Flexible Childcare Services Scotland (FCSS) has been awarded £45,000 from the Northwood Charitable Trust to drive sustainability and enhance service delivery in their flagship flexible early learning and school age childcare setting in Dundee.
FCSS was created to redesign childcare delivery models, empowering parental employability and tackling child poverty. Indeed, in the charity’s last Social Impact Report 97% of parents reported enhanced financial well-being, with annual increases to their household income of between £2,000 to over £5,000 each year thanks to flexible childcare.
The funding from the Northwood Trust will help the charity to reach up to 500 families in the area, enhancing their service provision by working with and signposting to other agencies, and creating opportunities for earlier interventions, helping to improve the lives of children and young people at risk of experiencing poor outcomes. This could include supported access to speech/language therapy, support for kinship and foster carers and other support as needed by individual families.
According to the charity’s chief executive, Susan McGhee, “By empowering parents to return to work we reduce their reliance on benefits, increase their earning potential and enable them to contribute to the local and national economy. Our wrap around support addresses cost of living challenges, children’s health and development and gives greater access to crucial services. This reduces reliance on public services and improves wellbeing within families. By enabling children to attend early learning, our work addresses the attainment gap, delivering improved outcomes for children as they grow up.”
FCSS currently supports more than 1,000 parents each year with early learning and school age childcare and it estimates that collectively those parents are increasing their household income by almost £2m each year solely due to the flexible childcare model.
The charity is now creating a blueprint so that it can replicate its services and work in partnership to deliver flexible and affordable childcare services in some of Scotland’s most deprived areas, which will have the greatest impact on families living at risk of poverty.
Susan McGhee explains, “Our work has trialled a scalable model of flexible childcare in areas of multiple disadvantages, producing robust evidence of positive outcomes. With almost a quarter of children in Scotland, and a third in the UK, living in poverty and nearly 140,000 economically inactive adults in Scotland struggling with caring responsibilities, the call for change is urgent.”
“Our service in Dundee is located in Fintry, 30% of the population are considered to be income deprived, and the area is considered to be in the 10% most deprived areas of the country. Yet we know that our model works, parents are empowered to return to or remain in work, they pay less for childcare, are better off financially and report improved wellbeing.”
The charity believe that their flexible model is an ‘anti-poverty childcare system’ which can deliver meaningful change to families across Scotland.
According to Morag Neville, spokesperson at The Northwood Charitable Trust, “The Trust is delighted to be able to support the really important work being delivered by Flexible Childcare Services Scotland in Fintry. Enabling parents to return to work has enormous benefits to the whole family and wider community.”
