Are you passionate about nurture, high quality childcare and making a real difference to children and families in Scotland? Do you want to be part of SCMA – a thriving membership organisation, advocating on behalf of childminders and delivering services across Scotland?

We are recruiting a Senior Childminding Development Officer to help us deliver our childminding services across Scotland.

The Scottish Childminding Association (SCMA) is the national voice of childminding in Scotland. SCMA is a national Third Sector and membership organisation that promotes childminding as a quality childcare service. Working on behalf of its 2,600 childminder members, SCMA helps to improve the wellbeing and outcomes for Scotland’s children and aims to influence policy to ensure that it is informed by the experiences of childminding. SCMA provides a wide range of support and professional services for members including training and events as well as delivering local services. For more information about our organisation and services visit childminding.org

The successful applicant will coordinate and deliver the Integrated Childminding Service in the City of Glasgow area and provide appropriate support to childminders recruited onto the service. This post may require direct contact with children and vulnerable adults. You will be adept at developing relationships, negotiating and working collaboratively with partners to achieve better outcomes for children and families, along with experience of the delivery of funded ELC hours and family support. This will be underpinned by an understanding of childminding and the role of childminders.

We require a skilled communicator with the ability to engage with others while demonstrating enthusiasm, self-motivation and focus. You will possess excellent organisational skills and be comfortable using Microsoft Office packages including Excel and Sharepoint.

Due to internal secondment this post is fixed term, with initial year one funding to March 2025, as part of a 3-year funding agreement, confirmed on an annual basis.

The post is home office based but will require travel and attendance at meetings within Glasgow (including occasional travel to Head Office in Stirling). Equipment and broadband/IT connections will be provided.

We are seeking Family Learning workers to deliver a series of groups and activities designed to support parents of families with limited English, to familiarise parents with nursery and primary school practices and to enable them to successfully integrate within their local communities.

Their duties will include delivering a series of Family ESOL programmes to assist parents and children with transitions from nursery to school, encourage reading in English and their home language, discuss intercultural aspects of parenting and understand the Scottish education system. This could also include support to bilingual parents attending courses such as PEEP, Raising Children with Confidence and more.

An Adult Education centred approach is required for this work.

Experience of working with people whose first language is not English or a qualification in English language teaching is desirable.

Applicants should have good literacy skills in English.

Experience of group work with adult learners is required.

We would welcome applications from speakers of Arabic, Kurdish, Dari, Pashto, Somali and Ukrainian.

As an equal opportunity employer, we recognise and value the benefits that a diverse workforce with different values, beliefs, experience, and backgrounds brings. We would like to encourage conversations with people who have not previously thought about employment within a Local Authority.

We warmly invite people to take this opportunity to demonstrate their ability regardless of age, disability, sex, gender, race, marital status, sexual orientation, religious or political beliefs.

We're committed to creating a workplace culture where all our people feel valued, included and able to be their best at work, and we recognise the benefits that a diverse workforce with different values, beliefs, experience, and backgrounds brings to us as an organisation.

As part of our goal to improve our organisational culture and create a great place to work together for the people of Edinburgh, we want to make sure that we’re bringing the best people into our roles, not just in their skills and experience but also in their approach to work.

To help achieve this, we’re changing the way we interview and assess candidates by moving from a competency-based interview approach to a behavioural and technical (skills for the job) based approach. This new way of interviewing will allow us to assess how you think and how you would bring Our Behaviours of Respect, Integrity and Flexibility into your ways of working.

Our salary range typically reflects the initial starting salary and annually increases until it reaches the top of the range.

The official purposes of Earth in Common (EiC), a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SC044220), can be summarised as to encourage and support the people and organisations of Leith to grow food vegetables, and flowers for pollinating insects, in urban spaces, in order to improve health and wellbeing, community cohesion and the environment. However, EiC brings together a diverse group of enthusiastic staff, freelancers, volunteers and members/supporters who are tackling an array of social and environmental issues at local, national and international levels, and so it has broader activities and interests than suggested by its current official purposes.

The charity was appointed by the City of Edinburgh Council to manage, with and for the local community, two acres at the northwest corner of Leith Links Park. Now known as Leith Community Croft (LCC), our pioneering and model ‘urban croft’ offers cross-cutting solutions to social and environmental problems through a suite of integrated projects. It accommodates a community growing project with >100 participants. The growing project is distinct from allotments and benefits agrobiodiversity (see tinyurl.com/croftabdiv).

LCC is also the site of our tree nursery, market garden, composting facilities, our Hingabootery (shed-based café, with a serving hatch), our Market on the Croft (to be re-launched in 2023), and our lovely new building (largely funded by the Scottish Government’s Regeneration Capital Grant Fund), with a well-equipped kitchen, flexible meeting/training/dining spaces and office space. This building constitutes a multipurpose community hub at the core of LCC.

To learn more about EiC, candidates are advised to familiarise themselves with the organisation’s history and current projects and campaigns by visiting its website (earth-in-common.org). More information is also provided in the Job Description.

Summary of the job

• Appointees will work as a team with other Croft Café Co-ordinators, with a main focus on preparing and serving simple but high quality food and drink. They will also sell fruit and vegetables (many from our market garden on Leith Community Croft) from our farm shop area of the same building. Barista and/or kitchen experience would be preferable, but we can provide training to the right candidates. An understanding of food safety standards is essential as well as a proactive attitude, a sense of urgency and ability to pinpoint priorities and act on them.
• The appointees will also perform all necessary ancillary work (food preparation, cleaning, stocktaking, till operation, ordering supplies, etc.). Opening hours are currently 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday to Friday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday (subject to change during spring and summer), but there will be some meeting, preparation and cleaning time outside these hours, and possibly occasional catering at events. Candidates must be able to work weekends and early mornings.
• As well as ensuring the smooth running of all aspects of Earth in Common’s café and farm shop operations, they will assist with other aspects of running Leith Community Croft, as required. This may include, for example, waste management, litter-picking and assisting with market garden work.
• Croft Café Co-ordinators are expected to be flexible, use their initiative, and help each other as necessary, turning their hands to whatever needs to be done to further Earth in Common’s services and reputation. This includes contributing ideas to the development of café and farm shop operations to make them more biosphere- and customer-friendly and to improve profitability.
• Croft Café Co-ordinators are important public-facing representatives of Leith Community Croft and Earth in Common, and are expected to abide by the charity’s Code of Conduct, offer efficient and friendly service, also engage with people who don’t necessarily use the café, and be able to inform members of the public about the charity’s history, values, long-term vision and ongoing projects and services and direct them to Earth in Common contact points and colleagues as appropriate.
• While no guarantees can be given, it is hoped that the charity’s finances will allow contracts to be extended, assuming appointees have performed well.