Children's hearings redesign - policy proposals: consultation

2. About this Consultation

This consultation is part of a series of steps to ensure that Scotland’s children’s hearings system can be redesigned to build on its strengths so that it can deliver the best possible experience to the children and families in need of its support. It focusses on areas which may require changes to the law.

The policy aims of this consultation paper, and of the proposals it contains, are:

• To ensure that the children’s hearings system meets the needs, and respects the rights, of all the children and families it serves.
• To ensure that the processes of the children’s hearings system support children and families to properly participate and engage - with the referred child always at the centre.
• To minimise the obligations and expectations on children and families to prepare for, and to attend proceedings - while preserving essential rights and participation protections.
• To support the children's hearings system to become more inquisitorial and to minimise the application of adversarial proceedings, without diminishing the significance of the process.
• To ensure that the children’s hearings system and the professionals operating within it have the capacity to deliver what each child needs.
• To ensure each child continues to be treated in a way that is trauma-informed and accounts for their age and stage of development.
• To make other technical and procedural alterations where it is necessary, appropriate or beneficial to ensure processes and procedures work more effectively.

To deliver these aims and those of the wider programme of children’s hearings redesign, the Scottish Government is committed to working effectively with others. This will entail collaboration with a range of organisations, partners and communities in a number of different ways. This consultation is only one part of the wider children’s hearings redesign initiative.

The Promise (2020)^[1] expressed how to take forward the findings of Scotland’s Independent Care Review which aimed to improve outcomes for Scotland’s most vulnerable children, particularly those who come into contact with the care system. Subsequently, the Scottish Government committed to keeping the Promise by 2030.

The Promise Plan 2021-24 required that by 2024 the children’s hearings system will have gone through a redesign process, rethinking the underpinning structures, processes and legislation.

The first step in this process was the publication of the independent, Promise Scotland commissioned, Hearings for Children^[2] report in May 2023.

Further details of the engagement and evidence that underpinned this report can be found in the dedicated section of the Promise Scotland website^[3].

The vision and ambition of the Hearings for Children report broadly aligns with the policy trajectory and longer-term aspirations of the Scottish Government. Policy teams across the Scottish Government undertook several stages of analysis of the report across summer and autumn 2023. They also worked with statutory delivery partners in the children’s hearings system – learning from those responsible for the system’s day to day running. That work confirmed that many Hearings for Children recommendations had in some way been anticipated, or work had begun to make progress on certain issues, in the way envisioned by the report. Practice changes were being delivered or planned, and other improvement programmes were already underway, all of which would help deliver the aims of the report and the overall intentions of system redesign.

The Scottish Government’s work with partners also identified that there was capacity for further change, and it has now drawn on partners’ professional expertise to identify those Hearings for Children recommendations that can be driven forward by practitioners, managers and other leaders - without the need for new law or Government action. However, many of the issues considered by the Hearings for Children report and then supported by the Scottish Government response, cannot progress without changes to primary legislation or without significant changes to existing systems or structures, roles and responsibilities.

This consultation follows directly from the Scottish Government’s December 2023 response^[4] to the recommendations of the independent Hearings for Children report. It covers potential legislative reforms flowing from the recommendations which have been reflected on, adapted and updated following the Scottish Government response. It seeks views and feedback on policy proposals to redesign aspects of the children’s hearings system, that could be introduced to the Scottish Parliament within a potential Bill. The Government’s future legislative programme will be set out in the Programme for Government.

The sequence of any changes to the hearings system must be planned with care, involving all key parties, to ensure that children and families continue to be supported and system professionals are able to operate safely and with confidence.

This includes making sure that development of the substantive legislative proposals to underpin the redesigned system are concluded before the updated supporting administrative functions, guidance, codes of practice and training are defined and developed.

Scotland’s Getting it Right for Every Child (GIRFEC)^[5] policy recognises all under 18 as children, as does the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier^[6].

To aid readability and to simplify this document, the terms ‘child’ or ’children’ in this consultation document therefore refer to under 18, unless otherwise stated. ‘Young people’ is typically used to refer to those aged 18-25 years, in-keeping with wider legislation and policy developments^[7].