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Section 6: Workforce Planning
Local and national workforce planning is needed to ensure we can continue to provide flexible, appropriate and consistent quality, early years and childcare services now and in the future.
The Issues
6.1 This Review has set out a challenging and inspirational picture of what the workforce of the future might look like in order to deliver services for children and families. If we want to make these changes, we need to adopt a much more strategic approach to how we plan our workforce. The changing demographics of Scotland means that many sectors are examining how they will deliver their services in future; who they need to do it; and the combination of skills those staff will need. Early years and childcare needs to be able to compete for the workforce it needs. To date there has been very little strategic planning of the early years and childcare sector.
The Changing Nature of Services
6.2 We know that the early years and childcare sector is changing rapidly and developing to meet the needs, demands and aspirations of children and their families. Growth in the sector has brought significant changes to the numbers and range of people working in it. The people working within the sector are the essential resource to support the delivery of quality services.
There are some key challenges currently facing the sector. The move towards delivering more joined up services, which meet the individual needs of all children and families, places continuing demands on the workforce to respond to change, to be flexible and responsive and to move away from traditional roles. |
6.3 Although initiatives such as the central funding for early years and childcare workforce development are steadily increasing the numbers of qualified childcare workers, a significant core of staff remain unqualified. Qualification pathways are still complex and somewhat disjointed. We continue to need to raise the status of work in early years and childcare and to improve career opportunities and movement across the sector.
6.4 In order for services to meet these challenges, local and national workforce planning is needed to ensure we can continue to provide flexible, appropriate and consistent quality, early years and childcare services now and in the future.
Policy Drivers for the Future
6.5 Workforce planning needs to take a strategic view and look to the medium to long term. Organisations must be aware of the external environment around them and "scan the horizon" for changes. One of the major influences is the policy agenda. Some of the key policies that will continue to impact on services for the foreseeable future are:
- offering parents and children flexibility and choice (in terms of the type of service offered and the times that service is offered) to help them balance work and family commitments;
- offering quality childcare that is affordable;
- continuing to meet current commitments and any future changes to free pre-school education places for 3 and 4 year olds;
- continued emphasis on partnership working between the local authority, voluntary and independent sectors to enable parents to make choices about the best service for their child;
- registration requirements of the Scottish Social Services Council;
- developing agenda to improve the integration of children's services and the associated integrated assessment/inspection agendas ;
- quality and regulatory requirements;
- planning services to meet the needs of all children, within the demographic context of a reducing population.
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What Can Workforce Planning Do?
6.6 Workforce planning is essential to ensure that services will be able to meet the challenges within this changing and evolving agenda. However workforce planning within the early years and childcare sector is relatively uncharted territory. We need to agree a consistent approach to workforce planning and to how this can be implemented across Scotland.
In order to develop and deliver the services we need, workforce planning arrangements will have to answer some key questions: - how many people will be needed to deliver this service?
- what skills, competencies and knowledge are required now and in the future?
- is further training or development needed?
- is recruitment necessary?
- how do we achieve the necessary degree of flexibility in the use of people?
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6.7 Early years and childcare services are provided in a range of ways, for example by a lone childminder working from her own home, by a large corporation delivering a network of private nurseries, by a voluntarily managed childcare provider or by a local authority. Therefore variations exist in the infrastructure, resources and expertise available to support workforce planning across the early years and childcare sector. All organisations need to be involved in workforce planning to some extent but there may be ways that we can avoid duplication of effort across organisations or achieve economies of scale. For that reason, the purpose and mechanisms for workforce planning of all early years and childcare services within local areas and across Scotland need to be clear.
6.8 We also need to ensure our workforce can deliver quality universal services (delivering on every aspect of the Ministerial Vision for Children and Young People) and deliver more tailored or specialised services when appropriate. This means we need a workforce that can respond to our constantly changing environment and to the changing needs of children.
The Proposals
6.9 All organisations involved in delivering early years and childcare services have a role in workforce planning. We propose that there should be a consistent approach to workforce planning by all organisations. The level at which workforce planning takes place will clearly be different in different organisations. We have set out some high level and generic attributes which all organisations, regardless of their size or sector could use as part of their workforce planning system for the future. We have not We need to develop an approach to workforce planning that is consistent across the country but is flexible enough both to be useful to small individual providers and to much larger organisations such as local authorities.been able to identify a model of workforce planning that is specifically-designed for the sector, nor have we sought to develop such a model ourselves. It may be that existing approaches to workforce planning for other sectors could be adapted to meet the needs of the early years and childcare sector in the future.
6.10 Rather than develop a single workforce planning model for the sector, we have set out some high level and generic attributes of an organisation that uses a workforce planning system which all organisations, regardless of their size or sector could use. We are clear that workforce planning needs to take place at national, local and individual provider level.
Attributes of an Organisation which Plans its Workforce
- obtains and retains the number of people it needs with the skills, expertise and competencies required.
- The sector needs to compete with other related sectors for a shrinking pool of workers. Forecasting future need is critical.
- makes the best use of its employees.
- Changes in the way services are delivered can mean using staff in a different way.
- is able to anticipate the problems of surpluses or shortages of employees.
- A plan must be drawn up to match supply with demand and this should
be constantly implemented and monitored. Risk assessment should also be carried out.
- can develop a well trained and flexible workforce.
- Investing in employees and recruits who have the right attitude and potential.
- reduces its dependence on external recruitment when key skills are in short supply.
- This means formulating retention as well as employee development strategies.
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How Do We Do This?
6.11 In order to achieve the desired outcome of the right people with the right skills in the right place at the right time, we need to design a model of demand for services, supply of staff and the costs of delivering the services. In other words, we need systematic thinking that delivers the attributes of workforce planning described above.
6.12 We need to base the development of a workforce planning model on a shared, clearly-articulated understanding of the services we are delivering for children, young people and their families. We believe that the Roles and Responsibilities grid provides this. We now need to build on this, using the key attributes of a workforce planning model identified above, to develop a sector-specific model of workforce planning which is sufficiently flexible and adaptable to enable its deployment at national, local authority and individual provider level. As part of that task, we suggest further investigation of existing approaches to workforce planning in other, related sectors. We have included at Annex D one approach to workforce planning used in the NHS, which may help inform further consideration of this issue.
6.13 We need the views and knowledge of the sector to be able to put in place the appropriate tools for workforce planning. As a start we have set out the following questions:
Consultation Questions
This section outlines the case for all organisations to undertake workforce planning now in order to deliver the type of workforce we will need to deliver services in the future.
16 | How accurately does this analysis capture the key challenges that face the early years and childcare sector regarding workforce planning? |
17 | Considering each of the attributes of workforce planning described in this section, what activities are you aware of that currently take place to help achieve each of them? Do different activities occur at an individual (business) level, local level and national level? |
18 | What needs to happen at a local level for effective workforce planning to take place? What needs to happen at a national level? Why? |
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