 Can I welcome everyone to the 24th meeting of the Education and Skills Committee in 2017, and can please remind everyone present to turn on mobile phones and other devices on to silent for the duration of the meeting? Tavish Scott will be joining us this morning, but will be a few minutes late. Daniel Johnson has given his apologies as he is unwell. The first item of business is an evidence session on the Children and Young People Information Sharing Scotland Bill. This is the third meeting where we will be considering the bill. We have already heard from the Scottish Government's bill team and members of the legal profession and the health service. This morning, the panel's focus is on services that local authorities provide, including in relation to education and social work. This morning, I welcome to the meeting Dr Gary Clapton, Senior Lecturer of Social Work, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Andrew Kerr, Gyrthrych Manager of North Ayrshire Health and Social Care Partnership, Jackie Nicholl's Team Leaders, Social Work Services, Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership, and Jenny Brown, Principal Teacher of Pupil Support on Freeson Galloway Council Education Services. I should say to the panel from the outset that, if you would like to respond to a question, please indicate to me or the clerks and I will call you to speak. I would ask Ross to open up the question. It would be useful to know just to begin with what the current state of play is with the implementation of GERFEC and named person in your local authorities? The GERFEC is interwoven in all our policies and procedures at the moment. The named person hasn't been implemented in any meaningful way. Last year, there was a proof of concept hub, but that was abandoned in the light of the Supreme Court ruling. We don't really have, as a Glasgow employee, and particularly as a social work employee in Glasgow, we don't have a lot of experience of the named person and its potential impact on service delivery. In North Ayrshire, getting right for every child has been around since 2005, I think, was the first document that we talked about getting right for every child. In North Ayrshire, we have used the term's name person, but of course the act spells out the specific function. We haven't taken those functions forward, and it has only been the name only. Up until last year, we have developed a name person service, a physical service, located in our headquarters. At the moment, we initially thought that it would be a good vehicle to support named persons and to share concerns with other professionals. However, we put a stop to that because we were unclear about the information sharing, and we didn't revert back. We always kept the data protection act and shared information with consent. Their function at the moment, the sole function, is to manage requests for assistance. If a family requests assistance to the named person, it will come to the hub who will either route it to that particular service or try to find a service to support that child. It is a consent-based model, so we are not sharing information. It is only about family saying that I need this sort of help. In Dumfries and Galloway, I would say that in terms of education, we are quite far down the road in gerffet terms. We have certainly been using the idea behind the name person in education for the past three years. To some extent, I have been sharing information, and it is probably a little like Ayrshire, where plans to set up a hub where information would come in and then route it out into different agencies. That was put on hold when the act did not go through. In terms of education, that is how we run our policy and look after our pupils in Dumfries and Galloway. Although we do not have that backup of the act being implemented yet, we do everything that goes through the name person in terms of the pupil in the school. Information is being shared, to some extent, from other agencies. Do you worry a little bit when we talk about implementation of gerffet? Gerffet, for me, is not a thing. It is a set of values, principles and a way of working. It is a new culture, practices and systems. We have all been trying to do that, especially focusing on culture. We made the mistake where we can construct some systems, but we do not change the culture. We have tried to really enforce those values and principles, going back to the beginning of what Gerter Wright is all about, and not worrying too much about the system around that at the moment. I can speak for my students, so it is second hand. It is their experiences in the local authorities around the area where we have placements. I agree with what Andrew just said, while getting it right for every child, gerffet is very much part of what I hear about their placement experiences. The name person today is not. The debate over the last year that the uncertainty around that affected current practice in terms of sharing information that falls below the child protection threshold? I would say in Glasgow that it did. The pilot of the hub scheme did cause a bit of confusion. Information was getting sent direct to the hub and in some cases the children had an allocated social worker, but they were not getting informed about the incident that had occurred. In addition, there was I think a more defensive practice in terms of the information that was being provided. An example was the police sharing a notice of concern rightly so that children had been removed to family over a weekend because of an incident in the family home, but they would not provide social work with the grandmother's phone number. It was a need to know basis, was their view. They told us about the incident and we obviously had the address and we could go on. It was probably an overzealous implementation of the need to know aspect of the information sharing, but that is just one example. There were similar where there was a kind of reticence to share information that previously would have been helpful and certainly would have aided just checking on the welfare of the children. I think that we have wasted a lot of valuable time when we are looking at implementing an act and statutory guidance. We obviously do not wait until the last midnight hour to train our staff to produce