Deferred school entry in Scotland: the women who changed the law

What was it that first made you realise there was a problem to be tackled, and what motivated you to try to do something about it?

Patricia: I have two children and deferred the first easily as he was born in January. My second child was not quite so lucky. She was autumn-born and it was a very different case. I found out, by chance, through a Facebook page that I had the legal right to defer. The relief was amazing, but then it turned to anger. I was working as a teacher myself, having already deferred a child, and thought I was informed - yet didn’t know children born between August and December could also be deferred, or that the right had existed since 1980.

Diane: Yeah my answer is pretty similar to Patricia. I had applied for discretionary deferral for my son in North Lanarkshire in April 2018 and they told me no. They said I could not defer and that I had to send my son to school. My friend who had deferred her child a few years earlier had told me this was wrong, that they could not force me to send my 4yr old to school. I put a question on the Upstart Scotland Facebook page asking what I should do to challenge it. I then hooked up with Patricia, and as she says it became apparently very quickly that parents were being told all sorts of nonsense across the country about deferral law and parents’ rights.

Patricia: We were seeing all the misinformation on threads online about it, hearing parents' experiences of professionals telling them they did not have the right to defer, finding the ambiguous if not downright misleading – or simply unavailable – information on councils' websites about who did have the right to defer.

When  you started, did you know what it would take to succeed in your campaign?

Patricia: We didn't have a clue! And we didn't know whether to fight nationally for a law change or at local council level, so we fought on both fronts.

Diane: Yeah we had no idea or intention really to change the law. Our first plan was to lobby local authorities and ask them to change their local policies. We knew that they had the power to do this, especially because Falkirk Council of their own volition changed their discretionary deferral policy to automatic funding for all eligible 4yr olds.

However, we quickly realised with the many closed doors from local authority employees and councillors that we would never be able to make any significant progress going down this route. We were meeting with Fulton MacGregor MSP frequently and he then set up the opportunity for us to meet with Maree Todd, the minister for Children and Young People at the time. Our meetings with her went well - although she was adamant that the law didn’t need to be changed to begin with.

It was Iain Gray’s motion that changed it all.

Patricia: Absolutely. Scottish Labour’s decision to focus their education debate on the Give Them Time campaign put the pressure on the minister to recognise the will of parliament and to commit to changing the law.

Diane Delaney, co-founder of the Give Them Time campaign (Image: Colin Mearns/The Herald)

Were people generally receptive to your campaign or did you face a lot of barriers and resistance?

Diane: I would say most people were receptive to the campaign. Those who were resistant were mainly from local authorities and COSLA - employees and local councillors. Much of the resistance was on the basis of budgets and funding, with councils trying to play the Scottish Government vs Local Authority blame game.

Local authorities never really took on board or agreed to work with us on the issues relating to staff training on deferral law and policy, and this was highlighted via the Ipsos Moray evaluation report. There was also resistance from the government in terms of their initial views that play based learning would solve the problems of difficult transitions for 4yr olds moving from ELC to school.

FOIs on the implementation of play based learning in schools squashed that one though.

Patricia: Yeah it wasn’t happening everywhere. It was often down to the view of a headteacher whether it was adopted in their school or not. Also, it was hard to pin down an exact definition of what it is and what exactly constitutes a play-based approached.

The FOI requests really helped us argue that deferral and a further year of nursery would definitely provide a play-based, developmentally-appropriate early learning environment, whereas the chance of your child’s school offering a play-based approach to P1 was a postcode lottery.

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How did you feel on the day when the Scottish Government announced that you had been successful and the rules around school deferral would indeed be changed?

Diane: The day of the Scottish Labour (Iain Gray) led motion on the Give Them Time Campaign, asking for the law change, we did not expect the decision at the end of the day to be that the law would change. Patricia and I were together as we had met for lunch to watch the debate. We were shocked but so happy and emotional and excited. Maree Todd had only the week before said that the law would not change because it didn’t need to!

Patricia: I felt surprise. Elation. There was a sense of it being surreal as we watched it on parliament TV, so removed from the in-person aspect of it. But we quickly realised that the next question was when it would be changed, and knew that we wanted to put the pressure on for a quick implementation.

Diane: The law change was formally announced via the media in December 2020 and we were pretty annoyed that Maree Todd had not given us the heads up that day that this would be announced. We also didn’t know the details of the pilot - we had not been consulted about which five local authorities would be part of it. So although we were very excited to see the implementation plan become a reality, we were frustrated that we had been excluded from discussions on the key decisions around it.

The announcement was made several years ago now but you’ve still been very active. What have you been doing?

Diane: Yeah, the implementation plan was published in 2020, saying the law would change on 1st Aug 2023. So this meant that several local authorities were still operating their awful discretionary deferral policies, which meant parents were still being forced to engage with an inconsistent, non-transparent process that absolutely had nothing to do with children’s needs and Getting It Right For Every Child. So all of our work became centred on sharing information about parents’ rights, supporting parents to write their ‘evidence’ papers, supporting them with complaints and appeals.

We continued to lobby local authorities right to the end about their dreadful communications on deferral. We were supposed to be working with the Scottish Government led Deferral Working Group, but we were only invited very tokenistically to one meeting and again this was a big disappointment for us.

Diane Delaney (left) and Patricia Anderson (Image: Colin Mearns/The Herald)

Now that new approach has been fully implemented, do you feel like the job is done or are there new priorities?

Diane: Our goal was to campaign for a further year of nursery funding for all children legally deferring their primary one start in Scotland. I feel we can be proud that we achieved that goal.

Our campaign evolved to become more than a funding issue: we were dealing with bigger themes around child and parent rights, child development, health and wellbeing, staff training, support and resources, and parent engagement. So in this respect, there is more work to be done, but I think these themes cross over with other groups and organisations like Upstart Scotland, Together, ASN Reform Scotland, Connect.

Patricia: One thing to raise awareness of is the need to support those who are applying for deferral for older children – those already age five by the school start date. They still need to apply to their local authority for discretionary approval and continued funding.

Diane: So I think there are other priorities that are not necessarily new, but it was difficult for us to tackle all of these on our own. I personally think that tackling these issues requires parents to be at the centre of them, as authentic partners and leaders. The National Discussion, the Pilot report of automatic funding for deferral, and the Hayward review all made comments about the need for better parent engagement and communication.

Our experiences from the campaign evidence that despite the rhetoric and many policies around the role and value of parents, and the legal right for parents to be involved in their child’s education, the reality is very different. Much like the issues with discretionary deferral, valuing and involving parents is inconsistent, lacks transparency and is not always child and family centred.