Keeping The Promise to our children, young people and families: progress update 2024

Part 2 Progress on Commitments

The Scottish Government Promise Implementation Plan identifies a broad range of actions and commitments that span policies and portfolios. This includes immediate actions to improve experiences and outcomes for children, young people, adults and their families who are currently in or on the edge of care; and action over the longer term to improve the level of support for families from birth through to adulthood to significantly reduce the numbers of families coming into the care system.

The Scottish Government Promise Implementation Plan broadly follows the structure of The Promise and sets commitments and activities against key themes of:

• Keeping Families Together Through Whole Family Support And Support for Our Care Experienced Children, Young People and Adults
• A Good Childhood for Our Children and Young People
• Creating The Right Scaffolding
• Building Capacity

In order to present the progress made, these key themes are mirrored in the updates outlined in this part of the plan and are reflected in the detailed review against all of the actions and commitments presented in Part 7.

Progress on Key Commitments

In 2022 The Promise Implementation Plan identified fifteen overarching key commitments. These were identified as important areas of activity to drive forward the initial change required on our journey to keep The Promise. An update on each of these key commitments is presented below.

• We will invest £500 million over the course of this Parliamentary term, beginning with £50 million in financial year 2022-23, in preventative spend through the Whole Family Wellbeing Fund.

The Whole Family Wellbeing Funding Programme aims to enable and support the system change required at local Children’s Services Planning Partnership (CSPP) level to deliver holistic family support so that families can access the help they need, where and when needed. This is a transition fund, which is focused on delivering the system changes required to shift investment towards early intervention and prevention activities.

Since 2022-23, £50m per annum has been allocated to support activity focused on:

• providing funding direct to CSPPs to build capacity for change and test and scale transformational practice;
• providing national support for local change, including 3 collaborative partnerships with CSPPs to explore learning about what will enable this system change;
• building a co-ordinated cross-portfolio approach to delivering system change.

Going in to 2024-25, we have maintained this commitment to spend, allowing us to continue the programme of activity which has been established across a range of workstreams. In particular, it maintains our multi-year commitment of £32m to Children’s Service's Planning Partnerships to progress transformation plans at local level.

The Year 1 Evaluation was published on 31 January. Further case study examples, including information about projects we have funded as part of a cross Scottish Government approach to system change, are available in our online Whole Family Wellbeing Funding Learning into Action Knowledge Hub.

Further details on the Programme’s approach to date, and our plans for future investment are set out in Part 4.

• We will support local areas to implement the National Guidance for Child Protection in Scotland 2021.

The National Guidance for Child Protection was published in 2021 and updated in 2023 to reflect legislative, policy and practice changes. This guidance supports practice that places children and young people’s experience, needs, wishes and feelings at the centre of decision-making, builds on strengths as well as addressing risk, and focuses on working in partnership with families and communities.

A National Child Protection Guidance Implementation Group, chaired by the Deputy Social Work Advisor, was established in September 2021 for a period of 2 years to provide strategic oversight and offer support to local areas as they implemented the 2021 Guidance. The Group concluded in September 2023 after delivering a number of significant pieces of work.

As part of the Implementation Group, a Monitoring and Evaluation subgroup was established to develop and implement an approach to monitoring and evaluating implementation of the Guidance up to September 2023. An evaluation presenting the findings was published by CELCIS in March 2024 that highlighted significant progress had been made by local areas despite challenging circumstances. It also confirmed that implementation is ongoing for many areas and more time is needed for the Guidance to properly bed in.

The Scottish Government continues to provide support to some workstreams and will continue to monitor implementation of the National Child Protection Guidance through a range of data sources.

Further detail on implementation of the National Guidance for Child Protection is set out in Part 2.

• We will invest £10 million per annum through our Care Experience Grant: a new £200 annual grant for 16-25 year olds with care experience.

The Care Experience Grant is now known as the Care Leaver Payment. This change in name better reflects the intention of the payment, to support young people as they move on from care and transition into adulthood. This change also aligns with other forms of assistance currently provided by the Scottish Government.

The amount of the payment was originally proposed as an annual payment of £200 to be paid for 10 years. Following consultation which reflected the impact of the cost of living, and the best potential impact for young people, the approach to support has changed to focus on a one-off payment of £2000.

A public consultation on the Care Leaver Payment concluded in January 2024. Independent analysis of consultation responses was published on 18 June 2024. The responses to the consultation will be used to inform further policy development and decision-making.

Further detail on the background to the Care Leaver Payment and wider work on Transitions that relate to it are set out further on in Part 2.

• We will set a Recommended National Allowance for foster and kinship allowances.

In August 2023 the new Scottish Recommended Allowance (SRA) was announced. This means that all foster and kinship carers across Scotland will receive at least a standard national allowance to help care for the children and young people they look after.

Funded by an additional £16 million from the Scottish Government, the new SRA has benefitted more than 9,000 children. This marks the first time a set rate, which all local authorities must pay, has been introduced across Scotland.

A review of the SRA will begin in autumn 2024 and will help identify any areas where improvements can be made.

• We will end the placement of 16 and 17 year olds in young offenders institutions without delay. We will fund care based alternatives to custody and consult on new legislation in spring 2022.

Policy proposals for the Children (Care and Justice) (Scotland) Bill were subject to public consultation in late March 2022. The Bill was introduced to the Scottish Parliament in December 2022, was passed on 25th April 2024 and became an Act on 4th June 2024 following Royal Assent.

The Act, among other provisions, will enable us to give effect to key aspects of The Promise including ending the detention of 16 and 17 year olds in young offenders’ institutions YOIs and raising the maximum age of referral to the Children’s Reporter to 18. During Stage 1 proceedings, evidence was provided to committees from a range of stakeholders including the Promise Scotland and Who Cares? Scotland and there was broad support for the principles of the Bill. Regulations to end the detention of under 18s in young offenders institutions came into force on 28 August. In line with the Promise, under 18s will now be detained in alternative settings, such as secure accommodation. Those under 18s who were detained in a YOI before 28 August have now safely transitioned to new settings.

• We will strive to ensure that Scotland becomes a nation that does not unnecessarily restrain its children. In March 2022, we will consult on the need for appropriate underpinning in legislation or guidance to ensure children’s rights are protected in care settings.

The Children (Care and Justice) (Scotland) Bill consultation gave consideration to the legal framework for restraint within wider children’s services. At this stage, Ministers agreed that legislative change was considered necessary in order to deliver the changes required. Instead, it was agreed that a blended framework of regulation, guidance, practice support and precise reporting is likely to best serve Scotland’s children.

Work is ongoing across the Scottish Government in relation to reducing the need to practice restraint and seclusion. This includes working with partners to support the reduction of restraint in practice so that this is no longer used or needed in respect of children and young people in care including;

Education – Following conclusion of the consultation on “Draft Physical Intervention in Schools Guidance” (which focussed on the rights of the child) in October 2022 the guidance is being revised, with a target date for publishing in summer 2024. Alongside the publication of the new guidance, we are exploring options to strengthen the legal framework in this area, including placing the guidance on a statutory basis.

Mental Health – The final report of the Scottish Mental Health Law Review set out significant recommendations for change to the scope and purpose of the law. Part of this work will consider specific recommendations to reduce the use of coercive practices, including restraint and seclusion over time within mental health settings.

The Scottish Government response to the review was published in June 2023 and we are currently designing and establishing a new programme for reform. We intend to publish an initial delivery plan in 2024. This will include information about the activities that will be taken forward during the first 18 months (from October 2023 – April 2025) to help to achieve the programme aims.

Scottish Prison Service (SPS) – SPS is currently implementing a new restraint framework, based around embedding a human rights-based approach into practice, addressing the rights of all involved within an incident. A primary part of this is the pilot study of a new physical intervention curriculum, alongside dedicated Violence and Restraint Reduction Managers and data driven strategies to proactively manage distressed individuals in custody. A pilot was initiated in April 2023, with a decision to widen the scope of the pilot in early 2024.

The SPS Mental Health Strategy, which outlines the support to be provided and the interface with key partners to ensure holistic, whole person approach to care, will be published in 2024. SPS has also developed a Development and Learning Strategy, “Learning for a Better Future”. The strategy aims to provide a context for development and learning that will enable people within the prison service to have a better life beyond custody and increase the likelihood of desistence.

Secure Care – We continue to work with secure accommodation providers and partners to ensure restraint in such settings is only used as a last resort and for the shortest time possible.

The Children and Young People’s Centre for Justice (CYCJ) are supporting implementation of the secure care pathway and standards, which were published in 2020 and include standards around reducing the use of restraint. The Care Inspectorate carried out a review of implementation of those standards and published their findings in late September 2023. Further consideration of the findings will take place across 2024 and 2025.

Residential Childcare – We continue to work with partners to support the workforce to develop a wider trauma-informed approach to the provision of care within residential childcare settings. Stakeholders within the residential sector across Scotland have successfully engaged in Promise Partnership funded pilot projects which focus on the development of relationship based and reflective practice.

Residential and secure accommodation both follow Holding Safely Guidance, and reporting mechanisms are in place with the Care Inspectorate. The Care Inspectorate inspects residential and secure care homes at least once each year. Restraint procedures, reporting and follow-up are part of that inspection process.

UNCRC Concluding Observations – The UNCRC Concluding Observations include a range of recommendations about monitoring and restricting the use of restraint and seclusion. These form part of over 190 recommendations that are relevant to Scotland on a wide range of issues.

The Scottish Government is carefully considering prioritization of the Concluding Observations. We published our initial response to the UN Committee recommendations on 25th March 2024 and are developing our approach to advancing these over the next reporting cycle.

• We will work with The Promise Scotland to build an evidence base to understand the best governance, financial arrangements and models of care to assess how we best keep The Promise.

The establishment of the National Care Service (NCS) will change the social care, community health and social work services landscape in Scotland.

It will provide opportunities to strengthen systems, secure better ways of cooperative working, ensure performance issues can be identified and addressed transparently and supportively, and ensure better outcomes for people accessing support, in addition to improving experiences of those delivering care.

In June 2023, Scottish Ministers and COSLA Leaders agreed to progress a new national framework for community health, social work and social care support services within the NCS. Under this agreement the accountability for services is shared between Scottish Ministers, local authorities and NHS Health Boards. At the national level, they will work together to drive improvements to the quality, consistency and fairness of these services. A National Care Service Board will be established as the primary forum to discharge this shared accountability.

Local authorities will remain legally responsible for the delivery of social work and social care support and keep the staff and assets associated with those services. Similarly, NHS Health Boards will remain legally responsible for the delivery of primary care and community health services, retaining their staff and assets too..

On 24 June 2024 Minister for Social Care, Mental Wellbeing and Sport wrote to the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee to provide further detail on the development of the NCS. This package of document explains the changes to the NCS Bill Scottish Government proposes to make at Stage 2 and sets out the preferred approach to children’s social care, social work, primary care and community health services.

• We will consider establishing a National Social Work Agency to support the workforce and ensure equality of service and support.

The National Social Work Agency will provide national oversight and leadership for the social work profession, and ensure higher quality and more consistent outcomes for people who need social work support. It will have responsibility for driving improvements to the social work profession, providing national level oversight, and supporting shared accountability. It will bring significantly more coherence and collective focus to national workforce planning for social work and policy implementation whilst ensuring systems are in place to monitor performance. Importantly, it will embed an improvement approach across the sector and improve professional learning and development.

It will work collectively with partners to address workforce pressures and factors impacting on supply and the recruitment and retention of the social work workforce. It will be an opportunity to address some of the longstanding issues impacting on the sector and will seek to improve consistency in service delivery and crucially, enable social workers to implement right-based practice and work more effectively to support people to transform their lives.

We are working closely across the Scottish Government and external stakeholders to agree the most appropriate form and structure for the NSWA, linking closely with all elements of the NCS. The intention is to have a Shadow NSWA established by spring 2025 and to be fully operational by spring 2026

• We will take forward a redesign of the Children’s Hearings System, building on the recommendations from the review led by Sheriff Mackie, with the aim to bring forward any required legislation by the end of the Parliamentary session.

The Hearings System Working Group (HSWG) was established by The Promise Scotland in the summer of 2021 to consider the redesign of the current Children’s Hearings System in order to keep The Promise. The group was independent of the Scottish Government, chaired by Sheriff David Mackie, and with membership from Children’s Hearings Scotland, The Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration, and The Promise Scotland.

