The Promise Story of Progress: How is Scotland doing in its progress towards keeping the promise?

A national report co-authored by COSLA, The Scottish Government and The Promise Scotland, presenting the shared approach to understanding progress towards keeping The Promise.


Introduction

Transformational change across organisations is essential to keep the promise. To understand the work and pace of change, Scotland needs an agreed way of tracking progress and to ensure it is felt in the lives and experiences of children, families, and the care experienced community to whom the promise was made.

Understanding progress across the breadth and depth of the promise requires very different types of data, collected, and analysed at different levels, at different frequencies, and in different ways. That means there are three questions that need to be answered for Scotland to say it understands progress:

Figure 1: The 3 strands of The Promise Stories of Progress
  • How is Scotland doing in its progress towards keeping the promise?
  • Does the care community feel the impact of the promise being kept?
  • How are organisations doing in their work to keep the promise?

The Strands are presented as 3 boxes, each with arrows pointing between them. This is to indicate that no single stand in isolation can give an understanding of progress, but only by considering all 3 alongside one another can we understand the overall story of progress.

When taken together, the answers to these three questions are collectively referred to as The Promise Story of Progress. It is not possible to tell the overall story of progress without focusing on all three questions.

The Promise Story of Progress

“Current data is fundamentally flawed as it does not reflect what matters to children and therefore currently cannot be relied on to support good decision-making on its own”

the Promise, p.13

By blending different types and levels of data and information together, The Promise Story of Progress seeks to address the disconnect between what matters to children, young people and families and the recorded data to tell a more rounded story of the progress being made towards the promise.

The Promise Story of Progress will be hosted as a ‘Scotland owned’ output on the Plan 24-30 website. Maintenance and updating will be shared between The Promise Scotland, Scottish Government and COSLA.

The Promise Progress Framework has been created to set the frame for The Promise Story of Progress questions to be answered using data from the various levels required. Its first iteration is populated with national level data to answer the question, 'how is Scotland doing in its progress towards keeping the promise?'. It will continue to evolve as Scotland implements the changes required.

No individual organisation owns the Framework, nor does it function specifically to meet their reporting needs.

Understanding how Scotland is doing in its progress towards keeping the promise

The Promise Progress Framework contains an initial ten vision statements taken directly from the promise, chosen because of the availability of multiple sources of meaningful data. Each vision statement has an associated set of outcomes that reflect the overall ambition of what keeping the promise will look and feel like.

Attached to each of these outcomes is a set of national level indicators. The Framework uses multiple data sources across these indicators to guide a high-level understanding of national progress. Each indicator is populated with data back to 2020 where possible so change over time since the promise was made can be understood.

The use of multiple outcomes and indicators means it is possible to use the data to help tell a story of national progress, taking multiple factors and contexts into account. When taken together, this helps Scotland understand the direction and pace of the change it is making.

It is key to understand not only whether an indicator is showing a change in direction or trend, but also whether this change is causing unintended consequences elsewhere in the system. Contextual indicators are a way of checking whether what is seen in core indicators is an accurate reflection of what is really going on in the ‘system’. The indicators blend multiple types and sources of data, including health, inspection, social work, poverty, education, and justice, to chart progress towards outcomes.

The Promise Progress Framework provides organisations with a structure to aid their own reporting on how they are feeding into Scotland’s overall aims. The intention is not to set up new governance and reporting structures where unnecessary, but for organisations to identify alignment, complementarity, or gaps with the work they do, the data they have, and how they use it.

The separation of the provision of data and information from organisational reporting will help foster broader shared accountability beyond individual organisations. This information is both vital to verify that change is happening across Scotland, and to support the creation of a learning system to understand which activities are having a positive impact and where learning can be drawn.

Understanding how organisations are doing in their work to keep the promise

While national-level indicators are important for aligning activity they do not interpret the reasons behind this change and the resulting impacts. Therefore, a broader evidence base is required to examine how processes at local and organisational level are affecting change.