materials and to have people ready for that implementation. We had a long and possibly a year before the first act was to be implemented by producing materials based on what was in the act, materials based on what was written about the information sharing at that time. We trained all our name persons and now we have to go and unpick all that and go back and say, no, actually, status quotes were we were in terms of information sharing and the protection act. I think that, for us, there has been a lot of wasted time. I am sure that it was not done deliberately by anybody. I would say that I was seconded to be a Gyrfex Sport Officer from education last year. Some of our role involved training staff, but also taking phone calls in an advisory capacity and most of those phone calls were about whether they should share or not. It was at that level just below child protection. Staff felt very vulnerable and were very weary of sharing in those circumstances when, perhaps before that, they were maybe more willing to share. I think that there was concern about being personally liable. I do not know how much you know about the CEMIS wellbeing software programme. CEMIS is the software that we use in education to record pastoral notes but also to form chronologies on pupils. As part of that new software programme, which I believe has been rolled out across the whole of Scotland, built into that was making sure that consent was a topic that you had discussed when you got to an assessment of a child. Staff expressed concern when we were going through that training that they were going to be held personally liable because we had to state whether we had concern or not and what the views of the parent child were, etc. There was a lot of concern when we were doing training there about that. How much does that represent a change from current practice in your authorities? From a social work perspective, it does not represent much of a change at all. That is our day-in-daily taking in information and processing it, deciding what is appropriate to share and who to be shared with. We may inform education of an incident that we believe may have caused a child trauma, but we may withhold details that the police have provided us with more details that people do not need to have that kind of in-depth detail. I do not see that as a shift at all. I reiterate that in terms of the fact that I work across a partnership, social work, health and education, I think that practice has always considered what information may be relevant to share. I think that it might have an impact as adult services in which a family, addiction service or mental health have a dependent child and helping adult services to think about the impact in that child and then what they do with that. That might be an advantage to the duty to consider on our adult services, but on named persons and principally professionals coming from social work, I think that that is already part of the psyche. One of the main principles that we teach in social work is that partnership with parents is the niplo's ultra of good social work practice. One of the concerns that was being around and still hangs in the air about the scheme is that it was about parents rather than for parents. That is a phrase that is hung around a lot, and many of the social work students that I work with have come back and talked about that. It butts up against basic social work values about partnership. The duty to consider is one that is well part of what we do and part of our psyche, as you said. I am sorry, but I would say in education as well that I think that staff consider very carefully whether they are sharing or not, and I think that that has always been the case. I just wondered if there was a difference in the duty to consider in law the expectation of evidence that you have not considered. Presumably, professionally, it is something that you do, but you would not necessarily have to record it in the way that it is being asked now, or is there no difference? I think that the difficulty is that practitioners are considering all the time that information is coming to them all the time. What then or when do you record something that you have either decided to share or not decided to share? I think that that becomes a bureaucratic nightmare and resource intensive when you have to think about every time, should I share this or I better record why I have not shared it. I do not know where the threshold is for that, so I think that that would be very difficult. I wonder if I could come to ask you for some comments on previous evidence that we have taken about three weeks ago by the bill team that the concept of wellbeing was well utilised and well understood. Last week, we heard from both the legal profession and from other witnesses who were representing the Royal College of Nursing, various other professionals, saying that they did not agree with that. Could I ask for your perspective on it? From a practitioner's point of view, I think that when I had studied the 2014 act, I know that the legal services had been critical of the shift away from welfare, which was kind of in legal terms easily defined, and I know that in legal terms wellbeing remains a bit of a unknown. However, I would say from a practitioner's point of view, we are quite clear that the holistic needs of a child that would incorporate into wellbeing are not necessarily child protection. I think that there is more of an understanding at a front-line practitioner's view than can then be taken into the legal system. Can I come back on that? That is a very interesting point that you have just raised. Given the answers that you gave to Ross Greer, do you feel that there is a need for the name person policy, given that the implication is that you are highly professional in the way that you are approaching things already in terms of GERFIC and working through the system? Do we actually need a name person policy at all? I am very aware that, as a social work representative, I am only dealing with a relatively small number, although it does not always feel like that, of Scotland's children. When I am speaking about my involvement, it is that small group of children that come into the social work arena. I think that the principle around a named person is—I do not