadily since 2003.

The number of childminders has risen to 70,900, but is still down from 71,000 at the end of last year and a peak of 72,000 in December 2003.

The number of out-of-school providers has also increased. An extra 300 providers have taken the total number of places to 349,200 - a rise of 8,000 since March.

Providers of sessional care, including playgroups and private nursery schools, also recorded a slight increase. But the number of providers is still down 200 compared with figures from December 2004.

Last month also saw the publication of the Scottish Executive's Pre-School and Childcare Statistics 2005. The statistics provide detailed information on all 4,717 childcare and pre-school centres in Scotland, including playgroups, creches, nurseries and out-of-school and breakfast clubs.

The number of nurseries in Scotland has increased by 7 per cent in the past year to 2,517. More than half of these are run by local authorities.

Out-of-school provision has also risen. There are now 1,079 centres providing out-of-school clubs, up from 1,066 in 2004.

The number of childminders in Scotland has dropped slightly, from 6,165 in 2004 to 6,100 in 2005.

There are 2,836 pre-school education providers - exactly the same as in 2004. However, the number of three- and four-year-olds attending pre-schools has fallen by 4.4 and 2.2 percentage points respectively.

A Scottish Executive spokeswoman said, 'Overall, the levels of children in pre-school education are healthy. Uptake for four-year-olds remains close to 100 per cent and for three-year- olds is still over 80 per cent.

'Internationally, the most recent figures show Scotland is in the top third of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries for pre-school education take-up, ahead of the rest of the UK.'

For details see www.scotland.gov.uk/statistics/children.