The Scottish Government are working on changes to child employment policy/legislation that are required as a result of the UK Government’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. These changes are as follows:
- for children between the age of 14 and the end of compulsory school age: the maximum working hours on Sundays (2 hours) will be aligned to those for Saturdays, which is up to 5 hours for 14 year olds, and up to 8 hours for 15-16 year olds;
- the ‘window’ of working hours on any day of the week will change, to allow children between the age of 14 and the end of compulsory school age to work up to 8pm (rather than the current limit of 7pm); and to work up to one hour before school starts (whereas at present they cannot work before school starts).
These changes will need to be reflected in guidance and allowed for within permit applications, but operationally these do not change from the current process of submitting and approving child employment permit applications. However, while operationally the process to send/ receive and approve permit applications to employ a child will remain the same, with approval staying at the Local Authority level, there will be a move from Local Authority Byelaws governing the rules around the types of work a child can undertake, and the minimum age at which they can work, to national regulations.
We have commenced conversations with a number of key stakeholders and reached out to all local authorities to gain information on the child employment permit landscape. While responses have been useful, we have not had consistent responses across all local authorities in Scotland. We are now contacting ADES and SOLAR so you have awareness of the changes and ensure all local authorities are ready to implement the changes.
We are also trying to gather the relevant contact information for each local authority and ideally learn more about how child employment is working at a local level. With your connections in this area, we wanted to see if you could assist us in gathering information from the remaining Local Authorities, to which we can send a list of those who have not responded. We appreciate ongoing resourcing issues so having the correct contact details would suffice if you could assist with this.
Finally, we will be establishing a short term working group to assist us with the drafting of regulations for permitted and prohibited work based on member’s feedback, to comment on guidance, and to share with relevant networks. If this is something that you would like one of your members to engage with please let me know. I’m also happy to send updates on the progress we are making. We expect the changes to come into effect in early 2028 to align with UK Government timelines.
If you would like to discuss any of this please let me know.
Many thanks in advance.
Best wishes
Rebecca Henderson
Child Rights Policy Officer
Children’s Rights Unit | Children and Families Directorate | Scottish Government Email: [email protected]