Publication - Advice and guidance

Secure care: pathway and standards

Published: 5 October 2020
Directorate: Children and Families Directorate, +2 more … Justice Directorate, Learning Directorate
Topic: Children and families, Equality and rights, Health and social care
ISBN: 9781839608629

The pathway and standards set out what all children in or on the edges of secure care in Scotland should expect across the continuum of intensive supports and services. They provide a framework for ensuring the rights of children and young people are respected and improve experiences and outcomes.

Supporting documents

Joint Statement

We are delighted to be able to introduce the new Secure Care Pathway and Standards Scotland and commend all of the hard work that has gone into creating these new rights based Standards.

The new standards are aligned with and reflect the principles of Scotland's Health and Social Care Standards, introduced in April 2018. Central to the development of these standards was a commitment to ensure children, young people and young adults with experience of secure care were involved at every stage.

The Pathways and Standards working group of the Secure Care Strategic Board brought together a significant programme of co-production work in partnership with all five secure centres, STARR group, Who Cares? Scotland, CELCIS, Centre for Youth and Criminal Justice, Social Work Scotland, NHS, the Care Inspectorate, Scottish Children's Reporter Administration (SCRA), Scotland Excel and young people and adults with current and past experience of secure care.

The standards have been designed to address the calls to action voiced by children and young people in the Secure Care in Scotland: Young People's Voices paper published in 2017. The standards provide a vision to drive forward the transformational change to improve the experiences and outcomes for children who are experiencing extreme vulnerabilities, needs and risks and who are in or on the edges of secure care in Scotland. The standards deliver on the Scottish Government's commitment to develop standards for secure care.

We would like to thank everyone involved in creating these standards. You have worked hard to make them innovative and aspirational. You have created standards that will drive change and deliver better outcomes for Scotland's children.

There is still work to be done to ensure that the standards are implemented successfully. We will support stakeholders and inspection agencies to ensure a full understanding of what is required to meet the standards and improve our approaches to vulnerable children across the continuum of intensive supports and services in Scotland.