DLEARN-Childcare Early Adopter Communities – Process, Impact & Spend Evaluation

The Scottish Government has committed to building a system of school age childcare that provides care before and after school, all year round, to support parents and carers – particularly on low incomes – to access secure and stable employment.

The School Age Childcare Transformational Change Programme was established to deliver this commitment. The Programme is taking a phased approach to policy design in order to test and refine what an effective system will look like in different communities, and to adapt and scale different approaches. This includes work within six ‘early adopter communities’ (EACs) to understand how to co-design local systems of childcare which will meet the needs of families living within those communities. This work is targeted at families most at risk of living in poverty, as set out in Best Start, Bright Futures, the Scottish Government’s tackling child poverty delivery plan.

In the 2023 Programme for Government, Scottish Government also made a commitment to expand the EACs to include families with younger children for the first time. This will mainly focus on children up to age three, given that all three- and four-year-olds (and eligible two-year-olds) are already entitled to 1140 hours of funded early learning and childcare. In the coming year the EACs will conduct engagement work with families to better understand their needs in relation to childcare for younger children. Some limited delivery will also begin for families in selected communities where this engagement work has already taken place.

The Scottish Government, on behalf of the Scottish Ministers, wishes to commission a process, impact and spend evaluation of the EACs. The contractor will be required to build on a first phase of evaluation of the EACs (which involved development of a theory of change and a monitoring and evaluation framework, an early process evaluation, and an evaluability assessment) and work with the Scottish Government to meet the aims outlined below.

This next phase of work is to provide robust findings on the impact of these community-based childcare projects on children and families, how these changes are enabled, and how the resources put into the EACs have been used. These findings will in turn inform both continuous improvement for local partners and wider local and national childcare policy.

The aims of this evaluation are:

1. Scope and refine a detailed evaluation approach, building on a preliminary evaluability assessment.
2. Work with leads and partners in the EACs to refine and improve monitoring and evaluation data, as required
3. Conduct a process evaluation across all 6 EACs
4. Conduct an early impact evaluation across all 6 EACs
5. Conduct a spend evaluation across all 6 EACs.