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

Part 5 How We Are Understanding Progress

Scotland is striving to be the best place for children and young people to grow up, and we know children in and around the care system have the same needs to thrive as all children. There are many factors that impact this ambition and, importantly, that affect the lives and wellbeing of families.

Improving outcomes for children and families requires transformational change across Scottish Government policy areas, national and local public authorities, communities, and Third Sector Delivery Partners. While no basket of measures will be able to definitively tell us whether The Promise has been kept, we must understand how our activity so far is impacting the aims we are looking to achieve and enable us to tell the story of change.

The outcomes for Scotland’s children and families are monitored through several Scottish Government frameworks, focusing on different population groups and areas. It is imperative that where there are shared aims across different population groups, we have a shared understanding of what “good” looks like and how it is measured, even when the journeys to achieving this need to look different for different population groups. This builds consensus around our desired direction of travel, and avoids confusion around the same thing being measured in many different ways.

While Scotland has the ambition for those in and around the care system to experience the same outcomes as all children and families, the Independent Care Review shed light on the specific challenges they may face, and support they may require. This is why an approach is being created collaboratively to allow us to understand how we are making progress towards Keeping The Promise.

The Promise was clear that whilst outcomes are important, it is the experiences and relationships that happen on the journey to those outcomes that really matter to children, young people and families and have long lasting consequences for their lives. Therefore, we must translate the national outcomes into something that is meaningful to children and young people's lives so that we can understand if Scotland is truly the best place for them to grow up. We must not allow our processes to ignore experience in favour of tracking outcomes.

An overview of the current reporting landscape, and where reporting on The Promise sits within this wider landscape is presented in Figure 7 on the following page.

Scotland’s National Performance Framework (NPF):

The NPF is Scotland’s wellbeing framework, setting out an overall purpose and vision for Scotland. It highlights the broad National Outcomes that support the purpose and provides measures on how well Scotland is progressing towards those outcomes. The NPF includes ‘increased wellbeing’ as part of its purpose and combines measurement of how well Scotland is doing in economic terms with a broader range of wellbeing measures.

These outcomes describe the kind of Scotland we all want to live in, with The Promise reflected across the National Outcomes. Of particular relevance is the Children and Young People Outcome, which refers to growing up loved, safe and respected so that every single one of us can realise our full potential.

Diagram illustrating the Promise Progress Framework in the centre. Above it, are two other national reporting frameworks: The National performance Framework and the Children, Young People and Families Wellbeing Outcomes Framework. On one side, arrows come down from these two frameworks towards the Promise Progress Framework, labelled with the question: Are we delivering this for the care experienced community? On the other side, arrows point back upwards from the Promise Progress Framework to the 2 national frameworks, labelled with the question: How are we feeding into Scotland's overall aims?

Below the Promise Progress Framework is the Promise Heart. On one side, an arrow points from the Promise heart to the Promise Progress Framework labelled with the question: What specific support is needed to ensure our care experienced community grow up feeling loved, safe and respected? On the other side, an arrow points in the other direction from the Promise Progress Framework to The Promise Heart labelled with the question: How are we making progress towards Keeping The Promise?

Through the ongoing Review of the National Outcomes, a new National Care Outcome has been proposed, to recognise the importance of all forms of care for our collective wellbeing. This outcome would increase the visibility of children and young people with care experience in the NPF.

A revised set of National Outcomes and Indicators and how we utilise the NPF in our decision making, our policy priorities and our budgets is a continuous process, and as a government we are committed to bringing these strands together ever more effectively will be published following Parliamentary scrutiny. To achieve this we will also publish an Implementation Plan alongside the revised NPF, that will set out how government will continue to mainstream and raise awareness of the NPF.

Children, Young People and Families Outcomes Framework

The Outcomes Framework for Children, Young People and Families contributes toward a holistic understanding of what we mean by wellbeing, based on what children and families have told us matters, and rooted in GIRFEC and children’s rights. This Outcomes Framework plays a key part in providing the overarching strategic coherence needed, but it is not enough on its own. The outcomes approach will only add value if we commit to contextualise it within wider sources of data, information, and evidence, where we consistently work to link local information to decision making and national monitoring.

In reporting on the core wellbeing indicators, analysis will identify where there are significant differences in outcomes for particular groups of children and young people. This means that as well as identifying key trends, areas of success, and areas of concern within the Children, Young People and Families population, reporting will demonstrate how well Scotland is closing any ‘wellbeing gaps’. This in turn helps to inform priority setting and adapt planning at both a local and national level.

The Promise: Stories of Progress

The Promise: Stories of Progress is being jointly developed by Scottish Government, COSLA and The Promise Scotland. It will provide Scotland with a shared evidence base that allows us to understand where we are on (the journey towards) keeping The Promise.

Our work to keep The Promise is anchored by our Theory of Change, set out in Part 1, which hypothesises the primary drivers, secondary drivers and activities which need to be undertaken across Scotland to realise our collective vision. In order to guide our work over the coming years we need to better understand how this work is impacting the experiences and outcomes of the care experienced community.

