SSELC
Over the last few months our team in Cummings Park Nursery in Aberdeen have been supporting Scottish Government’s Scottish Study of Early Learning and Childcare (SSELC).
The aim of the study is to understand the impacts of the 1140 funded childcare expansion and to understand if it has had improved outcomes for children and their parents we well as if the expansion has had a positive impact on family wellbeing in general.
Cummings Park nursery opened in January 2022 and provides funded childcare for eligible 2s and all 3-5 year olds Monday to Friday from 8am – 6pm.
Cummings Park has been identified as an area of high deprivation by Aberdeen City Council and they chose us as their delivery partner as they felt that our flexible childcare model would be able to help families to reduce their childcare costs while helping to increase parental employment.
And they were right! According to our latest research 85% of families using our early learning & childcare services have said that they are in full time or part time employment and more than 90% have said that they have increased their household income thanks to flexible childcare.
This will make the Cummings Park Nursery a valuable contributor to the SSELC study and the team are already distributing questionnaires to parents, keyworkers and ensuring that child outcomes are being monitored and recorded appropriately.
The study will allow Scottish Government to evaluate the impact of the 1140 policy change and understand whether the Government are achieving the outcomes that the policy aimed to address – such as increasing parental employment.
Amy Grant, Service Manager at Cummings Park Nursery said,
“We are delighted to be chosen to support this study. I’ve been working in early learning and childcare for 17 years and have seen for myself the positive impacts that the 1140 expansion has had on families. Being able to feed into a national study to share these positive impacts is a great opportunity and one that will hopefully see a further increase for younger children in the future.”
