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

Part Three: Next Steps in Developing The Promise Story Of Progress

This final section sets out how The Promise Scotland, The Scottish Government and COSLA will collaborate with stakeholders to develop The Promise Story of Progress and The Promise Progress Framework to create a collective understanding of progress which seeks to capture:

• 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.

The Promise Progress Framework sets the frame for those questions to be answered, and its first iteration is populated with national level data to begin answering the Scotland level question.

The Promise Progress Framework provides organisations with a structure to aid with their own reporting on how they are feeding into Scotland’s overall aims. It aims to help organisations to read across to their own strategies and monitoring frameworks to identify alignment, complementarity, or gaps with the work they do, the data they have, and how they use it.

The analysis of changes in the data between 2020 and the most recent available data presented in Part Two demonstrates that further work is required to develop the quality and availability of quantitative data across the ten vision statements. Whilst it is recognised that this will continue to evolve to best reflect the work that is developed and progressed to 2030, actions have been identified and are set out below:

Understanding Scotland’s progress towards keeping the Promise

The Promise Progress Framework is a national framework that is shared by all those with a responsibility for keeping the promise. While reporting will be produced centrally by The Promise Scotland, Scottish Government and COSLA, we are working closely across organisations and groups to ensure the best data and evidence available is used to interpret the national picture.

Feedback on this first iteration of the Promise Progress Framework will be key. Views of stakeholders and partners would be highly valued. To do this please email: plan2430@thepromise.scot

Engagement will also continue through the Promise Collective and directly with individual organisations to develop examples of how the Framework can be used locally to both inform and be shaped by work underway. It is expected that additional, outcomes and indicators will be added to the Framework as collaborative efforts to build a better understanding of progress continues.

Consultation with the care experienced community on the Framework will be led by the Independent Strategic Advisor for The Promise, Fiona Duncan and The Promise Scotland as part of ongoing work to develop and work collectively on Plan 24-30.

In areas where there are data gaps, where examining progress at the national level is unavailable, data development projects will be undertaken to focus on outcomes and indicators, as well as work to understand and improve the existing data and information that could support a better understanding of the progress Scotland is making.

As identified in Part One, the indicators blend multiple types and sources of data, including health, inspection, social work, poverty, education, and justice, to chart progress towards outcomes. Wherever possible, data which contains a marker for care experience is used. However, not all data sources include markers specific to the care experienced community. In some instances, data that is collected at whole population level, but where we know that care experienced people may be evidentially overrepresented, may provide helpful demonstration that an overall population shift is indicative of a shift for care experienced children and families.

In aiming to achieve consistency at a national level across 10 vision statements it is recognised that some evidence gaps will take longer to address than others. However, whilst collective data development and improvement work progresses, use of the initial iteration of the Framework will begin now.

Where indicators and quantitative data are not available for certain outcomes the data collected for the other questions that build the Promise Story of Progress will be crucial to Scotland’s understanding of progress in the interim.

Understanding work to keep the promise at an organisational level

At an organisational level, The Promise Story of Progress will provide a structure for understanding and reporting on change. Many organisations will have a role to play across multiple outcomes and vision statements, and as this continues to develop a shared approach to making sense of where activity fits into Scotland’s wider goals will become increasingly evident.

Organisational-level contributions are crucial to build the understanding of the reason behind changes in trends. The structure of the Promise Progress Framework as set out in Part One, is designed to assist organisations to map activities against the promise and opportunities to share learning, and collaboratively tackle barriers to progress.

The promise calls for concerted efforts to improve Scotland’s data. This includes an increased focus on what children, young people and families told the Independent Care Review mattered to them most and an understanding of whole family support which will necessitate the use of different kinds of data, evidence and information, some of which does not translate into national level quantitative data but can nevertheless provide important insights into Scotland’s progress towards keeping the promise.

Organisations are encouraged to consider how The Promise Progress Framework supports the different kinds of data, evidence and information that they record and use to direct their work and how this may be targeted or refined to support change.

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 The Impact of The Promise Being Kept

The promise is clear that the experiences of those in and around the ‘care system’ must be at the heart of how success is measured. For this reason, understanding progress must include a focus on how people are feeling the impacts of change.

This requires an approach that balances the need to collect insights while limiting the burden on people with care experience, or those who work within the ‘system’. Work will be undertaken to explore a variety of ways of collecting this qualitative information, including drawing on the work of social research and the support of organisations who work directly with the care experienced community.

As part of this, and to ensure that collective efforts to keep the promise build on what has already been heard, the ‘What Matters’ questions have been developed and published on the Plan 24-30 website as an improvement tool to support this work. These can be accessed here and can also be viewed in every theme under the five foundations in Plan 24-30 as part of ‘Understanding Progress’.

They are based directly on what children and families told the Independent Care Review about what was important to them. The ‘What Matters’ questions will help root Scotland’s understanding of what ‘good’ looks like through the experience of what makes a difference, rather than what ‘good’ looks like to the ‘system’. In turn this will guide Scotland’s planning and actions.

The ‘What Matters’ questions should be used to help assess the extent to which work to keep the promise, including data collection, use and development, is moving things closer to being able to answer those questions. Where the questions cannot be fully answered, they are intended to help identify gaps in understanding and support, or changes needed in processes and practice, from the perspective of what children and their families have already shared about what needs to happen.

As part of ongoing iteration of Plan 24-30, improved guidance and examples of uses of the ‘What Matters’ questions will be produced based on feedback and testing of the questions for different purposes.

Only qualitative, experiential evidence will verify the direction of travel presenting in the national-level indicators. Without this, there is a danger of conflating improvement in outcomes with an improvement in experiences, which may not always be moving in the same direction.

To support the direction of this work, a Research Implementation Group, chaired by the Chief Social Policy Advisor for Scotland, will:

• act as a quality assurance group in the development of quantitative data where data gaps have been identified in the core outcomes and indicators.
• provide direction on the methodological approach to gather qualitative evidence which will complement the Promise Progress Framework.

This Research Implementation Group will have representation across Scottish Government, The Promise Scotland, COSLA and key stakeholders from across the system. It will identify opportunities for the care experienced community to be represented in existing research, and champion the inclusion of a care-experienced strand to relevant upcoming research projects.

The group will work with The Promise Scotland to ensure that the Scottish Government is not duplicating similar qualitative research which is taking place across sectors. Not all qualitative evidence needs to be gathered through bespoke research projects and the Research Implementation Group will be positioned to advise on how other existing forms of evidence, including case studies, academic research and focus groups may help to contextualise and interpret the national-level indicators.