As we move through the Scottish Government’s route map to recovery, the restrictions of lockdown will ease, however the legacy of the pandemic means that there are additional measures to support the safe delivery of ELC now and beyond phase four of the route map.  In response to this changed landscape, we have developed ‘Key Question 5’, a self-evaluation resource and tool which asks you to evaluate how well you are supporting children and families during Covid-19.  This is the only Key Question we expect ELC providers (including out of school care and childminders) to compete.

This key question will sit alongside our Quality Framework for Early Learning and Childcare when this is published later this year (which will include Key Questions 1-4).

The aim of this resource is to enable settings to gather information and continually evaluate their progress in supporting staff, children and families to have confidence in the provision of ELC by specifically evidencing how they have implemented the national guidance for Covid-19, while ensuring positive outcomes for children. 

We encourage you to complete the ‘self-evaluation tool’.

The tool asks you to take account of performance data when evaluating your service. This will be individual to your service. It may include how you communicate with families or other settings where there are blended placements. It may also be some examples of evidence which you wish to include within the tool e.g. Supporting evidence of how you have implemented and reviewed the national guidance relevant to your service:

Inspectors will request the completed self-evaluation from providers on a risk and sampling basis.  Please do not send this to us until requested.  This will not be before 10 August 2020.  However, we may undertake other scrutiny activities in settings before this date.  

We will use the completed self-evaluation to assess how well the setting is managing the situation and consider whether further scrutiny is required.  If no further scrutiny work is undertaken an assessment of your self-evaluation will be sent to you and may be shared with the local authority if you are providing funded ELC.  We will work to develop a system to make the assessment available on our website.  We will not apply evaluations from our grading scale to the assessment of your self-evaluation of “How good is our care and support during the Covid-19 pandemic?”