think that anybody could argue with the principle of it—our understanding of adverse childhood experiences, the impact of trauma on children and the presence of one consistent person in ameliorating the negative impact of that is well documented. I suppose that my worry is that, while it is an additional task to a teacher or a health visitor, it is perhaps not as meaningful if we are serious about it, can the named person be—that is their job—that they have a group of children that they are the named person for? That is what they do. Can I pick up on that, too? Everybody has agreed that the most important focus here is our most vulnerable children. That has come across loud and clear in all evidence, irrespective of people's views, whether they are for or against the named person. What I am interested in, though, is that, if you feel that the professional standards that are used by practitioners are working well enough without the actual named person element of GERFEC, that obviously questions whether it is right to have this new bill and to have a different code of practice. I am just interested in your views as practitioners who know far more about this on the front line than we do. I actually had a presentation to a group of practitioners around the named person. I think that they would, to an individual, say that, yes, they can see the merit in the named person, but not for their child. That is the bottom line. People will be saying, yes, I can see it being very useful for not my child, not my grandchild. We do not need that. We do not need a named person. Why do you think they are saying that? Because they believe that, as parents or grandparents, they are amongst a group of adults who hold the wellbeing of that particular child as the priority. Unfortunately, we know that that is not the case for every child in Scotland. We also know that it is not the case that every child who is not having that positive experience is known to social work. That would be where the named person would be useful in the vulnerable child that maybe is not being identified as quickly. We will move on to Gillian. Pick up what you are saying. We are looking at it from the parent's perspective, but from a child's perspective, the named person is providing a single point of contact that they might otherwise have difficulty in knowing who to go to unlock a lot of services. That is a major part of the named person. Has that been affected at all by what has been proposed and the change here? In terms of information sharing, it is a little more difficult for me to comment on the named person. I tend, when I am speaking as a social work practitioner, with limited experience of the roles and responsibilities around a named person. I am not entirely sure what the parameters of that role will be. That is a better question for Jenny Brown, given that she will be a named person. Sorry, can you just repeat what your original point was? We have been talking about this largely so far about the impact that this has on parents and those who become a named person, but the whole ethos of a named person is a child having a single point of contact. We were talking about this earlier. Possibly in education, they had that anyway with a principal teacher of pupil support. I think that the principles that are aligned with GERFEC are all good ones about looking at the child holistically, early intervention and all that. I think that a good pupil support teacher probably did that anyway and was a good point of contact. Education is currently trying to emphasise noturing principles, etc., and they all work together there. I think that it probably would work, and I think that it did work without the named person role being there. I suppose that my question is in front of us. I am asking you what you want now to happen with regard to, for example, the code of practice around clarity. What is your opportunity to effectively feed in to a forum on what you want out of the code of practice as practitioners? What I would want is something that is very straightforward. That is backing up professional judgment, which I think most of the time is very sound and is based on putting the child at the centre and doing the best for the child. It is to back up the decisions that are currently being made and make sure that a teacher is not exposed to legal retribution in whatever way, but it has to be done in a very straightforward manner. Teachers are extremely busy at the moment. There is constantly changing environment in terms of exams, etc. This is an additional workload, and if you bear in mind secondary school teachers in particular, you know what exams are really at the core of what they do. If you have just said to me that you are effectively doing what the named person is already, how do you see it being an additional workload if you are already doing it? What aspect of this do you see as being on the road? I suppose that the planning process that the named person added, the child's planning process, was additional. However, the idea of having an individual who a child could approach and who had an overview on everything that was happening in their life, I think that is pretty much always been the case. Can I ask it from the social work point of you who obviously engage with schools what you want to see from the code of practice? Personally, I do not particularly think that the code of practice needs to be in legislation. I think that it needs to be robust. I had looked at the draft code of practice and certainly it just felt a bit the perennial issue around for services about information sharing. The last item of, if it is in the best interests of the child, comes back again to professional judgment. We were discussing that. As the document says, it is the responsibility of the local authority who is not the named person as an individual. If the named person is aware of that and is given guidance about what information they can share, they are ultimately not going to be personally liable if they share information or, indeed, do not share information. To the question about named person policy, the concept of having a named person, someone to co-ordinate at a lower level, is a fantastic idea. We need someone to co-ordinate support. Children need support. The difficulty that comes