The HSWG published its final report on 25 May 2023. The report contains 130+ recommendations covering a broad range of policy areas relating to care systems, children’s hearings, youth justice, legal representation, access to justice. and preventative support for families amongst others.

The Scottish Government published its response to the Hearings System Working Group’s report on 21 December 2023. This response accepts, or agrees to consider further, the majority of recommendations made in the report.

A Children’s Hearings Redesign Board has now been established, consisting of senior leadership from the key statutory organisations responsible for the delivery of the children’s hearings system. This group will be responsible for the governance and oversight of all non-legislative aspects of the redesign of the children’s hearings system. The group met for the first time in January 2024, and is progressing work to develop plans and priorities across 2024 and 2025. A planning sub-group consisting of operational leads from the statutory bodies has also been established to take forward actions emanating from the Children’s Hearings Redesign Board.

A public consultation on legislative aspects of Children’s Hearings Redesign was launched on 26 July 2024.

• We will support The Promise Scotland to develop a blueprint for the creation and control of, and access to, information about people with care experience which will empower people to decide how and when key information about them is made available.

The Promise Scotland will report on this work in summer 2024 and will examine how protocols with key institutions can support provision of the right information at the right time. It will consider the National Digital record as proposed in regulations as part of the National Care Service Bill.

In support of this work the Data for Children Collaborative are leading work to draw on expertise in information sharing, data governance, engagement and systems design to help shape a solution to the management of personal information.

The output of this when published, will inform the connection of children and young people's data to wider activity as part of the National Care Service response. It will also open opportunity to include any additional legislative changes as part of the proposed Promise Bill.

• We will support The Promise Scotland to scope a national lifelong advocacy service for people and families with care experience.

Since 2022, The Promise Scotland have undertaken and completed work to scope a national lifelong advocacy service for care experienced people and families with care experience. The outcome of this work was submitted in a report to Ministers in December 2023, and was published on The Promise Scotland website in February 2024.

In developing this report, The Promise Scotland engaged with advocacy providers, building on the voices and experiences heard by the Independent Care Review to make a series of recommendations on how a lifelong advocacy service could be operationalised. The report presents four phases of activity proposed to move this forward and calls on a collaborative approach across advocacy providers, experts, and children, adults and families with care experience to help achieve this.

• Phase One: Agreeing the core principles of an advocacy service
• Phase Two: Creating a National Strategy for advocacy provision
• Phase Three: Expanding the National Practice Model
• Phase Four: An approach for adults and families with care experience

Complementary to the work undertaken by The Promise Scotland, Who Cares? Scotland have undertaken a review of their experience and learning from providing an advocacy service and have shared findings in a separate report.

The Scottish Government welcomes the recommendations presented in both reports, and they are informing wider activity on advocacy provision within the developing National Care Service model and implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, as well as areas with existing, long established, models of advocacy provision, such as the Childrens Hearings Advocacy National Practice Model, and how a potential approach to lifelong advocacy could be progressed within this broader landscape.

Moving forward, further engagement with advocacy providers will be critical to the next stages of development of an approach to lifelong advocacy. In support of this, The Minister for Children, Young People and The Promise will convene and chair a stakeholder panel with advocacy providers, and other key partners, to progress the recommendations and identify the appropriate next steps to be taken.

As this work is progressed, there is an opportunity to amplify and promote access to existing advocacy services for people with care experience.

• We will develop a delivery plan for our work to embed and sustain trauma-informed workforces and services in the coming year.

The National Trauma Transformation Programme (previously called the National Trauma Training Programme) provides accessible, evidence-based trauma training resources and support for implementation. There is a renewed shared ambition with COSLA for a trauma-informed workforce and services with the launch of a National Trauma Transformational Programme and new website.

Work continues with COSLA, the Improvement Service, Resilience Learning Partnership, and NHS National Education Scotland to support organisations to develop and implement trauma-informed approaches to their workforces and via their services.

Trauma-informed social work services are progressing in collaboration with key partners through the Trauma Responsive Social Work Services Programme (TRSWS). Delivery of the implementation support and learning programme commenced in October 2023, initially with four local authorities across children’s, justice and adult social work services and workforce (Glasgow City Health & Social Care Partnership, Scottish Borders Council, Stirling Council, and West Lothian Council). Initial learning from these sites will help inform scheduling, with further areas across Scotland to be supported by the team from 2024 until December 2026.

The team has delivered Trauma Skilled Practice training and follow up support to over 200 newly qualified and early career social workers across Scotland. The team will review learning and offer this learning and support to an additional minimum 200 newly qualified social workers this calendar year. We will work with key partners through the Social Work Education Partnership to consider how best to embed this learning into the first year of social work practice.

The TRSWS team is also trialling trauma skilled practice learning in undergraduate social work education.

• We will introduce a Promise Bill to make any further legislative changes required to keep The Promise by the end of this Parliamentary session.

The Promise Bill will make any further legislative changes required to keep The Promise. This may include, for example, provisions required to implement the adopted or adapted recommendations in respect of children’s hearings redesign, and bring forward guidance that requires to be put on a statutory footing to make sure that public authorities do what is necessary to keep The Promise.

We will continue to work with partners including The Promise Scotland and COSLA to identify areas where legislative change may support delivery of The Promise.

• We will establish The Promise Collective co-chaired with The Promise Scotland and COSLA to support alignment and cohesion of activities.

The Promise Collective was established in 2022 with an aim to align the improvement work underway across the system. A key element of this is to connect and provide a route for joint working and ambition by linking research and evidence to practice and policy.

The group is co-chaired by The Promise Scotland, COSLA and The Scottish Government. Membership includes CELCIS, Who Cares? Scotland and the Improvement Service. The focus of the group has progressed over the two year period to consider the development and agreement of core aims, methods and measures for joint monitoring and reporting of progress. This joint working has been supported by the Verity House Agreement.

In 2024, The Promise Collective has widened further to bring together the work of organisations including, the Care Inspectorate, Public Health Scotland, Police Scotland and the Scottish Fire and

Rescue Service to embed The Promise aims into improvement work across agencies.

The Promise Collective provides a strong framework of partnership working and sharing of information and activity underway across organisations to monitor and report progress. This includes connecting activities through corporate parenting duties; sharing of information and best practice to support improvement activity; and identifying opportunities for further joint working and collaboration.

• We will collaborate with The Promise Scotland to scope a new, holistic framework for governance and accountability of social care services

The Promise is clear that if Scotland is to shift its practice to support, prioritise and nurture relationships, then we must shift our accountability structures. Part of this relates to inspection. We are committed to ensuring regulation and scrutiny centres on listening to children about how they are cared for, their ability to thrive and measures the things that matter to children, young people and their families.

The Independent Review of Inspection, Scrutiny and Regulation of Social Care in Scotland (IRISR), chaired by Dame Sue Bruce, and engaging with The Promise Scotland, considered how regulation and inspection of social care support and linked services can ensure a human rights-based approach that delivers improved outcomes for people.

The IRISR Recommendation Report was published on 27th September 2023 and made 38 high level strategic recommendations. The Scottish Government response to the IRISR Recommendation Report was published on 6th March 2024, accepting all 38 recommendations, recognising that significant amounts of work are already underway that will in part or fully address a number of the recommendations.

To ensure the recommendations are implemented in a way envisaged by the IRISR implementation will be phased, and work has already commenced two new workstreams focused on recommendations 15 and 33. We have established a programme of work that will enable us to track progress for current and future work to progress the recommendations.

We will continue to work closely and collaboratively with regulators, providers, partners and with those who have lived and living experience of social care support and linked services in all aspects of this work.

The Promise Scotland was directly engaged in the Independent Review of Inspection, Scrutiny & Regulation including representation on the Practitioner and Stakeholder Panel, one of two panels providing specialist advice to the Chair to inform recommendations. In recognising that inspection and regulation form one part of a wider governance and accountability framework The Promise Scotland will publish a report in 2024 on resetting public services and the governance and accountability changes require to keep The Promise. The paper will set out recommendations for changes to unlock the power of everyone working with children, young people, and their families with care experience to improve their lives. It will propose a different approach, one which changes behaviours, leadership, how we scrutinise and inspect, and our ways of working.

Keeping Families Together Through Whole Family Support and Support For Our Children, Young People and Adults with care experience

As set out in The Promise Implementation Plan in 2022, our overarching ambition is to keep families together where that is safe and to provide the support that is needed to enable this to happen. In turn this will support our main aim that by 2030 we will have reduced the number of children in care and those in care will report a positive care experience.

Actions that have, and continue to be, progressed under this ambition recognise the importance of early experiences, including pre-birth and infancy, and how these are critical to determining wellbeing throughout childhood into adult life. The support available to families during these stages is a crucial part of the ongoing impact that early experiences will have on a child’s life. We know that the improved outcomes we can achieve for those children who are diverted from the care system include better educational attainment, better health and reduced likelihood of homelessness, substance misuse, mental health and offending behaviour.

Where our children, young people and adults have care experience, it is crucial that the right support is available to them across services such as education, health and employment, and that these actions are underpinned by our national approach to improving outcomes for children and young people, Getting it right for every child (GIRFEC), and our aims to improve outcomes for adults with care experience.

Investing in Whole Family Support

We must recognise the network around our children and young people, and the role and impact that they have in shaping their experiences and outcomes into adulthood. Holistic support aims to address the needs of families at the time of need rather than at crisis point, helping families to flourish and reduce the chances of a family engaging the care system, and children potentially entering care.

The vision for holistic whole family support is that support will be readily available to families that need it, where and when they need it. This will enable us to move towards our ambition to keep The Promise, and for Scotland’s children to only know care, compassion, and love.

Further detail on our investment approach with Whole Family Wellbeing Funding, and work to shift towards early intervention and prevention is outlined in Part 4.

Access To Financial Advice

Access to the right financial advice can lead to income maximisation, lower bills, access to employment opportunities and housing support, in addition to wider wellbeing support. In 2022, we set out a commitment to invest £10 million over the term of this Parliament to increase access to advice services in accessible settings, through Welfare and Health Partnerships and other health settings, to maximise incomes, tackle the poverty penalty and improve wellbeing.

Since then, a total of £2.5 million has been committed to the Advice in Accessible Settings Fund which is delivered by Advice UK. In 2024-25 this is supporting 32 partnerships delivering debt, welfare, and income maximisation advice in health, community, and education settings. From July 2023 to June 2024 over £7.5 million of financial gains were recorded providing support to over 5,500 people. Over £700,000 of those financial gains were directly related to children, for school meal vouchers, Educational Maintenance Allowance, Scottish Child Payment, school clothing grants, and charitable grants from children’s charities.

Along with investment in the Welfare Advice Health Partnerships there is now significant accessible financial advice available across Scotland. Progress on the impact that this is having on families will be monitored through regular reporting.

Children, Young People and Families Early Intervention (CYPFEI) Fund, Adult Learning and Empowering Communities (ALEC) Fund

CYPFEI & ALEC has provided over £106m core funding to 115 organisations since 2016 to deliver support that tackles inequalities, child and family poverty, improve learning and build skills across Scotland by supporting third sector organisations who work with children and families to ensure that sustained, high quality support is available. The Promise is embedded as one of the main focuses and key policy priorities in the fund by way of supporting organisations who are providing services to young people and their families with care experience.

In March 2023, Ministers took the decision to extend all existing funding under CYPFEI and ALEC for two financial years, providing £29m to 115 organisations to end of March 2025.

The Promise Partnership Fund

The Promise Partnership Fund (PPF) was launched in February 2021 as a transformational change fund for organisations to begin to take steps towards implementing The Promise and thereby improve the lives of children and young people with care experience and families on the edges of care.

The Corra Foundation administer the fund on the Scottish Government’s behalf and Ministers publicly committed £4m per annum to the PPF until 2025.

Criteria for funding rounds are set by an Advisory Group and applications are assessed by a Decision Maker’s Panel which includes members with lived experience of the care system.

The fund has provided support to over 100 organisations and local authorities across Scotland across five funding rounds, with specific focus on:

• Supporting the care sector to change internal infrastructure and culture
• Organisations who are leading the way with change
• Supporting change to help ensure that brothers and sisters stay together and connected
• Relationships/Moving On and Youth Justice
• Workforce/Supportive School Structures/Youth Justice Rights

The organisations supported range from third sector organisations, local authorities, including Health and Social Care Partnerships and NHS Boards, Universities and Police Scotland. A number of the projects involve collaboration across sectors and organisations and show how joint working can lead to wider change.

