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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.

Yes, and thank you for the opportunity to speak to the committee, convener. Overall, the work of the Scottish Government, with our partner agencies in health, happens through pre-conception care, antenatal care, perinatal care, the baby box, and the best start grants that are available. Those give our children and families the best start in life with the tools and opportunities to have healthy babies and to supported people when they become a family—when someone gives birth to a child.

One of the most obvious examples is the baby box, which the Scottish Government introduced in our programme for government in 2016. That is a universal measure. As of January this year, more than 200,000 baby boxes have been delivered across Scotland and have had an impact on 98 per cent of expectant parents, who took up that offer of support, clothing and information. That demonstrates how valued that particular intervention and offering is.

I move on to the expansion of early learning and childcare. In August last year, all local authorities across Scotland were offering 1,140 hours of free early learning and childcare. As the cabinet secretary mentioned, that offer is also made for eligible two-year-olds.

The Government is looking to expand that offer, which we hope will mitigate some of the effects of poverty on families, which the cabinet secretary also mentioned, including the ability to access work, training and education. In addition, our manifesto commitments include expanding the childcare offer by considering wraparound childcare, out-of-school childcare and holiday childcare. That will provide families with some of the support that is necessary to enable them to access services, education and work opportunities that will alleviate the poverty in which they find themselves.

I can understand why care-experienced people feel frustrated that progress is not as visible as it should be. The past two years have been very difficult and challenging for all of us, and many people’s situations have changed as a result. As we recover from the impact of Covid-19, our commitment to keep the Promise remains central to the Government’s actions, as I said in my answer to Gillian Mackay. Our ambition to create the conditions that enable wellbeing to flourish is set out in our Covid recovery strategy. That includes driving forward the changes that we need to keep the Promise.

It sounds as though the voice of that young woman has resonated with you and, I am sure, the rest of the committee. It is vital that we listen to those voices and that such voices and experience are at the heart of the work that we do. As we develop policy and work to fulfil the Promise, it is vital that we take account of the voice of lived experience.

We absolutely recognise the vital role of positive and well-planned transitions, and we recognise that planning can improve outcomes for young people who are in care and leaving care. We are committed to supporting care-experienced young people. That is enshrined in the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 and the measures that we are taking to keep the Promise.

We are working with partners to explore how to link existing data collections in order to provide a clearer picture of health and wellbeing outcomes for care-experienced young people so that we can make targeted interventions. For example, over the next six to 12 months, we will be working with four local authorities on a pilot programme to link community health index numbers with existing data on looked-after children in order to get a better understanding of outcomes and information for the next steps of a national roll-out. That will mean that, ultimately, we will have a better understanding of long-term outcomes. The aim is also to measure improvements in the care system as we work together to keep the Promise and improve the lives of children and young people.

Through that on-going work, there has to be a golden thread of lived experience—people’s experience, good and bad, of being in looked-after situations or in the care system. What we can take from that includes what they felt was good and what we need to improve on. We are absolutely determined to do that work.

I will give a further example of targeted support from my portfolio interests. The eligibility of two-year-olds to access the 1,140 hours was expanded to include the children of care-experienced parents in order to provide them with the opportunity to work, train, or continue or restart their education. That recognises that they might not have the family support around them that other people will have in terms of childcare, and it enables them to get some time away while their children are in a safe place, so that they can access other services. That is another example of where we have targeted the support in a way that is tangible.

We are acutely aware of the impact that the pandemic has had on us all, particularly children and families. The Covid-19 children and families collective leadership group, which was jointly chaired by the Scottish Government and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executive and Senior Managers, was established in May 2020 to bring together local and national Government and other partners across children’s and family services, including included health, education, justice and the third sector, to review concerns for children, young people and families with vulnerabilities during the pandemic and the longer-term support for recovery and renewal.

As part of its work during the pandemic, the CLG developed an action plan that was focused on 10 priorities, including access to services, child protection, drugs and alcohol, care leavers, respite care and workforce resilience. Using near real-time data rather than historical data, the CLG was able to get a better sense of the early impact on vulnerable children, including by commissioning deep dives through the centre for excellence for children’s care and protection—I believe that the committee has had some contact with the centre and received some information and evidence from it—as well as other partners to understand the collective impact and any emerging trends, particularly in relation to service response to the need.

During the pandemic, we have learned to work in a more agile way between local and national Government organisations and agencies. We also need to continue to include our third sector partners. That has largely been driven by better access to timely routine data and use of local intelligence, which was not previously available in the same way.

We have seen some good examples of how services have adapted to the pandemic to ensure that they were able to deliver to vulnerable children and families in particular. We have heard examples of social workers donning personal protective equipment to do home visits and meeting children and families outside to go for a walk at times when that was the most appropriate and safest approach because of the mitigations that were in place for Covid-19. Of course, health services remained operational during even the most restrictive of measures and during lockdown. For instance, maternity services were prioritised and health visitors and school nurses continued to work.

There are certainly lessons to be learned and we will learn from them. If services need to respond to tighter restrictions that need to be put in place in the future, we will be able to learn from the work and research that has already been done.

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.

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.

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.