from the question that is asked about wellbeing is how we interpret wellbeing. From one practitioner to another, depending on their personal experience and professional experience, I may have a very different view of what it means to be respected or responsible or anything else. I think that wellbeing has its difficulties in terms of interpretation and thresholds. However, from the code of practice, I do not think that we need to have that code of practice linked to legislation. We seem to have forgotten about the practice that is around getting ready for every child. There is a practice model. There are five practitioner questions. What is getting away from this child's wellbeing? What information do I need? What can I do? What can my agency do? What help I need from others? I think that we need to attach the robust guidance with examples of what that might look in practice linked to getting it right for every child. We seem to have disassociated ourselves from getting it right for every child again through a very much illegal route. I would like to see them coming back to having robust practice document around the already established national practice model questions and processes. Then it becomes real to practitioners. They know when and at what points they need to share and not have a legislative document. To be honest, if I am in a field and I am busy, and somebody says, Andrew, does that comply with schedule 2? Oh, okay. I have not got time, but I need something very quick that I can make sense of. The benign element of the named person scheme seems to have been lost in the midst of time with all the discussions and debates that have taken place over the past couple of years. It strikes me that one of the challenges is to articulate what is the added value that the scheme brings to the table of existing services to a teacher and health visitor. There is a problem with, as Andrew said, the lack of—we have missed an opportunity to articulate anything more than the wellbeing still remains undefined. There are a number of indicators. There are H and R indicators, but there are a number of nearly 269 sub-indicators. They have grown arms and legs. The definitions, some of them very technical, laugh a lot. One of the main concerns in my written submission is that the increase in thicket of indicators would be one of those things that would either lower the threshold of intervention and, thus, the issue of mistrust might develop. It plays alongside existing child protection procedures that we have already. They have their difficulties, but they are fairly well articulated in terms of the children's healing systems, definitions of abuse and so on. When you start to move wellbeing on to the table, things become messy and conflated. I believe that that is a major challenge for us. Oliver, you said that you wanted to come in, but very briefly because Ruth was just about to come in. You were just on the point from Andrew Round, the code of practice, and some of the other things that we mentioned in using, you do not think, a code of practice should be in legislation. The problem is that the Supreme Court has asked for some of these things to be legislated on so that they are clear in law. I do not see how it is possible to match up what you need as professionals and what people need in terms of legal certainty in any form of difficult to put legislation in. The Scottish Government says that it is difficult to put that in primary legislation because that requires to be very precise and specific and to cover all these different possibilities. Do you think that it is just… I just do not see what the bill gives us an additional to what we have already got in terms of the data protection act, the human rights act. I do not see, apart from the duty to consider, what else it gives us. Why would you legislate when you already have existing legislation in place? All you are saying is refer to this legislation, but that is an argument for legal services in terms of practitioners. This is something very simple that we need that tells us. It cannot be prescriptive because it cannot be prescriptive because every single situation will be different. People's lives are different and that goes back to the point of wellbeing. When we compartmentalise ourselves into those indicators, we lose that kind of subjective wellbeing and we can look at subjective wellbeing in two elements of personal wellbeing. How a child feels about themselves, what is their resilience, their identity, their belonging, all those things that the scenario does not really give us and also that social wellbeing. What is their community like? Have they trusted adults? What is their relationships? Again, I do not think that it gives us that. I think that when we are considering to share practitioners, we just do not look at wellbeing in that very narrow scenario. We look at other things that impact on that and make those decisions where we are to share, not legislation. Yes, legislation but as long as it does not confuse practice. I think that it is what it is doing now. Practitioners are retreating back to their homes. I better not share anything because I really do not know where I am supposed to go to get my advice from or get my legal advice from. I think that from practitioner measures it is clear. Draw folks' attention to the register of interests of my former North Ayrshire councillor. Good morning panel, thanks for being here. We have taken quite a bit of evidence around the code of practice. I know that colleagues have touched on it. I think that it needs to be clear and accessible in the language that all the practitioners who are involved with children and families can use meaningfully. What extent are your views on the bill dependent on the content of the finalised code of practice? I do not know. I would think absolutely that what we will think of the bill is absolutely hinged on the final code of practice that is drawn up. It is useful to debate that but, yes, the actual finished article could sway the view of the bill in its entirety. As it stands, it is an illustrative draft, so I do not think that we can put much. If it is overly legalistic, it has no impact on practitioners whatsoever. The code of practice needs to have some meaningful triggers in there that practitioners