Funding has been committed to The Promise Partnership Fund for 2024/25 and the Scottish Government will work with the Corra Foundation to carry out a comprehensive review of the fund, including the impact the funded projects have had in keeping The Promise.

This will include the significant steps that have been taken forward, but will also acknowledge the barriers that organisations have faced in making the necessary shifts.

Welfare Advice and Health Partnerships & Money Talk Team

Since 2021, the Scottish Government has invested over £4 million in a ‘test and learn’ programme through Welfare Advice and Health Partnerships (WAHP), supporting people to access advice in up to 180 GP Practices across Scotland, with 150 targeted in the most deprived communities and 30 in remote, rural and island settings.

Through the initiative, embedded welfare rights advisors can provide regulated and accredited advice on a number of issues including social security entitlement, income maximisation, debt resolution, and employability. The objective of this funding has been to understand and demonstrate the effectiveness and positive impacts of this accessible advice model and to encourage participating local authorities and health and social care partnerships to consider this model of advice provision.

Following successful completion of the ‘test and learn’ phase, the Scottish Government is seeking to support participating local authorities, through continued investment, to mainstream the WAHPs model over the medium-term.

A new, streamlined Money Talk Team service is now being delivered by Citizens Advice Scotland. The new funding arrangement brings together three previously separate funding streams into one grant agreement. The new service incorporates income maximisation, welfare and specialist debt advice delivered through one national website and telephone number as well as the CAB network of local bureaux. The service continues to provide holistic household financial advice across Scotland. The most recent progress report for April-December 2023 recorded that almost 36,000 clients had been supported, including almost 8,000 from Tackling Child Poverty priority family groups. Total client gains reached over £23 million and for priority family groups, this totalled over £6 million.

Supporting Families To Stay Together

The Scottish Government is progressing actions to support early years and under 5s through two major programmes: Early Child Development Transformational Change Programme, and Early Learning and Childcare.

We know that the experiences that children have during their early years and parents’ capacity to provide nurturing care lays lifelong foundations for health and life skills during the period from pre-birth to three, when the brain and metabolic and immune systems develop fastest, laying the foundations for life. The programme builds on significant investment and support and renews our focus on improving early child development by bringing together a programme of work to: provide oversight and better integration of the policies that contribute to early child development with a focus on prevention; re-emphasise the importance of pre-birth and early years across all policy, and; identify any policy and implementation gaps, informed by current evidence areas (including what is needed pre-conception) and build collaboration across the whole system to address them.

Scotland’s Universal Health Visiting Pathway offers support to all of Scotland’s young families from pre-birth until a child starts school. Where additional input is required, the pathway provides a gateway to other levels of Health Visiting provision and referrals to more specialised healthcare services. Health Boards are directed to deploy more health visitors to areas of socioeconomic deprivation. This allows health visitors more capacity to help those most in need. For young, first-time parents, the Family Nurse Partnership programme is provided pre-birth until their child reaches two.

Up to 4,000 families per year are supported by the Family Nurse Partnership (FNP), and over 13,000 have benefitted since the programme began in 2010. We are working with NHS Boards to widen the eligibility criteria so more people can benefit. First time mothers under 20, and first time mothers aged under the age of 25, with care experience will be offered FNP services by the end of 2024. This expansion will support up to an additional 500 families per year.

Perinatal and infant mental health. The Promise provides a continued thread in our delivery, reflecting the ongoing need to support infants, children, young people and families with their mental health and wellbeing. This work is now progressing through a Joint Strategic Board for Child and Family Mental Health (JSB) led by COSLA and the Scottish Government.

The Voice of the Infant Best Practice Guidelines and Infant Pledge was published in 2023 and supports the recognition and understanding of the voice of all infants. There are currently 13 health boards in Scotland with new Infant Mental Health (IMH) services. To support this the Perinatal Mental Health Network Scotland have published an IMH Service Development Guide and role descriptors for Parent-Infant Therapists. This sits alongside other statutory services supporting perinatal and infant mental health (Mother and Baby Unit, specialist Community Perinatal Mental Health Teams, and Maternity & Neonatal Psychological Interventions. In addition, third sector provision for infants, parents and carers is supported via the Perinatal and Infant Mental Health 2024 Third Sector Fund.

Our ongoing support to every family across Scotland is continued through our national and universal programmes designed to give children the best possible start, including Baby Box; Bookbug; and our targeted PlayTalkRead programme, supporting parents and carers to develop positive relationships, form attachment and bond with their child from day one. The Best Start programme for maternal and neonatal services in Scotland provides a continuity of carer for women with the most complex needs, developing trusting relationships throughout their pregnancy and birth. Building on the 2013 Play Strategy for Scotland, we will publish a Play Vision Statement and Action Plan 2024-2030, which will reflect The Promise, before the end of 2024.

Work continues to ensure that all children with care experience receive a health assessment, within 28 days of the Health Board being notified. This includes work across the health service to identify who is best placed to carry out these assessments, and to refresh the guidance to support any gaps in implementation. We have continued to engage with Health Boards and Health & Social Care Partnerships (HSCPs) in respect of the delivery of initial health assessments for looked after children with a view to identifying opportunities for improving health assessment delivery and the health outcomes of children with care experience.

Aberlour Perinatal Service

In November 2023 the Minister for Children, Young People and The Promise visited Aberlour Intensive Perinatal Support Service in Falkirk where she heard from staff and parents who are being supported by the service.

Aberlour’s Perinatal Befriending Service is a non-clinical and community-based service for women experiencing perinatal mental health difficulties, providing emotional and practical support through pregnancy and during their baby’s first year. Delivered across Forth Valley, the model is an early intervention approach for mothers/mothers to be with mild to moderate perinatal mental health illnesses.

The service is peer led, is asset based and person centred. Volunteer Befrienders are there to listen, not to judge, to support, not diagnose and just be there to help women build the confidence to enable them to reconnect and build new connections that will endure beyond service support.

After building trusting relationships with Perinatal Coordinators through home visits, assessment and therapeutic conversations, new/expectant mothers are matched with a highly trained and supported Befriender and choose when, where and how they would like to receive their befriending support (2-3 hours) on a weekly basis.

Early Learning and Childcare

The Scottish Government is committed to providing high quality, flexible early learning and childcare that is accessible and affordable for all families. Our Early Learning and Childcare work maintains this focus on our ambition to ensure that all children get the best possible start in life.

The Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 ensures our children in care are able to access funded early learning and childcare from age two. From August 2021, the provision of funded early learning and childcare for two-year olds was extended to include children of parents with care experience. Importantly, once a child qualifies for early learning and childcare, they stay qualified. Building on what we have learned from the 1140 programme for all three and four year olds and eligible two year olds, our work to develop future funded offers of early learning and childcare will be strongly aligned to our approach to Whole Family Wellbeing and Holistic Family Support.

Delivering An Education System That Supports Our Children And Young People with care experience

Closing the gap between the educational outcomes of children with care experience and all children is a key part of how we keep The Promise. We want all of our children to experience an education system where they feel supported to thrive and have opportunities to develop and gain qualifications and experiences which will help them onwards in their journey through life and into positive destinations. However, we know that children and young people with care experience are more likely to have poorer educational outcomes than other children and young people. This includes during their time at school – when they are more likely to experience exclusion and have lower attendance – as well as when their time at school is coming to an end, when they are less likely to achieve qualifications compared to other children.

In our 2022 Implementation Plan we acknowledged that we must work together to change this. We have, and continue to work collectively to make change happen for our children and young people with care experience. Our approach is rights based, in line with implementation of United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), and person centred as we aim to Get it right for every child, understanding and nurturing their needs to enable them to flourish and reach their full potential.

Education Scotland are working across the wider education system to identify the actions required for practitioners, educational settings and local authorities to implement: The Promise, the Additional Support for Learning Implementation Review, and incorporation of the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child, within the framework of the getting it right for every child.

Work is ongoing with partners, including Education Scotland, COSLA, the Association of Directors of Education in Scotland, and CELCIS to progress the development of a Promise In Education Framework. This framework focusses on improving the educational outcomes of children and young people with care experience, including:

• Increased attendance and reduced exclusion
• Improved staying on rates
• Improving achievement and attainment and
• Sustaining positive destinations upon leaving school.

The Promise in Education Framework recognises the correlation between educational outcomes to increase attendance and reduced exclusion, improved staying on rates, improving achievement and attainment, and sustaining positive destinations upon leaving school. The framework aims to build on actions already being taken across Scotland’s education system to keep The Promise and will be integral to The Promise Progress Framework, further detail on which is set out in Part 5.

Education Reform

Education reform includes the reform of the approach to assessment and qualifications, and the overall delivery of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Implementation Framework, including re-assessing the vision for Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) and improvements to curriculum delivery and measurement of impact.

The Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills gave an update to Parliament in November 2023, and set out the priority of ensuring reform is right for our system and creates change in practice and culture. This update highlighted the importance of a holistic approach to reform across the Education and Skills system and the creation of a new Centre for Teaching Excellence.

We are making progress on reform, with a revised governance and delivery model now implemented across the Education and Skills portfolio. We are working to establish a new agency for Scottish education, a new independent inspectorate, and a new qualifications body. We are working with teachers, practitioners, and others involved in delivering education day in, day out across the

full range of settings, listening to the voices and views of children, young people and all those experiencing education. The next steps of the reform work are:

• Agreement of transitional governance arrangements for the new Qualifications Body the New Agency and New Inspectorate.
• The analysis of the consultation on the proposed Education Bill for New Qualifications Body and Independent Inspectorate was published in June 2024.
• Curriculum Improvement Cycle to commence.
• Co Design work for Centre for Teaching Excellence to commence (spring 2024).
• School Education Digital Strategy to be developed (late 2024).

Attainment

The Scottish Attainment Challenge is about achieving equity in educational outcomes, with a particular focus on closing the poverty-related attainment gap. Education Scotland Attainment Advisers have a responsibility to report, through their tri-annual reports, on progress towards improving attainment of children and young people with care experience. Attainment Advisers also provide advice and support to local authorities in terms of interventions and practice to improve educational outcomes.

The Care Experienced Children and Young People (CECYP) Fund is a targeted resource provided to local authorities to support children and young people with care experience from birth to the age of 26. The funding is provided to local authorities and aims to improve the educational outcomes and experiences for children and young people with care experience, supported by the strategic goals of The Promise and the Scottish Attainment Challenge.

In 2022/23, £10.9m was provided to local authorities through the Fund to help improve the wellbeing and educational outcomes for children and young people with care experience from birth to the age of 26.

In January 2024, the first tranche of funding for the 2023/24 academic term was paid to local authorities totalling £7m, enabling additional support to be provided to children and young people with care experience. The second tranche of payments covering the 2023/24 academic term will be paid in June bringing the total across the year to £10.5m. Allocations for 2024/25 will be calculated following the publication of the Childrens Social Work Statistics Scotland: 2022 to 2023. They will be communicated to local authorities in the new academic term.

To date CECYP funding has supported progress in areas such as attainment, attendance, engagement and exclusions, including through the expansion of the Virtual Schools and Head Teacher Network, delivery of a range of mentoring programmes, improvements in tracking and monitoring of educational progress and outcomes of CECYP, and the introduction of a wide range of tailored and targeted supports in educational settings.

Many local authorities are using data to track measures and in turn target resources and interventions in ways that will have the greatest impact on supporting care experienced children and young people.

Progress has been made in educational attainment, in 2010, there was a 63.9 percentage point difference between the proportion of looked after school leavers who achieved at least 1 qualification at SCQF level 5 or higher, compared to all children. This meant that while over 3 quarters (77.1%) of all school leavers were achieving at least one qualification at SCQF level 5 or higher, just 13.9% of children who were looked after in their final year at school achieved the same.

In the following 10 years up to 2020 when The Promise was made, this percentage point gap had narrowed to 47.6 percentage points, and nearly 2 in 5 pupils who were looked after in their final year were achieving at least one qualification at SCQF level 5 or higher.

Just 2 years later in 2022, this gap has fallen again to 40.3 percentage points, meaning that nearly half (46.1%) of school leavers who were looked after in their final year at school achieved at least one qualification at SCQF level 5 or higher.

Exclusions

The Promise called for an end to the exclusion of children and young people with care experience. Our position continues to be that exclusion should be a last resort where there is no appropriate alternative. Local authorities continue to be encouraged to focus on maximising attendance and engagement in learning by applying the ‘Included, Engaged and Involved’ guidance as a way of mitigating against the need for exclusion.

