Summer support for children: FOI release

Information requested

1. Further to the release ‘Summer support for children’ published by the Scottish Government on 1 July 2022, please provide a copy of all the documentation that accompanied the decision that this programme should be supported by £10 million, including any documents that discuss whether other funding levels would be more appropriate.

2. Please provide confirmation of whether this ‘summer support for children’ is permanent funding or one-off funding.

3. How much has the Scottish Government allocated to future holiday funding programmes for (a) summer 2023 and (b) any other school holidays, for instance October 2022, winter 2022, spring 2023.

4. For what reasons did the Scottish Government not maintain the funding levels at the £20m provided for summer 2021, announced here: https://www.gov.scot/news/enhanced-summer-offer-forall-children/?
Please provide any documentation that either related to or supported this decision.

Response

The answer to your questions 2 and 3 are:
2. Scottish Government budgets are decided annually. Future School Aged Childcare funding will be subject to the overall Budget agreed by the Scottish Parliament for 2023-24.

3. We have invested £10 million building on Get Into Summer 2021 and delivering a summer 2022 offer for children and families in low income households. Our intention is to build on our investments and learning from the Access to Childcare projects and the Summer 2022 holiday programme, continuing our work in 2022-23 to further understand demand for services and delivery capacity within the existing system. We will continue to test year-round innovative models of school age childcare for those families most at risk of poverty, focusing on addressing the specific needs of priority families.
While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the costs of locating, retrieving and providing the information requested for questions 1 and 4 would exceed the upper cost limit of £600. In order to answer question 1 and 4 in your request officials were required to approach a number of policy teams across the Scottish Government and received over 1500 documents that fell within the scope of the request.

Unfortunately, when completing the cost limit calculations the results came out well over £600. Under section 12 of FOISA public authorities are not required to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying would exceed the upper cost limit, which is currently set at £600 by Regulations made under section 12.

You may, however, wish to consider reducing the scope of your request in order that the costs can be brought below £600. You may also find it helpful to look at the Scottish Information Commissioner’s ‘Tips for requesting information under FOI and the EIRs’ on his website at:
http://www.itspublicknowledge.info/YourRights/Tipsforrequesters.aspx.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.