A key part of the Promise Stories of change will be The Promise Progress Framework. This will draw on national-level indicators across a range of areas to build a link in our understanding between how the activities underway are feeding into the vision for change. The framework will aim to develop our understanding of how the processes in place are impacting the outcomes we need to improve, which allows us to be responsive in guiding what needs to happen next.

Some of these areas of focus within the Promise Progress Framework seek to make sure Scotland’s care experienced community are supported to achieve the same outcomes that we want everyone to experience, for example when it comes to health, mental health or educational outcomes. Where useful in these cases, the framework is aligned to the National Performance Framework and Children, Young People and Families Wellbeing Outcomes Framework to make sure we are understanding whether the care experienced community is getting what we all need to thrive, and how this work is contributing to Scotland’s overall aims.

Elsewhere, our aims are focussed on the specific scaffolding and support we need to provide to the care experienced community as and when they interact with the care system, for example when it comes to supporting caregivers, keeping brothers and sisters together, and transitions out of care into adulthood. Here, engagement with policy experts, local colleagues and third sector organisations is key to designing a framework that captures the key outcomes which give decision makers the insights needed to drive positive change.

Once The Promise Progress Framework is in place, it is intended that organisations and bodies can use it to guide and locate their own organisational level reporting, allowing the national picture to be understood separately from the local and/or sector picture. This will provide great opportunity to identify implementation gaps in getting evidence into practice reliably and consistently. Development of the framework is being used to guide prioritisation of future data development projects, through data linkage improvements, collection of experiential data, and qualitative research.

The Scottish Government, COSLA and The Promise Scotland will jointly publish an update to this work before the end of 2024. This will set out our joint approach to understanding progress, an assessment of the baseline, and plans for future development.

This statement of intent will be a key part of Plan 24-30 and engagement with the care experienced community will be undertaken to support the next stages of its development.

Visions, outcomes and processes

The Promise Progress Framework seeks to bring together and grow an evidence base across 10 key vision statements taken directly from The Promise, which are:

• Where children are in their families and feel loved they must stay – and families must be given support together to nurture that love and overcome the difficulties which get in the way.
• Scotland must limit the number of moves that children experience and support carers to continue to care.
• Schools in Scotland must be ambitious for care experienced children and ensure they have all they need to thrive, recognising that they may experience difficulties associated with their life story.
• Where living with their family is not possible, children must stay with their brothers and sisters where safe to do so and belong to a loving home, staying there for as long as needed.
• Scotland must strive to become a nation that does not restrain its children.
• Scotland must ensure that there is timely access to mental health support before crisis point, so that children can avoid hospitalisation.
• Care experienced children and young people have access to intensive support ensuring that their health needs are fully met.
• Scotland must stop locking up children who have often experienced the failures of the state in the provision of their care.
• Young adults for whom Scotland has taken on parenting responsibility must have a right to return to care and have access to services and supportive people to nurture them.
• Older care experienced people must have a right to access to supportive, caring services for as long as they require them. Those services and the people who work in them must have a primary focus on the development and maintenance of supportive relationships that help people access what they need to thrive.

Doing Data Differently

Through this exercise of bringing together information held across Scottish Government and partner organisations relating to The Promise, several areas have emerged which will require data development work to build a further understanding of progress and outcomes.

This initial iteration of the framework is the beginning of ongoing work, aiming to do data differently. As set out in The Promise, there are challenges in the current landscape where, quantitative measures do not always tell the full story of progress that is being made on the ground, nor the experiences of Scotland’s population with care experience. The Scottish Government will continue to work in collaboration with COSLA and The Promise Scotland, to fill in the gaps that cannot be reached through existing data sources.

Alongside quantitative data development, a key aim of the Promise Stories of Progress will be to expand on the available qualitative data that will help us to understand whether people are feeling a difference. A set of ‘‘What matters” questions, have been developed by The Promise Scotland, which could be used as a guide for this work. The questions were developed using evidence collected during the Independent Care Review to formulate questions that would answer whether changes were being felt by children, young people and families. The aim is to use experiential data to build a rich picture of voices and experiences in the system in line with what The Promise tells us is essential for transformational change.

The Promise Collective

We know there is already a lot of work going on across Scotland to improve the lives of children and families. For The Promise to be kept, we recognise that we must play a key role in alignment and cohesion across this landscape and ensure that all policies, programmes, and investments are joined up and focused on the things that really matter to children and families.

Similarly, data, information and evidence must reflect what matters and be used to inform decision making at every level. The Promise Collective, co-chaired with The Promise Scotland and COSLA, was established to support alignment and cohesion of activities including progress monitoring, bringing together agencies and third sector organisations from across Scotland who have a role to play in keeping The Promise.

The Promise Collective was first convened in June 2022, 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 of monitoring processes. Joint working on this 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.