Scotland’s Virtual School Head Teachers and Care Experienced Teams Network (VSHT) was established by CELCIS. The aim is to support and connect those working in Virtual School Head Teacher roles, share good practice and drive progress towards better educational experiences for all children and young people with care experience. The network has an Exclusions working group specifically looking at common practice across local authorities: things that are working well, challenges, and identifying effective alternatives to exclusion.

The Scottish Government continues to provide £100,000 annual funding to enable CELCIS to support the continued facilitation of the Virtual School Head Teacher network. There are currently 18 Virtual Head Teachers (or equivalent) who are members of the network with a standing offer of support to other local authorities who are considering implementing the role. The network has also been expanded to include two Attainment Advisers from Education Scotland to offer additional support to the network and virtual head teachers.

Keeping The Promise Award

Scottish Government have co-developed a keeping The Promise Award Programme for individual practitioners and educational establishments. This Professional Learning Programme has been designed at 3 levels: individuals, the I Promise Badge, and Educational Establishments the We Promise Award and the keeping The Promise Award. The Keeping The Promise Award is for settings who can demonstrate that their actions and approaches are having a positive impact on the educational experiences and outcomes of children with care experience and their families.

The Award Programme was formally launched in March 2024. The full Award requires Educational Establishments and local authorities to provide evidence of the impact of any changes they have made that supports the educational experience and outcomes of learners with care experience. In 2024/25 we will begin to collate this evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, to provide ‘Stories of Change’.

The keeping The Promise Award resources are now published on the Education Scotland website: https://education.gov.scot/resources/keeping-the-promise-award-programme/

In June 2023, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills convened the first meeting of a Headteacher Taskforce which focused on school exclusions. The topic of school exclusions has also been covered across a series of behaviour summits held between September and November last year. The final summit coincided with the publication of the Behaviour in Scottish Schools Research (BISSR) which provides a robust national picture in relation to behaviour in Scotland’s schools.

This work is being developed into a multi-year plan to tackle instances of challenging behaviour, working with local authorities, trade unions and others. We are working with the Scottish Advisory Group on Relationships and Behaviour in Schools (SAGRABIS) to establish what actions are required to respond to the findings of the summit process and BISSR. It is intended that the plan will include actions relating to supporting attendance, and towards creating safe and consistent environments in schools, through improved guidance and support on relationship approaches, consequences, and exclusion. The national action plan was published in August 2024.

There have been huge reductions in the number of exclusions looked after pupils experience since 2013. Children who were looked after within the 2012/13 school year experienced nearly 8 and a half times the number of school exclusions for every 1,000 pupils (280), compared to just 33 for all pupils.

By the 2022/23 school year, the number of exclusions experienced by all pupils had fallen significantly, with there being 97 exclusions per 1,000 looked after pupils, and 17 for every 1,000 pupils in the overall pupil population.

Whilst we have seen an increase in exclusion rates compared to 2 years ago, it is important to note that this is 36% lower than in 2019, the last time these figures were not affected by school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Further & Higher Education

We know that attaining a good level of education can lead to good outcomes such as good health, employment opportunities and more, which is why we are committed to ensuring that children and young people with care experience have the opportunity to gain a positive educational experience to help them succeed.

To support learning and address potential unfairness in the system, people with care experience are guaranteed an offer of an undergraduate place at a Scottish university, providing they meet the access threshold.

In 2023/24 academic year the Care Experienced Bursary (CEB) was increased to £9,000. This is a non-income assessed, non-repayable grant available to eligible Scottish domiciled students in full-time Further or Higher Education at college or university who have been in care by a local authority in the UK, before turning 18. It was first introduced in the 2017/18 academic year when 545 full-time undergraduate students received the bursary.

Eligible students in receipt of the higher education CEB can choose whether to receive their payments over term time, usually 9 months, or over the full year. The total bursary of £9,000 will remain the same. The 12 month option offers the added benefit for students to have their financial support spread evenly throughout the year to help budget over the summer months.

In the 2022/23 academic year, £13.8 million was awarded to pupils via the care experienced bursary, benefiting 1,840 full time students.

From academic year 2024/25 the Scottish Government will introduce a £2,400 increase to the main undergraduate student support package in the form of a Special Support Loan. This uplift will bring the support we offer students in line with the living wage. This also means that students with care experience, estranged students and those from the lowest household incomes can access funds up to £11,400. By introducing this uplift as a Special Support Loan will mean that those students who remain entitled to welfare benefits whilst they study can access this additional support without any further reduction in their benefit entitlement.

A Summer Accommodation Grant to eligible students with care experience in Higher Education who need help with their accommodation costs during the summer period is also available.

Hub for Success

In February 2024, the then First Minister visited students and staff at the Hub for Success. Supported by Napier University and hosted by the University of Edinburgh, the Hub offers people with care experience impartial, one-to-one support to help people get in, stay in, or return to education.

The Hub for Success received grant funding through The Promise Partnership fund to support the establishment of a Strategic Lead Manager role for one year to push forward the development and consolidation of the hub model to transform support experience for students with care experience of all ages providing an accessible, seamless and easy to navigate pathway into further and higher education. They are now working to expand collaboration between colleges, universities and local authorities outwith the current regional model for Hub for Success.

Student Awards Agency Scotland (SAAS)

The Student Awards Agency Scotland (SAAS) is an Executive Agency of the Scottish Government which administers financial support to Scottish domiciled students studying a course of Higher Education in the UK.

Since the 2017/18 Academic Year (AY), SAAS have been administering a bespoke bursary for students with care experience. Beyond the financial support available, SAAS have introduced a number of measures over the years to support our care experienced cohort.

The decision was taken at the outset to only ask students to provide evidence of their care experience once regardless of the number of times that the student applied for Higher Education funding.

A bespoke form has been developed that students can use as supporting evidence for their funding application. This form was created in conjunction with stakeholders who support students with care experience and students themselves to ensure a trauma informed approach to evidencing eligibility. In addition, as access to the Care Experienced Bursary is not restricted by age, SAAS have ensured that the supporting documentation is reflective of historical types of care that some students may have experienced during their lifetime. All of these applications are routed through a specialist team within the Agency who have all undertaken trauma informed practice training.

The SAAS website has a dedicated section for our students and those that support them which provides information on funding, application process and additional help and advice which is available Support for Care Experienced students – SAAS. SAAS work with schools, colleges, universities and third sector organisations across Scotland on this work.

Employability and Creating Opportunity

In creating a Scotland that is a fair and equal society, we must continue to create greater equity and opportunity for our young people and adults with care experience. We must continue to increase access to employment, training and support, all of which will, in turn, contribute to our ambitions on productivity growth and wellbeing.

Many Local Employability Partnerships are prioritising supported employment, education and training programmes for young people with care experience, which also includes strengthening the voice of care leavers in local service design. Employer Recruitment Incentives are available to support those furthest away from the labour market, including those who have been in the care system.

The Developing the Young Workforce programme enhances provision for young people with care

experience in schools. This includes via School Coordinators supporting every mainstream secondary school in Scotland and via our partnership with MCR Pathways and Career Ready, to provide mentors for young people across Scotland.

The Discovering Your Potential employability programme, which is a partnership between Action for Children, Barnardos, and the Prince’s Trust, provides flexible and intensive support for care leavers, who face multiple barriers to accessing positive destinations.

Additional funding is provided to Inspiring Scotland to deliver Our Future Now, an employability programme aimed at young people who are facing significant barriers, including those with care experience.

We recognise the value of lifelong learning. In December 2023, the Minister for Higher and Further Education and Minister for Veterans announced an Independent Review of Community Learning and Development (CLD) provision across Scotland. This announcement followed on from the publication of the Adult Learning Strategy in 2022. This will develop our understanding of the impact and outcomes for some of Scotland’s most and marginalised groups. The Review is expected to provide recommendations to Scottish Ministers this summer.

Modern Apprenticeships

Apprenticeships are vital for supporting our young people into valuable rewarding careers and this is why our funding contributions for Modern Apprentices are weighted towards young people, particularly the 16-19 age group, with enhanced funding contributions for those with care experience up to age 29.

This acknowledges that young people with care experience may have a longer transition into work and may require additional support from their training provider to complete their apprenticeship.

Since 2015/16, published statistics show that 0.9% of Modern Apprentices self-reported as care experienced. This has increased to 2.3% in 2023/24. Skills Development Scotland continue to work with training providers and stakeholders to improve self-reporting and to simplify the eligibility criteria and process for claiming Enhanced Funding.

Uptake of the number of care experienced Modern Apprentices (MA) can be monitored through the official Modern Apprenticeship Statistics which are published quarterly by Skills Development Scotland. Modern Apprenticeships statistics – Skills Development Scotland.

Tackling Inequality and Supporting Our Communities

We know that the places we live, the communities we live within and the environment that surrounds us can have a profound impact on our lives. We know also that our most disadvantaged communities have higher levels of crime, poorer health outcomes and increased levels of alcohol and drug use. To make real changes that really make a difference we need to understand the circumstances of people’s lives. That means taking a person centred, place based approach which starts and ends with individual stories in real places.

We are also maintaining our Delivering Equally Safe Fund, which is providing support to a number of organisations working with children and young people affected by gender-based violence. Over the 2 year life-span of the fund, we are providing over £3.4 million to 12 organisations solely working with children and young people. Delivering Equally Safe funding will run until March 2025, which is an extension to the original timelines to enable stability to services whilst an independent review of funding is undertaken.

Mental Health and Wellbeing

In taking a preventative approach to mental health the importance of relationships, stability and a non-stigmatising engagement is key. The timely and consistent availability of support before crisis point and available for parents and carers at all stages of their parenting journey can aid nurtured caring relationships and help keep families together.

In November 2023, The Scottish Government published the Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy Delivery Plan (2023-25). One of the priorities is to reduce the risk of poor mental health and wellbeing in adult life by promoting the importance of good relationships and trauma-informed approaches from the earliest years of life, taking account where relevant adverse childhood experiences. The Delivery Plan commits to funding the enhancement of crisis and distress services, including trauma-informed support, for children and young people, giving particular consideration to the needs of children and young people with care experience or on the edges of care.

Suicide Prevention

Scotland’s 3-year Suicide Prevention Action Plan Creating Hope Together: suicide prevention action plan 2022 to 2025 – gov.scot (www.gov.scot) (owned by Scottish Government and COSLA) contains our commitment to work with The Promise Scotland to engage with people with care experience to better understand what action is needed to embed suicide prevention activity in our support to children and young people in care, and care leavers.

The Action Plan is part of our 10-year suicide prevention Strategy Creating Hope Together: suicide prevention strategy 2022 to 2032 – gov.scot (www.gov.scot) – which is considered world leading due to it: focusing on outcomes and tackling the inequalities of suicide, prioritising supporting groups at higher risk of suicide, and taking a whole of government and society approach to suicide prevention.

Our vision is to reduce the number of suicide deaths in Scotland, whilst tackling the inequalities which contribute to suicide. As a government, we are keenly focused on reaching and supporting people who are at higher risk of suicide because of the inequalities they face, for example, people who are affected by poverty, homelessness or with care experience.

Our suicide prevention approach prioritises communities who are impacted by discrimination, stigma, inequality and wider social determinants of suicide. We are collaborating with a range of third sector equalities partners who represent people in these communities, including care experience, to deepen our understanding of the challenges they face, so that we can build more effective suicide prevention responses.

This engagement began in late 2023. It will be important to continue to work in a co-production space with these partners, and importantly to listen to the experience of people with lived experience, as we design and deliver tailored approaches, closely working with third sector partners. The care experienced community will be prioritised through this work.

Using data is critical to informing our suicide prevention approach, and as part of our data improvement work we are putting in place a multi-agency suicide review and learning system. This will allow us to access valuable demographic data and an understanding of the circumstances surrounding a suicide death, including capturing information about adults with care experience. The suicide reviews will support local and national service redesign as part of our suicide prevention work. We are also working with the Child Death Hub to ensure any learning on suicide through this process is shared at local and national levels.

As part of this work, we are undertaking research with our Academic Advisory Group around effective interventions for children and young people to identify effective interventions within key settings, such as education and youth work, and to gain a better understanding of help seeking and help giving. This work aims to inform known data gaps about suicide rates/ risks in the care experienced community.

The Scottish Government's work on suicide prevention is being progressed through an innovative delivery vehicle (Suicide Prevention Scotland) to drive delivery of our action plan. This is a partnership-led delivery model which we consider key to connecting national, local and sectoral partners together in our shared mission to prevent suicide. This partnership seeks to share resource, expertise and learning so we can work across organisational and sector boundaries to extend our reach and impact in preventing suicide. We have plans to deepen our engagement with partners working in the care experienced field as part of this partnership model.

