Hearings for Children report: response

Conclusion

This response signals the beginning of the next chapter of this exciting programme of work, seeking to bring together all those who care about Scotland’s infants, children and young people who may be in need or at risk and require the protection of a redesigned hearings system – a system in which each child’s experience reliably reflects its fine principles and intentions.

Scottish Ministers are grateful to Sheriff Mackie, the Promise Scotland the Hearings System Working Group and the children, families and system practitioners who participated for taking the transformational and courageous first steps on the path to the redesign of the children’s hearings system - through their prospectus for positive change, their determination to deliver only the very best to Scotland’s children, and their challenge to long-held orthodoxies and assumptions.

In extending that challenge to system leaders, practitioners and policymakers to work collaboratively with us, drawing on each other's skills and expertise and the voices of those with care experience, Ministers commit to working with system leaders and partners to ensure that we move forward positively, at pace.

The babies, infants, children and young people of Scotland are counting on us to deliver a redesigned hearings system that is inquisitorial in nature – and is experienced by Scotland’s children, at each stage, as a reliable humane, empathetic, agile, problem-solving, confident and robust legal system of child care and justice.