can say, yes, I know what decisions or questions I need to ask to be able to take this in the next step further. There are other material out there from the ICO and others that have got examples that work you through when and when or what things you should consider in quite accessible language. The code of practice is that my play would just be in a language that practitioners find it easy to navigate and not overly legalistic because I think for it. Again, it comes back to who is the code of practice for and I am not quite sure who it is for. Is it just for named persons? Is it for all practitioners that come to contact with children? I am unsure. That changes the shape of the code of practice depending on who the audience is. If information sharing is at the heart of this whole act and about named persons working to advantage, then the code of practice is right behind that. It has to be something that is accessible, easy and quick because if it is to help named persons, if it is to support their decisions, then it has to be something that is straightforward, quick flowchart type information, otherwise staff will not use it. They will not have the time to use it. It has to be something that is very accessible. Following on from that, what involvement would you expect your organisations to have in forming a code of practice and what involvement have you had previously? I would expect that each health service partnership local authority to be consulted, but more than just consulted, I think that the legislators need to learn from practice experience and it would be good to have representation from practitioners at some point in that journey, rather than just a consultation and draft at the end. I think that one thing that has come out of the evidence sessions is that the Government will clearly be having to listen to the stakeholders about the code of practice. I think that that is perfectly clear. Did you want to come back in here, Oliver? The most massive question is in a bit more probably following on from that. On that, okay. We are not going to take up too much time. I just wonder really when you are talking about flowcharts and making it easy to understand. These are really difficult, complex, legal questions and that is why obviously the previous legislation went all the way to the Supreme Court and was weighed up at length and balancing various different cases that have happened in the past and looking at a whole range of different bits of legislation and how they interact. I just wonder, do you think that that can ever be explained in a flowchart? Do you think that practitioners and people on the ground are ever going to understand the intricacies and the proportionality and how all those different bits of legislation fit in? Do you think that it is possible to simplify that and still meet the legislative standard? I think that the only way to... It is very difficult to simplify and very complex. On that, it is complex in terms of the law and the requirements and what you have to consider because there are lots of ambiguous terms. The best public interest, what does that mean? There are interpretations that practitioners have to put on. Whatever terminology we use, it talks about in the bill, in the opinion of... Well, we all have different opinions. I do not even think that the bill of that is going to make it any clearer for us on the type of decisions to make it easier. What will make it easier is through training but having a consistent message of when we need to ask certain questions. If we can do that... Again, I come back to wellbeing. We interpret wellbeing in lots of different ways. People's thresholds will be different and that is why we really need to build in a model where practitioners can go and ask somewhere now. We want them to go and ask their managers. They can come and ask them to name person service. There is no reason why any professional cannot pick up a phone to another one and anonymise and say, of this child here, here is the situation, what do you think we should do about it without actually disclosing any information about that child? We need to build in some of those safeguards that practitioners can actually get assistance and help to think through. However, it is a complex area and people with different thresholds and that is the difficulty. What suggests that there is not going to be those safeguards in place just now? This is how you would work just now, I suspect, that you would phone a colleague and anonymise the situation. Why would anybody think that that is not what will happen? That is what happens, so why do we need an act if it is already happening? We need to name person's act, but what we are here about is this specific Supreme Court decision and having to address that. That is exactly what this session is about. We are here because Supreme Court told us to be here. For me to take that forward, I need to be clear what the legislative landscape is like. I am not unsure what that is like, or I am sure what it is like at the moment, but I do not know what it is going to be like. We have to future plan, train our staff. It does not happen overnight. We have to prepare for that. Now, we already have those things in place. My question is, will they still be in place? The answer is yes. Then why are we changing anything? Because we have a data protection act. We have processes. We have things in place already. I do not understand why we need a new bill to tell us what we should do in the future if we are doing it already. I just want to say that I was not at a point. I just wondered in the Government's policy memorandum, I think that they say that there are options possible for the name person's act to continue without this legislation at all. My final question is just round. You said before that you wanted more than consultation, I wanted involvement in it. Do you, as practitioners and people working in this field, find it odd or unusual that members of the Scottish Parliament will not have a vote or have a formal say on the final code of practice? There is no necessity for it to be gone through in detail by members of this committee, for example. Do you find that unusual or would you expect, given its importance to the legislation that members of Parliament would have, no, it