We have created a new advisory group (the National Suicide Prevention Advisory Group) to provide strategic advice to Scottish Government and COSLA, as well as Suicide Prevention Scotland, on ensuring our delivery is achieving the strategy’s outcomes. Membership of our National Suicide Prevention Advisory Group reflects the complexity of suicide and includes many partners who are working to address the social determinants of suicides such as poverty, as well as higher risk groups. The Chief Executive of Who Cares? Scotland is a member of the Group.

Lived experience plays a central role in shaping our suicide prevention work. Our Youth Advisory Group (which is a lived experience group of children and young people affected by suicide) includes young people with care experience. This is helping ensure our work best supports people with care experience.

Self-Harm Strategy and Action Plan

In November 2023, the Scottish Government and COSLA published the world’s first standalone self-harm strategy Self harm strategy and action plan 2023 to 2027.

We made this decision because evidence shows that the majority of people who self-harm are not suicidal and if we only focus on self-harm through the lens of suicide prevention, we risk losing an opportunity to support a wider group of people, including many children and young people, who are in distress, but who are not suicidal.

We know that self-harm is complex and is often used by people as a way to cope with difficult, traumatic, or distressing feelings and experiences. It can affect anyone but evidence suggests that it is more prevalent among young women and other marginalised groups. Our action plan prioritises support for people who are at higher risk of self-harm, including people with care experience.

The strategy and action plan were shaped at every step of the way by people with lived experience of self-harm and those who work in services that support them. This included the views of children and young people who may face greater barriers in accessing support. Based on this feedback our action plan focuses on three priority areas; to deepen knowledge and compassionate understanding of self-harm, to continue to build person-centred support and services, and to review, improve and share data and evidence. Research confirms that many people do not come forward for help for fear of stigma or discrimination and tackling this sits at the heart of our vision, which is for people who have self-harmed or are at risk of self-harm, to receive compassionate, recovery-focuses support, without fear of stigma or discrimination.

Over the last three years, we have invested £1.5m in the development of bespoke self-harm support services through Self-Harm Network Scotland (SHNS), run by Penumbra. We have committed a further £1.5m for the delivery of the action plan, including the continuation of these vital services for 2024-2026.

SHNS provides free peer and online support to anyone aged 12 and over across Scotland who is affected by self-harm. There is a webchat service that operates 7 days a week between 6pm-10pm that is staffed by peer practitioners and trained volunteers who can offer immediate, compassionate, out of hours support.

Furthermore, SHNS can provide free self-harm training for professionals working with someone who has self-harmed and anyone else interested in learning more. Most recently SHNS have launched group support sessions for loved ones of people who self-harm.

As part of the implementation of the action plan we will be working closely with SHNS and other key partners to ensure that resources, support and learning opportunities are co-designed with people with lived experience to ensure they meet the needs of marginalised communities and groups at higher risk of self-harm including children and adults with care experience.

Violence Reduction

The Violence Prevention Framework was published in May 2023. Implementation of the Framework includes activity to identify opportunities to intervene earlier to reduce and prevent harm by those who have been, or are at risk of being, care experienced. The development of the Framework has been informed by engagement with various partner organisations and existing research and evidence on non-sexual violence. It also draws on official national statistics on police recorded violent crime, hospital admissions data and the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey findings, which are the main measures by which we gauge levels of violence in Scotland.

Scottish Government and violence reduction partner organisations, including the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit, continue to work towards achieving the 15 actions contained within the Framework including developing a measurement framework. The first annual Progress Report is due to be published shortly highlighting the progress made so far and some of the activity being taken forward over the coming year.

The Role of the Justice System

The Scottish Government’s Whole System Approach (WSA) to preventing offending by children and young people, rolled out since 2011, remains that children should be kept out of the criminal justice system, wherever possible and appropriate. This extends to young people currently in young offenders’ institutions (YOI).

The WSA is based on prevention, early intervention and diversion approaches. This entails the use of non-compulsory interventions and supports where possible, then an emphasis on children’s hearings measures where children come in to conflict with the law and compulsion is required, and using alternatives such as care settings like secure accommodation rather than YOI where a period of detention is required. That policy position remains unchanged. The Children (Care and Justice) (Scotland) Act 2024 (Commencement No. 1 and Transitional Provision) Regulations 2024 came into force on 28 August 2024 and ended the detention of under 18s in YOI from that date, with smaller, trauma-informed and child-friendly facilities such as secure accommodation used instead.

Scottish Prison Service

The Scottish Prison Service (SPS) has developed an overarching Mental Health Strategy with a series of outcomes that reflect the needs of the whole population with the specific needs of young people referenced where relevant. The strategy outlines the support to be provided and the interface with key partners to ensure a holistic, whole person approach to care. It details how various aspects of prison life can aid prevention, promotion, and recovery in mental health being cognisant of the impact of other policies and strategies on mental health in custody, including the Scottish Government’s review of the Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Strategies. SPS will publish the strategy in 2024.

A Young People’s Strategy Group has been established to oversee a plan to ensure that actions are taken to implement the refreshed Vision for Young People in Custody. This has included:

• Supporting Scottish Government with planning for ending the placement of children in SPS custody.
• Preparing for the incorporation of United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into Scottish Law, notably developing a new physical interventions framework. This has been developed taking a human rights based and more trauma informed approach to managing young people in our care, in line with the refreshed Vision and Strategy for women in custody. This will increase the safety for all involved in an episode of restraint.
• Development of specialised training modules for staff recruited directly to residential areas with and caring for young people and women which has a central emphasis on trauma informed care. Staff are encouraged to reflect and contextualise trauma informed care for both the young people and female populations.
• A workshop with a focus on trauma informed care and mental health care for young people has also been developed to enhance the skills of existing staff. Both were piloted with positive feedback during 2022. The content of all youth products is being reviewed by SPS College to ensure they are up to date and relevant to the population.
• Undertaking self-evaluation at HMP & YOI Polmont and an adult establishment to find out about young people and women's wellbeing and the transition from YOI to the adult estate respectively.

NHS Education for Scotland (NES) modules are now available, and a Scottish Trauma Informed Leaders Training package has been delivered to senior leaders covering aspects of trauma informed care and approaches. Moving forward, this will be rolled out to cover senior management teams across the prison estate.

In order to support the commitments of the “Strategy for Women in Custody”, the Scottish Government Population Health directorate have worked collaboratively with the relevant NHS Health Boards and other partners to develop appropriate trauma informed health care models at HMP Stirling and the Bella and Lilias Community Custody Units. We have invested over £2 million to date in funding these models.

The trauma informed and responsive healthcare staff working in the women’s estate, will recognise where women are affected by trauma and adversity, be able to respond in ways that prevent further harm and support recovery, and can address inequalities and improve life chances of women in prison. Improving the health and wellbeing of women in custody will have a positive impact when they return to their families and communities

meaning that they are more likely to be able to care for their children, sustain employment and access the necessary supports to maintain their health and wellbeing and that of their families.

The Scottish Child Interview Model

The Scottish Government is continuing to support the implementation of national roll out of the Scottish Child Interview Model (SCIM) for Joint Investigative Interviews (JIIs) as part of the Bairns’ Hoose Pathfinder Phase. This approach to joint investigative interviewing is aimed at providing a higher quality of forensic interview that ensures best evidence for court, allowing more scope for this to be used as the whole or part of the evidence in chief of a child in court, and for civil proceedings such as children’s hearings and local child protection services. The ultimate outcome is to keep children safe and ensure that they have the right to justice. The principles of trauma-informed practice are woven through the new model and the underpinning training programme for interviewers with the needs and rights of children at the centre of their interview experience.

The SCIM is presently live in 27 local authorities, 12 policing divisions, and 11 health boards. Many involve cross-authority partnerships, working collaboratively across regions to deliver this new approach. The remaining areas are currently undertaking preparatory work to install the new model of practice. It is expected that the SCIM model will be introduced to every area of Scotland by the end of 2024.

The Children and Young People’s Centre for Justice (CYCJ) are undertaking an evaluation of the impact of the SCIM on the experiences and outcomes for children and young people.

Scotland-specific standards were published on 31 May 2023. The Standards are based on the European PROMISE Quality Standards which reflect best practice from the Nordic countries.

Redesign of the Children’s Hearing System – Hearings System Working Group

The Hearings System Working Group (HSWG) was established by The Promise Scotland in the summer of 2021 to keep The Promise with regards to the redesign of the current Children’s Hearings System.

The group was independent of the Scottish Government, chaired by Sheriff David Mackie and with membership from Children’s Hearings Scotland, The Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration and The Promise Scotland.

The HSWG published its final report on 25 May 2023. The report contains over 130 recommendations covering a broad range of policy areas relating to care systems, children’s hearings, youth justice, legal representation, access to justice and preventative support for families amongst others.

The Scottish Government published its response to Sheriff Mackie’s review on 21 December 2023. This accepts, or agrees to consider further, the majority of recommendations made in the report.

A public consultation on legislative aspects of Children's Hearings Redesign was launched on 26 July 2024.

Bairns’ Hoose

Following the publication of Scotland-specific Bairns' Hoose Standards on 31 May 2023, we published a suite of documents on 1 June 2023: our refreshed vision, values and approach, Children and young people: participation and engagement plan and Bairns' Hoose – project plan: progress report and pathfinder delivery plan, which sets out the action taken to date and how we will trial the new Bairns’ Hoose Standards in Pathfinder Partnerships.

The Pathfinder Phase was launched in October 2023 with the announcement of 6 successful Pathfinder partnerships and 4 Affiliate partnerships. The selected Pathfinder partnerships are Aberdeen City, Aberdeenshire, Fife, North Strathclyde, Outer Hebrides and Tayside. The Affiliate Partnerships are Ayrshire, Dumfries and Galloway, Highland, and the Sycamore Partnership (Edinburgh, East Lothian and Midlothian).

To date we have invested £3.7m during 2023-24 to support the Pathfinder phase of Bairns’ Hoose development, with a further £7.23m investment in the Bairns’ Hoose programme during 2024-25.

Supporting partnership learning as we continue to move at pace to successfully implement Bairns’ Hoose in Scotland, we have extended the Pathfinder phase to summer 2027. The Bairns’ Hoose project team is currently developing specific plans for how the programme will be delivered over the new extended timescale. These plans will be informed by discussion with key stakeholders.

The aims of the Pathfinder phase are for partnerships to trial and test the Bairns’ Hoose Standards within each operational and geographical context; learn what works and identify challenges; and produce knowledge about the methods, practices and resources required for implementation.

Supporting these aims, we have developed five workstreams – Analysis, Knowledge Exchange, Quality Improvement and Service Design, Participation of Children and Young People and Funding Support.

The Pathfinder phase analytical approach supports Bairns’ Hoose aims by focusing on implementation and process, in order to document the journey to becoming a Bairns’ Hoose.

One of the strands of the Pathfinder analytical approach is to coproduce a set of Performance Indicators for all Pathfinder areas. The intention is for Pathfinders to collect and report these back to Scottish Government at the end of the Pathfinder phase.

A Standards Self-Assessment and Readiness Tool (StART) has been developed for Bairns’ Hoose Pathfinder partnerships with a dual purpose of starting them on their improvement journey, and to gather evidence to help us understand the position in each partnership area.

The StART was completed by Pathfinder partnerships in February 2024 and will be completed again in August 2025. Information from the StART will help us to learn about the current state of readiness. It will help us to see where work may need to be targeted across the system and what support is required to meet the Standards in full.

In addition to the analysis of the two StART submissions and the development of Bairns’ Hoose Indicators, the analytical approach also includes a qualitative research element, consisting of interviews and/or focus groups with relevant professionals in each Pathfinder area. The aim of the research is to explore in greater depth the Pathfinder starting positions, plans and progress in moving towards operating as a Bairns’ Hoose, as well as the position of Pathfinders at the end of the phase in terms of implementation of planned activities, achievement of Standards and identified outcomes.

Providing partnerships and stakeholders with the opportunity to share learning and knowledge with and between all parties, the Knowledge Exchange workstream has been established to support partnerships and stakeholders as they move to implement and deliver Bairns’ Hoose throughout Scotland.

Our Children and Young People Participation and Engagement Plan sets our approach to participation and engagement and the actions we will take to deliver. Through this approach, we will make sure that Bairns’ Hoose services best reflect the lived experience and views of those who matter most – the children and young people, and families of the children, who have experienced trauma.