Work at the organisational level is key to developing better understanding but also to support an improvement in how change is experienced by those for whom the promise was made. This work requires different kinds of data, evidence and information than what is needed at the national level.

As part of the next steps in the development of The Promise Story of Progress, the mechanism for how improvement work at the organisational level can feed into and inform the national picture will be developed, building on the work already underway through Plan 24-30.

Understanding whether the care community feel the impact of the promise being kept

How the care experienced community are feeling the impact of change must be at the heart of how success is measured.

Achieving this at a national level across the ten vision statements requires an approach that balances the need to collect insights that guide what needs to happen next, while limiting asking the same questions of the same people over again. For this reason, there is a need to explore a variety of ways of collecting this information including social research and support from organisations who work directly with the care experienced community.

The ‘What Matters’ questions have been created, based directly on what children, young people and families told the Independent Care Review was important to them. These questions are intended to help root Scotland’s understanding of what ‘good’ looks like through experience, rather than what ‘good’ looks like to the ‘system’. Further detail on these questions is provided in Part 3.

The Promise Progress Framework – Principles

The Framework has been developed by COSLA, The Scottish Government and The Promise Scotland, with input received across Scottish Government analytical service divisions and key stakeholders including Public Health Scotland, the Improvement Service, CELCIS, Who Cares? Scotland, the Care Inspectorate, Police Scotland and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service.

It has been developed in line with a set of five agreed key principles.

1. Insights, not targets, driven

To help all those with a responsibility towards keeping the promise understand where progress is being made, the Framework is intended to be used and contextualised within organisations’ own settings, enabling a richer understanding of the data and the development of shared accountability across Scotland.

2. Focused on use and burden reduction

The Framework brings data from multiple sources into one place to aid understanding. Rather than setting up any new reporting requirements, the Framework uses existing data sources, reducing the need for new data collection and bringing data from multiple sources into one place to aid understanding.

3. Non-exhaustive

The 10 Vision Statements have been chosen based on available data from multiple sources, however, indicators are intended to evolve and expand as data improves and understanding deepens, alongside other sources of data, and research.

4. Aligned

Through alignment with pre-existing frameworks, the Framework places data about care experienced children and families within the context of the wider population of children and families wellbeing at community level (the Children, Young People and Families Outcomes Framework) and national level data (the National Performance Framework).

5. Expansive

The Framework collates indicators from health, inspection, social work, poverty, education, and justice data to chart progress towards outcomes. Wherever possible, data which has been collected since at least 2020 is used to measure progress. It integrates data from multiple sources and in many forms at different levels, using care experience markers where available.

A note on language

“Scotland must change the language of care. Language must be easily understood, be positive and must not create or compound stigma.”

(the promise, p.87)

The Independent Care Review heard from children that language can compound a sense of being different, exacerbate low self-esteem and is stigmatising. Many of Scotland’s data collections use these terms as they are established in law to reflect a legal process or in reference to a specific dataset. In those cases, we have to use particular words or phrases to make sure we are clear about what the report is describing and to avoid any confusion with, or misinterpretation of, the report contents.

In developing The Promise Progress Framework effort has been made to avoid using acronyms and terms that are disrespectful and stigmatising. To make clear how what is written relates to data collection and reporting, sources are provided throughout the Framework.

The section below also helps by explaining the terms The Promise Progress Framework uses, and how they relate to the terms found in data collection and reporting nationally.

Language used by the system Language used in The Promise Progress Framework
‘Looked after’ child or young person Child or young person in or experiencing the ‘care system’
Placement Home
Placed Living
Starting to be ‘looked after’ Entering the ‘care system’
Care leaver Care experienced adult
Children ‘looked after’ at home Children in the ‘care system’ living at home with their parents
Special schools Additional support needs schools

Contact

Email: ThePromiseTeam@gov.scot

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