School Estate Management

Early Learning and Childcare Programme

The entitlement to funded Early Learning and Childcare for all three and four year olds, and eligible two year olds, was increased to 1,140 hours a year from August 2021.

Highland received the third highest capital funding allocation of all Local Authorities (£32.59M) from the Scottish Government to deliver the building improvements necessary to support the expansion programme. This was distributed across 82 Council settings and was combined with funding from our capital programme to deliver other essential works at the same time.

Progress on the combined investment programme was delayed due to the impact of the pandemic. Despite this, 90% of the projects will have been completed by the end of December 2021.

The 82 capital projects fall into the following categories.

• Part of a new school build project – 3
• New or replacement nursery buildings – 26
• Extension and refurbishment of existing buildings – 8
• Alteration and refurbishment works – 44
• Central production kitchen – 1

As well as these projects, 17 private providers received capital grants totalling £200K to support improvements in their settings to deliver an increased service.

The links here will highlight some of the completed projects and further projects will be added in due course.