We are working closely with Healthcare Improvement Scotland, who will support partnerships to ensure the voice of children and young people is represented.

National Child Protection Guidance

The National Guidance for Child Protection was published in 2021 and updated in 2023 to reflect legislative, policy and practice changes. This guidance supports practice that places children and young people’s experience, needs, wishes and feelings at the centre of decision-making, builds on strengths as well as addressing risk and focuses on working in partnership with families and communities.

In September 2021, a National Child Protection Guidance Implementation Group, chaired by the Deputy Social Work Advisor and comprised of over 40 members from across social work, health, justice, education and third sector. was established. The Group ran for a period of 2 years to provide strategic oversight and offer support to local areas as they implemented the 2021 Guidance. The Group concluded in September 2023 after delivering a number of significant pieces of work. Examples include:

• publishing the NHS Public Protection Accountability and Assurance Framework which supported Health Boards to self-assess and assure themselves with regard to their responsibilities for child and adult protection;
• publication of NHS Education for Scotland eLearning resources to support health professionals in their child and adult protection roles – the modules have been completed almost 25,000 times as of mid-March 2024.
• establishment of a National Learning and Development Co-ordinator post for two years to develop a range of resources for local areas.

As part of the Implementation Group, a Monitoring and Evaluation subgroup was established to develop and implement an approach to monitoring and evaluating implementation of the Guidance up to September 2023. A self-evaluation exercise was completed by all 31 of Scotland’s Child Protection Committees (CPCs) in relation to their local implementation of the National Child Protection Guidance. An evaluation presenting the findings was published by CELCIS in March 2024 that highlighted significant progress had been made by local areas despite challenging circumstances. This included progress in aligning local child protection processes with GIRFEC and the aspirations of The Promise. For instance, all areas had updated local child protection processes, either in full or in part, to ensure that they are strengths-based, trauma-informed and view child protection as part of a continuum of services for children and families as part of ‘Getting it right for every child’, beginning with prevention and early intervention.

Although the evaluation exercise highlighted that significant progress had been made, it also confirmed that implementation is ongoing for many areas and more time is needed for the Guidance to properly bed in. Therefore, although the Scottish Government’s commitment to provide support has now been met, some workstreams are continuing with support from the Scottish Government. The Scottish Government will continue to monitor implementation of the National Child Protection Guidance through a range of data sources.

A Good Childhood for our Children and Young People

While our overarching ambition is to keep families together and to prevent children and young people becoming engaged in the care system, there are times when this is not the right or safe solution. We must ensure that when and where our children and young people enter care they have the support, love and stability that they need.

The Promise tells us that our children and young people with care experience are almost one and a half times more likely to have anxiety at age 16; and almost twice as likely to moderately use drugs at the same age. It also tells us that our adults with care experience are over one and a half times more likely to experience severe multiple disadvantage; and more than twice as likely to have experienced homelessness.

This section provides an update on the activities underway to help ensure that our children and young people who are engaged with the care system have the best experience possible and are supported as they move towards a more independent life and adulthood.

Considering Our Language

Work to develop a universal definition of ‘care experience’ will help to develop a single understanding of what it means to have experience of care. The Promise tells us that this term has special meaning to many and that by developing a definition which encapsulates everyone, even with the smallest experience of care, it will help to normalise care as more people can understand it and how they can best support our children and young people. We will consult on a definition of care experience as part of a wider package of consultation in summer and autumn 2024. Details of the consultation package are included in Part 3.

The Scottish Government continues to provide funding to the Each and Every Child Initiative and has worked with partners to promote the initiative. The initiative is working to create a fresh and inspiring narrative of care to shift public attitudes and tackle the stigma that can be associated with care experience. Since January 2020, Each and Every Child have been approached by over 130 organisations across Scotland to deliver bespoke training based on Framing Care Experience and the framing toolkit, including local authorities, Scottish Government, Corporate Parents and Third Sector organisations. Each and Every Child have worked alongside ‘voices of experience’ to help shape and drive the delivery of the initiative.

Keeping Brothers and Sisters Together And Connected

The introduction of siblings legislation in 2021 was a vital step in recognising the importance of siblings relationships, and keeping brothers and sisters together and connected. “Sibling” refers to the relationship where two or more children have one or both parents in common, or where they have lived together and have an ongoing relationship which is like this. The legal definition of siblings includes “sibling-like” relationships and therefore allows for a broad and flexible consideration of who brothers and sisters are, in recognition of the diversity of families and children’s experience.

In recognising the complexities in sibling relationships, particularly when the needs and welfare of different children may sometimes appear to be in conflict, the Scottish Government published National Practice Guidance in 2021 and convened a National Implementation Group to consider the opportunities and challenges in realising our collective aspiration to keep siblings together. Who Cares? Scotland engaged with a group of children and young people with lived experience as part of this work to ensure their voices were held on sibling rights and how the legislation is being applied in practice.

The Groups final report and recommendations was published in June 2023. This recognised the high aspirations in the guidance for sibling relationships and that the legislation provides a strong foundation for change. The Group went on to acknowledge that there are factors within the wider environment, such as the recruitment and retention of social workers, and availability of skilled carers, that challenge our collective ambitions to support siblings. A collaborative approach is therefore required to support the change necessary.

It is critical to establish a national picture of the extent to which brothers and sisters are placed together, to understand how the policy is being implemented in practice and where further support is required. As such, and as a direct result of the Group’s work, the information that local authorities collect and report to the Scottish Government now includes, for the first time, four new data categories related to siblings, which includes sibling-like relationships.

The purpose of these four data items is to understand the extent to which children are placed together with their siblings in care. We continue to work with local authorities as the approach to sibling data develops in order to understand more fully the reasons why siblings aren’t placed together. Questions on this will form part of future data returns.

A substantial output from the Group was the development of a Staying Together and Connected: Getting it Right for Sisters and Brothers Learning, Development and Leadership Framework. This set out the required skills and learning outcomes, taking a tiered approach in order to ensure that children’s right to stay connected with their siblings is realised and the legislation and guidance are embedded in practice. We encourage all organisations who engage with children and young people to consider incorporating this framework into their own learning and development practices; recognising the importance of children and young people maintaining connections for healthy identity, development and emotional wellbeing.

We are engaging with practitioners and professionals across the children and families sector on the STaC Learning, Development and Leadership Framework; and with partners including the Scottish Social Services Council, to consider next steps in relation to embedding the required knowledge, skills and abilities, as set out in the Framework, into social work education.

We will continue to work with stakeholders including Who Cares? Scotland, Education Scotland, Young Scot and others to understand what work is now required to raise siblings’ awareness of their rights to stay connected to their siblings. This includes work underway to consider the advocacy offer to children and young people and the recommendations and proposals recently presented by The Promise Scotland.

In addition, a Siblings Community of Practice, jointly facilitated with The Promise Scotland has now been established. This forum provides a valuable opportunity for practitioners to reflect and learn from existing practice knowledge. The Community of Practice has met on a number of occasions in 2023/24 and has proven to be a supportive and solution focused space. We continue to engage with the Community to provide regular policy updates and to access the expertise and knowledge of the members as they share learning, practice and knowledge.

Use of Restraint in Residential Childcare

Work is ongoing across the Scottish Government in relation to reducing the need to practice restraint and seclusion. This includes working with partners to support the reduction of restraint in practice so that this is no longer used or needed in respect of children and young people in care.

In order to understand whether existing supports and tools for the residential care workforce remain fit for purpose, we are seeking to work with partners, such as CELCIS and Scottish Physical Restraint Action Group (‘SPRAG’), to build-up a national picture of learning from the work that is currently underway. This will help us to better understand developing and innovative local approaches taking place in the sector and identify the key values, principles and enabling environments that have been required to successfully embed trauma-informed care approaches which have reduced, and in some instances removed, the need for the use of restraint as the child’s needs are identified and supported appropriately from the earliest possible opportunity.

Residential childcare workers need to be highly skilled to support the frontline work they do with children and young people in their care. In alignment with The Promise, many providers in the residential sector have built on the 2013 Holding Safely Guidance to develop a wider trauma-informed approach to the provision of care within residential childcare settings. The aim being for current practice to work within a more blended framework of regulation, guidance, practice support and precise reporting to best serve Scotland’s young people.

We have continued to work with partners including Scottish Physical Restraint Action Group (‘SPRAG’) to explore all areas which support restraint reduction. We know that SPRAG have worked with the Care Inspectorate on improved consistency of reporting of restraint and restrictive practices and this has led to improved national data collection by the Care Inspectorate. The Care Inspectorate have also published a restrictive practices self-evaluation tool to support practitioners and services to evaluate how well they are doing in reducing restrictive practices and identifying further areas of improvement. SPRAG are also involved in a variety of activities designed to positively impact efforts to reduce and/or eliminate the use of physical restraint, including responding to Scottish Government consultations and collaborating with the Care Inspectorate on defining restraint.

Reshaping our Approach to Secure Care (including the use of restraint)

Work is underway to establish how secure accommodation needs to be reconfigured to meet needs. This includes understanding the current profile of young people in secure and young

offenders institutions, how current or alternative services or provision can meet that need, and where there are gaps. We continue to work with partners – COSLA, secure providers, and Scottish Prison Service – to consider the impact on secure accommodation in Scotland. This includes ensuring capacity through on-going funding of Scottish Government paying for up to 16 beds in secure care as they become available until required by a child living in Scotland.

The secure accommodation bed compliment across Scotland was 78 beds on 31st July 2023. Edinburgh Secure service, which prior to closure had 6 secure beds, closed on 30 June 2023. The average number of daily secure care residents in Scotland was 74 in 2014, and has risen to 82 in 2020. This fell sharply in the following 3 years, and in 2023 there were 59 average daily residents in secure care in Scotland.

Underneath these statistics, there has been a pattern of a falling number of young people in secure care on the average day each year from within Scotland, counterbalanced by a rising number of residents from outwith Scotland. In 2013, there were 7 residents in secure care units from outwith Scotland compared to 67 residents from within Scotland. By 2023, this balance has shifted to 22 out of the overall 59 average daily residents being from outwith Scotland.

The number of young people in prison has also been falling over the last 13 years. In 2009/10, the average number of 16-24 years olds in prison on the average day in Scotland was 2,318. By 2019/20, this figure more than halved to 1,011 young people aged 16-24 in prison on the average day. By 2022/23, this figure has fallen again to 668 16-24 year olds in prison on the average day. The number of 16-17 year olds in Prison in Scotland on the average day in 2022/23 was nearly 20 times lower than in 2009/10. Regulations to end the detention of under 18s in young offenders institutions came into force on 28 August 2024. Under 18s will now be detained in alternative settings, such as secure accommodation. Those under 18s who were detained in a YOI before 28 August have now safely transitioned to new settings.

The Youth Justice Improvement Board met in March 2024 to discuss an updated version of the Youth Justice vision and this was published in June 2024. The Board and its implementation groups are continuing to deliver on the priorities within the Vision, ensuring that children’s rights are respected and that there is reinvigoration of the whole system approach to preventing offending by young people. This includes specific work on community alternatives available across Scotland and the publication of a framework for practitioners on community alternatives to remand.

The Children and Young People’s Centre for Justice (CYCJ) have been commissioned to undertake a project to understand what is required to support secure care services to meet the needs of all children who are deprived of their liberty in the future. The Scottish Government, COSLA and Social Work Scotland are represented on a Governance Group which oversees delivery of the project. An interim report was published in December 2023 which summarises what children and young people and other stakeholders have told CYCJ during engagement sessions, combined with previous knowledge and research. The final Reimagining Secure Care report is due in September 2024.

The Reimagining Secure Care Project which the Children and Young People’s Centre for Justice undertook on behalf of the government ran in tandem with the Parliament’s consideration of the Children (Care and Justice) (Scotland) Act.

Discussions with secure care providers about changes required to augment current provision are ongoing. The current secure care contract has been extended until March 2025. Scotland Excel have begun work to consider future commissioning arrangements which will take account of the forthcoming changes.

Young People Transitioning from Care into Adulthood

The Scottish Government recognises the particular challenges faced by young people who are moving on from care into adulthood and more independent living.

Financial stress and strain for young people moving on from care can quickly escalate to create a multitude of challenges and can lead to financial hardship. The Independent Care Review heard about the anxiety that is felt moving on from care and living alone for the first time.

We recognise that young people moving on from care to more independent living need a broad package of financial and practical support to help them thrive. In support, the Scottish Government has committed £10m to deliver a Care Leaver Payment, which will provide young people moving on from care with additional financial security.

