Child rights and wellbeing impact assessment external guidance and templates

Introduction

The Scottish Government (SG) has completed and published Child Rights and Wellbeing Impact Assessments (CRWIAs) since 2015, to ensure children’s rights are taken into account in all legislation, policies, and strategic decisions. Elsewhere you may have come across Child Rights Impact Assessments (CRIAs) and wondered why ours is slightly different. As Scotland use these two approaches to achieve objectives within their National Performance Framework, the wellbeing aspect of CRWIAs is specific to Scotland. This covers the wider policy landscape, as Getting it right for every child (GIRFEC) is one of our national approaches to improve the realisation of children’s rights.

To make Scotland the best place in the world for a child to grow up, children’s rights need to be fully and progressively realised across all sectors and society. This requires a cultural change, supported by awareness raising on children’s rights and how authorities and organisations can take a children’s human rights approach. As the outputs of all public services (not just children’s services) and wider organisations may impact the rights and wellbeing of children and young people, it is vital that they consider children and young people in their work. Organisations should take a children’s human rights approach to decision-making, such as when creating a new policy, project or programme. The Scottish Government cannot deliver this cultural change alone; we all have a responsibility to respect and protect children’s rights and must embed child rights practice into our everyday work. To assist with this the Scottish Government has published non-statutory guidance on Taking a children's human rights approach: guidance

Completing CRWIAs and involving children and young people in decision-making are two important ways to support this cultural change and uphold and respect children’s rights in Scotland.

Informed by feedback from stakeholders, we have updated the external CRWIA example templates and guidance, and provided links to further resources throughout this document. However, please note that while published CRWIA examples are linked throughout, quality assurance of the content of external CRWIAs has not been carried out by SG.

European Network of Ombudspersons for Children (ENOC) research on CRIA indicates that there is no single, global model of CRIA/CRWIA in place and the template provided by the Scottish Government, is just one example of how the CRWIA process may be approached. One of the key elements to successful implementation of CRWIA, is developing a process that works for your organisation.

We will continue to gather feedback from those using the templates and guidance to ensure they are continuously improved.