Despite challenges, there has been strong commitment to #KeepThePromise and provide the leadership required to do so at all levels, as evidenced by various practical steps, including leadership capacity building across organisations.
By 2030, all Scotland’s institutions, organisations, national bodies and Local Authorities that have responsibilities towards care experienced children and young people, will be fully implementing all their parenting responsibilities.
Scotland’s leaders will support and embed the changes made throughout the entire 'care system' to nurture and support families to stay together. There will also be strong leadership across all the workforce that models and supports the values and principles of the broader workforce.
Collaborative leadership, working across organisational boundaries, will be the norm for leaders across public services in Scotland. Systems of accountability and incentives will reflect this.
Leadership development activity will be consistently designed to ensure leaders, at all levels, are focused on what matters to children, families and communities, rather than their own organisations and systems. The voices of those with lived experience will be embedded in decision making.
The balance of power and influence will shift towards those with lived experience of the 'care system'. There will be support for care experienced people to benefit from high quality leadership development. More people with lived experience of the care system will be in positions of power and influence across all sections of Scottish society.
Focus must be on the crisis on the workforce in and around Scotland’s ‘care system’; there are simply not enough people in the system to do the work required to care and support, let alone reform. For progress to be made, work must prioritise reducing the impact this is having, with a view to resolving the crisis.
The revised Common Core, which will include an implementation plan for workforce development, will be agreed with the National Children and Families Leadership Group and will have a Ministerial launch.
The Promise Scotland will convene a dialogue with stakeholders in the public, voluntary and private sectors, drawing on expertise in further and higher education on executive education, to develop an approach to high-quality leadership development for care experienced people.
The actions outlined in the Voice foundation are fully embedded at every stage to progress actions on Leadership.
At the local government level, there are Promise Leads within three quarters of local authorities, with a role to provide leadership and ensure responsibility for #KeepingThePromise locally.
The Children and Families National Leadership Group (CFNLG), is a cross-sector and multi-agency group, which “provides collective leadership and strategic oversight of key areas of transformational change to improve outcomes for children, young people and families”. Its priorities are: work to #KeepThePromise, Whole Family Wellbeing Funding, UNCRC implementation, the embedding of GIRFEC/GIRFE, and tackling child poverty.
In December 2023, CELCIS was commissioned by the Scottish Government to examine current delivery models and configurations in Scotland and internationally, to better understand how services can best support children, young people and their families. That research included reflections on the role of leadership in Scotland in driving the necessary collaboration and approaches. It highlighted that effective leadership at both national and local levels is crucial for aligning policies, challenging hierarchies, creating seamless service pathways, pooling resources, and establishing a learning culture. Leaders must also provide opportunities for multi-agency training and forums to enhance understanding among practitioners.
As part of the National Trauma Transformation Programme, The NES Scottish Trauma Informed Leaders Training (STILT) programme was developed to acknowledge that trauma-informed and responsive practice requires trauma-informed and responsive environments, policies, systems, and organisations. It aims to support organisational leaders in developing trauma-informed systems, processes, environments, and teams from both the top down and the bottom up.
The Whole Family Wellbeing Fund is hosting meetings (called ‘campfires’) for the Learning into Action (LiA) Network. This group brings together individuals from across the sectors who are leading on “transforming outcomes for children and families”, with the purpose of enabling progress.
People whose job it is to make big decisions that will affect me and my family’s life, care most about what matters to me and my family.
People who support me are all working together to share resources, to jointly make decisions with me, and to own and fix any problems together.
People who support me aren’t working in ways that are over-complicated and making it harder for everyone to do a good job.
Find out more about the what matters questions here.
This is how Plan 24-30 relates to other frameworks and plans
| Independent Care Review conclusions | Plan 21-24 priority area |
|---|---|
| the promise pgs.17; 36; 85; 99; 103-104 | What matters to children and families |
| Whole family support | |
| Supporting the workforce | |
| Building capacity | |
| Planning |
| UNCRC | GIRFEC |
|---|---|
| Articles 3; 4; 19 | Safe |
| Nurtured | |
| Respected | |
| Included |