The Care Leaver Payment, as proposed, is a one-off payment of £2,000 for young people leaving care. The amount of the payment was originally proposed as an annual payment of £200 to be paid for 10 years. Following consultation which reflected the impact of the cost of living, and the best potential impact for young people, the approach to support has changed to focus on a one-off payment of £2000. The payment will form part of a broader package of support which includes, but is not limited to, access to Continuing Care and Aftercare support for care leavers, the Care Experience Bursary and Council Tax Exemption for care leavers.

The Social Security (Amendment) (Scotland) Bill was introduced on 31 October 2023 and includes a power which will enable Scottish Ministers to create one or more schemes to give financial assistance to individuals who have had experience of being in the care system. This is named ‘care experience assistance’ in the Bill. In the first instance, this power will be used to establish the Care Leaver Payment by way of regulations. Details of the payment, including the delivery vehicle, will be set out in regulations following further consultation and engagement with those who may be impacted by the payment.

To further develop the policy and consider the best way to deliver the payment, a ‘Discovery’ phase was undertaken with the Social Security Programme. The Discovery phase ran from July to October 2023 and consisted of user research with care leavers, consideration of delivery vehicles, business processes, and the legislative and policy landscape. The outputs of Discovery were used to inform the development of the public consultation on the Care Leaver Payment and will continue to inform policy and delivery.

The public consultation on the Care Leaver Payment closed on 26 January 2024 and the responses are being independently analysed, Independent analysis of consultation responses was published on 18 June 2024. The responses to the consultation will be used to inform further policy development and decision-making. Details on the eligibility criteria, processes and delivery model of the payment are still to be determined and will be set out in regulations in due course.

We continue to actively listen to, and work alongside, those with care experience through our partnership working with the Scottish Throughcare and Aftercare Forum (Staf). Staf’s ‘100 days of listening’ exercise, which concluded in February 2024, has given us the opportunity to hear from people with care experience and those who support them in terms of how we can improve the experience of ‘Moving On’.

The themes which emerge from the 100 days of listening will inform a consultation, scheduled to launch in summer 2024, that will focus on the support package required to best support our young people to flourish as they move on from care.

Alongside this wide-ranging consultation, we are working with our partners and those with lived experience to consider the improvements required to Continuing Care and Aftercare. As part of the first phase of this work, we will publish updated Continuing Care guidance, which aims to provide further clarity to those providing and receiving Continuing Care.

The Care Inspectorate is presently undertaking a Thematic Review of Care Leavers transition services, which will implement recommendation 3 of the Care Leavers’ pathway. The review is scheduled to provide a final report in November 2024.

Homelessness

We understand the importance of having a place to call home and the very real difference having a solid foundation can make to people’s lives, especially children and young people. We also know that the best way to end homelessness is to stop it from happening in the first place. That is why we continue to work closely with COSLA and third sector partners to deliver our Ending Homelessness Together action plan, which includes a commitment to develop prevention pathways for those at highest risk of homelessness, including care leavers and young people.

We are supporting delivery of the plan by providing a total of £100 million from our multi-year ending homelessness together fund to transform the homelessness system. This includes funding of £62.5 million which has already been provided to local authorities between 2018-25 for implementation of their rapid rehousing transition plans to support people into settled accommodation and reduce the use of temporary accommodation.

Housing First is an important element of rapid rehousing. It provides settled accommodation with intensive support for people who require it. There are a number of local authorities in Scotland operating Housing First for youth programmes, which are targeted at care leavers to ensure they get the person-centred support needed to maintain their tenancies.

Most funding for homelessness is provided through the local government settlement but we also give local authorities £30.5 million annually for their work to prevent homelessness. This helps support the excellent work taking place across Scotland to help people avoid the trauma and disruption of homelessness while further developing the foundation on which the homelessness prevention duties will build. The duties form a key part of the Housing (Scotland) Bill which was introduced to the Scottish Parliament in March 2024. It will create a shared public responsibility to prevent homelessness, prioritise prevention over crisis response for people who do need support and enable more choice and control within the system.

The Minister for Housing has convened a Ministerial Oversight Group on Homelessness which brings together ministers from across the Scottish Government to promote joined up working, strategic funding and to drive forward the ethos of a shared responsibility to prevent homelessness. This is in recognition of the fact that often there are missed opportunities to support someone before they reach crisis point. Nobody should have to present as homeless to access the help and support they need. This is particularly true of children and young people who may need a different type of support.

In 2023-24, we committed an additional £2 million of funding for local authorities to reduce the use of temporary accommodation, recognising the impacts, especially for children, of spending too long in temporary accommodation. And we will invest over £90 million in Discretionary Housing Payments (DHPs) in 2024-25 – an increase of over £6 million on 2023-24 – which enables us to mitigate the previous UK Government’s bedroom tax and benefit cap.

Premature Deaths

The National Hub for Child Death Reviews (CDR) has been in place since October 2021 and is conducting a review into the deaths of all live born children up to the date of their 18th birthday, or 26th birthday for care leavers who are in receipt of aftercare or continuing care at the time of their death. The aim of the National Hub is to ensure that a quality review is undertaken following the death of every child in Scotland and identify themes and trends via the use of standardised forms and processes for Health Boards and local authorities. The Hub’s focus is to use evidence to inform practice to reduce the number of child and young people’s deaths in Scotland and to report annually on its findings.

In March 2024 Healthcare Improvement Scotland and the Care Inspectorate published an overview of learning arising from the first year of CDR implementation National Hub overview report: Year 1. The Scottish Government will work with partners in the National Hub to implement the 5 recommendations and to continue to share learning in order to reduce the number of preventable deaths and harm of children and young people.

Creating the Right Scaffolding

In achieving this and our ambition to keep families together where it is safe to do so it is imperative that we have the correct structures and services available to help. The Promise refers to this as ‘the Scaffolding’ and tells us that our children and families must be supported by a workforce that is there when it is needed.

The scaffolding of help, support and accountability must be ready and responsive when it is required.

This section provides an update on the activities underway to help ensure that our children and young people who are engaged with the care system have the best and most fulfilling experience to improve their outcomes and are surrounded by love.

Caregivers

Our caregivers – kinship or foster carers, and adoptive parents – provide an invaluable role in the lives of children and young people who cannot stay at home with their birth parents. In 2023, 34% of looked after children were looked after in kinship care placements, and 32% in foster care placements. We recognise the incredible support and love that caregivers provide to the children and young people in their care. We are committed to improving the support we give to caregivers – at both a strategic and practical level – so they are better equipped to love and nurture the children they look after and provide a secure, stable and loving home.

Most children and young people grow and develop and have their wellbeing needs met within their own birth families, and GIRFEC provides the framework for providing additional support to families where this is needed. For some children alternative family care to ensure their wellbeing and protection is needed, often for short periods, but on occasion permanent alternative care is required. In Scotland permanence can be achieved through four routes, the first of those being a permanent return to the care of

a parent. The other three are legal routes – a Permanence Order, a Section 11 Kinship Care Order or an Adoption Order. The most appropriate route to permanence will depend on the needs and circumstances of the child. We remain committed to one of the core principles within our Scottish legislation, that of minimum intervention – intervention should only occur where it is necessary and to the level necessary.

The Scottish Government are committed to providing support for all caregivers and their families, to enable them to provide the best possible care for the children who need it, and to do this when and where it is needed. We recognise that although progress has been made, there is more to do, and moving forward we will develop our support for caregivers, as a whole, and with targeted support detailed below for specific caregiver communities. We will continue to invest in the PATHways programme in 2024-25 to allow adoptive families, kinship and permanent fostering families to benefit from therapeutic support and a peer support parenting group; and will improve the existing Scottish Government website so that all caregivers and prospective caregivers can access information at a national level.

We will develop national Permanence Good Practice Guides from 2024-26 to support best practice across Scotland. These guides will focus on: Keeping In Touch; Supporting Birth Parents; and Supporting Families in permanence. And we will continue work to more fully understand the need of alternative caregivers, and equip them to deal with the impact of trauma on those they care for.

We will review the implementation of the Scottish Recommended Allowance, starting in the autumn of 2024, to assess whether it has brought greater consistency and transparency to the allowances paid to foster and kinship carers, what is working and what is not, and whether there are any other areas for improvement.

Kinship Care

The Promise, aligned with Getting it right for every child (GIRFEC), underlined the importance of children being supported to remain with their parent(s) where it is safe to do so. Where this is not possible the first consideration – where it meets the needs of the child and young person – is for them to live with adults with whom they already have a healthy, enduring relationship, and are already within their own family (or close friends) network. International evidence^[2] demonstrates that kinship care helps a child retain a sense of family, identity and heritage and increases the chances of that child maintaining critical links such as staying in the same school and community. The evidence also tells us that children in kinship care feel less stigma, feel settled and safe and there are lower levels of concern reported for the wellbeing of young people in kinship care compared to foster care^[3]. Kinship care can also bring with it the increased possibility for reunification with the birth family where appropriate. The strong policy emphasis on kinship as the first consideration has existed explicitly in Scotland since 2007.

In response to what carers and practitioners have told us the kinship care guidance for Part 13 of the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014, has recently been refreshed. This includes clarification of definitions and who is able to access the Scottish Recommended Allowance. This is a step towards making improvements for kinship families and those who work with them.

Moving forward we will support kinship carers by publishing later this year a new national assessment framework for assessment of kinship carers caring for a looked after child, to improve consistency of practice across local authorities.

In realising our vision to ensure children are actively supported to stay with their families where it is safe and possible to do so, some Children’s Services Planning Partnerships (CSPPs) are using Whole Family Wellbeing Funding to support kinship care and as a key element of their work on transformational change. The provision of whole family support, in line with the unique needs of the family, is crucial to keeping children and young people within their family network. This should be provided alongside financial, practical and emotional support which may be relevant as part of wider support in kinship situations.

Fostering

Foster carers provide a key role in providing safe and loving homes for children and young people who cannot live with their family. It has been a critical strand of how alternative care is provided for children for many decades. We know that there are challenges in recruitment and retention of foster carers, in Scotland and other parts of the UK, due in part to the pandemic, an aging workforce, cost of living and increased demands such as complexity of need exacerbated by increased numbers of Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children entering Scotland.

Reporting from the Care Inspectorate shows that the number of new foster carers approved each year has fallen in each of the last 4 years. While 15 fostering services in Scotland in 2022 had more approved foster care households in 2022 than the year before, 33 services reported fewer households, resulting in an overall reduction across Scotland of 165 households between 2021 and 2022^[4].

We are engaging with the sector to consider how local and national government can work together to secure the future of fostering by addressing some of those challenges. This includes supporting fostering through the recommended national allowance for foster and kinship.

We will continue to support foster carers by exploring the feasibility of developing and launching national communications aimed at recruiting more foster carers, working with local authorities and stakeholders.

In autumn 2024 we will undertake a public consultation on the future of foster care. This consultation will set out our vision for foster care in the 21st century and a flexible fostering approach to meet the many and varied needs of children and young people, and, therefore, accelerate the delivery of The Promise. This will include how we support learning and development, recruitment and retention and address the day to day challenges in foster care.

We are working towards having the Scottish Government’s HR leave policy updated by autumn 2024 so that all employees who are foster and kinship carers will have access to dedicated foster and kinship leave to support their roles are carers. We will also work with other employers across Scotland to support them to support their foster and kinship carers.

Adoption

Adoption has, and will continue to have an important role in providing safe, loving, permanent homes for children and young people with care experience in Scotland.

The advent of other routes to permanence means more children are remaining with their extended families, and since 2018 the Care Inspectorate has reported a downward trend in the number of new households being approved for adoption each year. However, for some children and young people adoption will continue to be the best option for achieving permanence, and meeting their needs.

Our work to keep The Promise includes supporting adoption as a positive permanence option for these children, as well as supporting the adoptive families who make this possible and giving attention to the needs of adult adoptees.

We recognise that all those affected by an adoption journey will require support at various stages, both before, during, and after an adoption order is granted. This is especially true when recognising that adopted children and young people are still care experienced, even though they are no longer ‘looked after’.

We will continue our support by developing and publishing an adoption vision statement which sets out the place of adoption in Scotland today and our strategic priorities moving forward, including a focus on understanding the needs and priorities in relation to improving the consistency of post-adoption support across Scotland.

The Scottish Governments recognition of adoption as a positive permanence option will be seen in our continued support to organisations delivering to those affected by adoption, including adopted children and young people and their families, adult adoptees and those working in the adoption sector; and the role of Scotland's Adoption Register which supports agencies to match approved prospective adopters with children who are identified as needing an adoptive family.

Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children

Since the Scottish Government first pledged to keep The Promise in 2020, Scotland has welcomed a growing number of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UAS children). Some of these children arrive in Scotland and claim asylum, and others arrive in different parts of the UK before being placed in Scotland through a UK-wide National Transfer Scheme.

There are currently more than 500 UAS children being looked after by local authorities in Scotland, in addition to hundreds more young people with care experience who are 18 or older, who arrived in Scotland as UAS children. This means that to meet The Promise, we need to provide good support and care for UAS children and young people, and also to take account of the impact that the arrival of UAS children is having on the wider children’s care system.

Many UAS children will have specific needs – for example in relation to language teaching – which are different from other children. In addition, since most UAS children are 16 or 17 when they arrive in Scotland, residential homes and foster care will not always be the most appropriate accommodation for them. Some might prefer supported living accommodation – to enable them to live with a degree of independence, while having access to the support and help they need.

However, although some of the needs of UAS children will differ from those of other looked after children, the fundamental principle of The Promise – that children will grow up loved, safe and respected – applies to all UAS children, just as it applies to all looked after children in Scotland. In the years ahead, we will work to ensure that we deliver The Promise for UAS children.

Children’s Services Reform: Improvement Work Plan

We commissioned the Centre for Excellence for Children’s Care and Protection (CELCIS) to carry out independent research to help us answer the question: ‘What is needed to ensure that children, young people and families get the help they need, when they need it?’ The study began in September 2022 and consisted of four strands of research:

• The first strand provides a rapid evidence review of existing published national and international literature associated with different models of integration of children’s services.
• The second strand provides six case studies which explore a range of approaches to transformational reform programmes. Five of these looked at approaches to changes in the structures and modes of delivery of children’s services in countries with a similar demographic to Scotland and the sixth explored what can be learned from Scotland’s experiences of national service reorganisation through the development of Police Scotland.
• The third strand maps the range of different approaches to integrated children’s services across Scotland’s 32 local authority areas and investigates any potential effects of integration.
• The fourth strand captures the views of over 1,400 members of the children’s services workforce on the opportunities, challenges, barriers and facilitators that are found to bring about high quality experiences and outcomes for children, young people and families using services.

A final summary report was published on 13 December 2023. This brings together key themes and learning from across the study’s findings and determines that there are a range of elements which contribute to creating the optimal conditions for implementing effective, sustainable change to improve support and outcomes for children, young people and families.

The CELCIS research is clear about the challenges facing children, young people and families and those supporting them across Scotland. The research has provided considerable insight into care systems both at home and internationally and a solid evidence base is offered for improvement that can be made without, or alongside, structural changes.

A number of themes for improvement have been identified from the research findings and an exercise is underway to identify and map any ongoing work which will address these. This exercise will also highlight any areas for improvement which are currently not being addressed, with consideration given to how work in these areas can be coordinated and delivered, ensuring this takes into account any impacts on the workforce.

We are keen to continue to work in partnership with internal and external stakeholders, therefore our collective approach to improving outcomes will be agreed through liaison with partners such as, members of the Children & Families National Leadership Group, Children’s Services Planning Strategic Leads Network, COSLA, and Solace representatives among others.

Our ambition is to simplify systems so their impact on the workforce is a key consideration in the development and delivery of policy and improvement initiatives. This will support them to deliver services and support to children and families which is underpinned by children’s rights, GIRFEC values and national practice model, and the principles of holistic whole family support, so that this leads to improved outcomes and safeguards, supports and promotes the wellbeing of children and young people.

Building Capacity

To achieve our ambition to keep The Promise it is necessary that we build on a strong legislative framework, that our financial ambitions are aligned and recognise that to improve outcomes we must invest in prevention; and that continued improvement must be underpinned by good information and evaluation so that we know that we have both kept The Promise and that we will continue to keep it. It is also important that children and young people understand their rights and how the law applies to them.

This section provides an update on the actions that we will take to build this capacity to support the change required to improve the lives of our children, young people and families.

Legislative Change

The Promise told us that there must be a clear legislative, enabling environment that supports families to stay together and protects and allows relationships to flourish. Legislation that has progressed since 2022 that support change include:

• The UNCRC (Incorporation) (Scotland) Bill was reconsidered by the Scottish Parliament in December 2023 and the Bill was approved unanimously. The Bill received Royal Assent in January 2024 and is now the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2024. Duties under the Act commenced on 16 July 2024.
• Bail and Release from Custody (Scotland) Act 2023 was brought forward to reform how remand is used, and how release mechanisms work for certain prisoners. We consulted on this between November 2021 and February 2022 and the Bill was passed on 22 June 2023, becoming an Act on 01 August 2023.
• Children (Care and Justice) (Scotland) Bill was introduced in Parliament in December 2022 and passed on 25th April 2024 and became
• an Act on 4th June 2024. The Bill will enable improvements to youth justice, secure care, aspects of the children’s hearings system, victims’ services and the criminal justice system.
• The Housing (Scotland) Bill was introduced to Parliament on 26th March 2024 as per our commitment in the 2023-24 Programme for Government. This Bill will enable the delivery of our commitment for longer-term private sector rent controls; tenants’ rights and other protections; and duties aimed at the prevention of homelessness. It’s right that we focus our action to support those most vulnerable, especially during these challenging times, in order to achieve our shared goal of delivering safe, affordable, and quality homes.

Promise Bill

The Scottish Government aims to introduce a Promise Bill by the end of this Parliamentary session, dependent on wider pressures on the Parliamentary legislative calendar. The Bill will be positioned to make any further legislative changes required to keep The Promise. For example, this may include, provisions required to implement recommendations of the Children’s Hearings System working group and recommendations of The Promise Scotland in relation to a national lifelong advocacy service for people with care experience.

The Scottish Government will continue to work with partners including The Promise Scotland and COSLA to identify areas where a legislative direction may support delivery of The Promise. Subject to Parliamentary timetabling,

Aberlour Poverty and Hardship Fund

Aberlour’s Poverty & Hardship Fund was supported through The Promise Partnership Fund. The aim being to support families experiencing extreme poverty by testing/refining solutions. Using the Scottish Approach to Service design, Aberlour developed a test of change which provided debt relief to families who were engaging with their family support services across Tayside.

Many families supported through this test of change, had multiple debts, 75% of which were public debt-related, such as council tax and rent arrears. This project cleared family’s debt and also linked families into Welfare Rights Services, who were able to offer help around income maximisation and wider money advice. Through this approach, families reported reduced stress and anxiety. Improved engagement with the wider support services was also highlighted.

Families who have had the debt removed reported significant relief and unburdening with a positive impact on their levels of anxiety and hope for the future.

Aberlour also developed resources and tools (including the creation of a financial well-being toolkit) to ensure practitioners were offering families good financial support. This is currently being utilised across all of Aberlour’ s services in Tayside and is likely to be rolled out more widely across services in Scotland.

South Ayrshire Council

South Ayrshire Council received over £229,000 through The Promise Partnership Fund. This investment helped to focus in detail on the population with care experience across 4 cluster groups (secondary and primary schools) to include children and young people previously looked after for the first time.

Broadening focus from ‘looked after’ to ‘care experience’ was a big change within education and brought new insight. It considered the time that it takes to build relationships with young people and their families and deepen understanding of trauma and learn how to feature this into work moving forward.

It enabled the team to value the experiences of young people and their families and in doing so challenge the existing culture of hierarchy and power differential between teaching and non-teaching staff within schools and across the school community.

They did this by ensuring the roles connected to the project were recognised as leaders with a support network and infrastructure of reflection built in to allow them to co-produce a tailored curriculum offer with young people with care experience. This allowed them to work collaboratively within and beyond the school community to join up activity and approach and widen networks of support.

The Village

Care Visions received funding from The Promise Partnership Fund to support the collaboration of three partner organisations: Care Visions, Scottish Attainment in Action, and Early Years Scotland. Their aim was to establish a completely new approach to supporting families with care experience. From this the Village was born.

The Village is an accessible, independent online community which provides knowledge and support to parents and parents-to-be with care experience. Designed to break down stigma, with parents choosing to join with no referrals needed. Once joined, they are linked with a Village team member who can offer a listening ear, specific advice, or general support.

Co-production and active participation are central to the Village ethos. This approach has changed the power dynamic, with parents actively choosing to be involved, adding value to the community overall. Referrals are not accepted from third parties and support is driven by what parents want and need.

The aim being to empower parents, allowing them to have full control of their involvement. There is no requirement for parents to prove their care experience at any point. Instead, all are welcomed into a trauma-informed, safe, and confidential space where support and guidance are made available in a manner which best suits those accessing it.

As well as the advice and information, the provision of practical support has made a significant difference to families, ensuring they are accessing financial support they are eligible for has helped to maximise their incomes. Some Villagers have noted that without this, they would have had to seek to borrow money from friends/family, which can be embarrassing and can cause fractious relationships. The Village were able to offer some direct financial support to families due to additional funding received, which was welcomed by all.

Dundee City Council

Dundee City Council received £200,000 through The Promise Partnership Fund. This proposal is looking at a whole systems transformation founded on approach of doing things with, rather than to, and will focus on the engagement of children, young people, parents, and carers. This involved the creation of a multi-disciplinary team, working with CELCIS to build capacity around named persons, developing systems to triage and allocate the right support and pathways to offer self-directed support to families with disabled children.

The Alliance – an intensive family support hub – has been established and offers support to families across Dundee. Figures show the number of young people with care experience have reduced, and the stability of care has improved.

Highland Strategic Partnership

Aberlour received a grant of £99,500 to work collaboratively with organisations in the Highlands to improve access and quality of through care and after care support for young people in care.

Through mapping and consultation with young people, The Highland Strategic Partnership identified priority areas for improvement. Groups were established to create change on each priority area. At the center of this redesign work are the experiences and voices of young people with care experience utilising the Scottish Approach to service design. The Partnership involves Aberlour, Action for Children, Barnardo’s, Highland Council, Gateway and Right There.

The Residential Care Group

The Residential Group was led by Aberlour and had participation from young people with care experience, Highland Council, Barnardo’s, and Gateway.

Young people said that having a personalised welcome pack with information and resources that they could understand would make them feel wanted and valued when arriving in care. They decided to create a ‘welcome box’. This is a wooden box, that can be personalised and drawn on, filled with toiletries, a photo album, water bottle, colouring books and pens, a fidget spinner, and inspirational quote cards written by young people with care experience from the Highlands.

The welcome box is now provided to every young person arriving into care in the Highlands. 50 boxes were produced using Promise Partnership Funding. Highland Council now provide these boxes to young people entering a residential care placement.

The Moving On Group

The Moving On Group was led by Barnardo’s and had participation from young people with care experience, Highland Council, Aberlour and Gateway.

Young people said they wanted to understand their rights better. Barnardo’s are commissioned in Highland to deliver the aftercare service and all young people have allocated pathways coordinators who they meet with regularly. The service has a Barnardo’s Rights Representative, and all young people are supported to understand their rights and ensure their rights are upheld.

Young people and professionals from The Barnardo’s Service spoke about the housing pathways for young people with care experience. From this, there are proposals to provide better support for young people with care experience. This includes a simple step of adding a check box to the Highland Council Housing System to identify when a young person has experience of care and may need additional support.

Young people who participated in the Moving On sub-group had the idea of a ‘My Journey Book’. This is a journal for young people with care experience to fill in that will help them feel in control of what is happening on their care experience journey. The partnership launched this journal in February 2024 and a copy will be available for every young person in care in the Highlands.

Next Steps

This update on key areas of activity demonstrates that progress has and continues to be made to introduce the national framework required to support change. Keeping The Promise requires us to continue to join up across our Government policies and actions and to work strongly in partnership to introduce transformation. A fundamental shift rather than incremental change is needed that places love and relationships at the centre of the experiences and outcomes.

A detailed review of activity against all of the actions and commitments included within The Promise Implementation Plan is set out in Part 7.

As we progress, our activity to keep The Promise continues to work in harmony with the Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan 2022-26^[5] and the National Strategy for Economic Transformation^[6]. It is also aligned with our strategic approach to education, health, justice, transport and communities. This connection across our strategic ambitions, our policies and our activities is presented in the update to our actions and commitments in the following chapters. The next stage of our journey to change is set out in Part 3.