would have more of a direct say over whether or not the code was signed off? I think we should. Right. I am not a practitioner, so you addressed that to the practitioner. I was not aware that they would not have a final overview and say on signing off. I think that the code of practice is not normally drafted up after the bill. This is a very unusual situation where we get an illustrative code of practice, which was given to us to be helpful. It would be interesting to see if we get one the next time as a whole. Oliver, have you finished? Yes, I have finished. Jenny Brown mentioned some concerns about consent. I would like to explore a little bit more around that. The first thing is the degree to which you are aware of the changes to the GDPR and what implications it might have for your practice around seeking consent for information sharing. Miners too, I am afraid. The only knowledge is that it will strengthen the seeking of consent and the rights of children and adults. I think that consent is always difficult. I think that we should always be asking for consent, unless, of course, it places that child at additional risk, with criminal proceedings, etc. It is always good practice to work alongside families and work in partnership. I do not know if we can ever achieve full partnership with families because we are in a different kind of power differential because of the nature of what we do, but I think that Hedy Claibor back in 2001, I think, in measures from research for child protection, talked about how practitioners through honesty, integrity, etc. can build that partnership and that trust. I think that when you have that trust with families, it is a lot easier to discuss. Consent always becomes part of the conversation rather than something that we spring on people because it is about getting support and help. I think that we should always be asking for consent as a first port of call. I think that the GDPR will strengthen that. The issue comes about how you record that and where you record it and if consent is refused, what you do with it then. I think that the data protection act actually covers all that in terms of the risk of significant harm or potential risk, the public interest. I do know that it will strengthen consent and consent rightly in terms of people's rights to be able to participate as appropriately there. I was particularly struck by the information commissioner talking about GDPR and saying that a public authority won't be able to rely on consent as a legal basis for processing in any case where there's a clear imbalance between it and the individual to whom the data relates. Is that actually significantly different from where we are at the moment? It's a hard question. I'll go on to an easier one. Within the context of the name person service, how best can you ensure that the consent is explicit, freely given and easy to withdraw after it's given? Is that an easy? No, that's not an easy. I think I could... I mean, when you have a relationship and you have built up a knowledge of the child and the parents, then it's obviously always easier in those circumstances, but that isn't always the case. I mean, do you always get written consent or is verbal satisfactory? We're probably moving more to written consent now and consent to share and naming who it will be shared with. We are moving more to that in schools, certainly. We've got the information commissioner next week, Colin, which... Sorry? We've got the information commissioner next week, so these are questions of probability. Certainly follow-up on that particular point. Do you think that the bill itself should refer to consent or is it enough that it's in the code of practice, which of course is going to be a mandatory code of practice? Does it make any difference? Right. Okay, thank you. I guess... I just didn't want to speak too much. I guess what... It depends what the bill says about consent. If you look at consent, you should only be consenting for particular information for a particular purpose. That's really hard in practice. It's really hard because your intervention with the family is often multifaceted. You're having different information at different times. You might use it differently. That's really difficult to record every time you have a new piece of information that you want to share that's not for a particular... It might be for a different purpose. However, it is important that we get that. How do you record that? How do you make sense of that in the bill? Good luck. Right. Okay. I'll give you an easy one as a last question. Should the bill include a requirement to consider the views of the child, young person or parent when considering whether to share the information? In other words, should it be part of the legislation? I guess the purpose of legislation is to enable a consistency. I know that probably 99 per cent of practitioners would involve the views of the child who would ask the child about it, depending on the circumstance of that child, the age of that child, et cetera. I suppose that you'll always get some practice who may be not doing that. To have a blanket... I think that I actually think that the code of practice is where it should sit and not the legislation. I think that the code of practice is robust and it's clear enough and I think that that's sufficient to have consent and the views of the child articulated there. Thank you, convener. Can I just pick up a little bit on particularly what Jackie and Jenny were talking about earlier on in terms of current practice for information sharing? Can you tell me how you would currently operate if you had information about a child that you had concerns about? From my perspective, as I keep reiterating, it's not a named person. It's a social work front-line practitioner and manager. We would routinely... My role that I'm referring to was the intake team, so this is referrals from members of the public, other agencies who, about children who are not allocated, they don't have a worker. There's a myriad of different situations that we get referrals about. For instance, domestic abuse referrals from the police just because it's one of the most we get a lot. We would aim to inform the universal services. As I said, there had been an incident that children were witness or nearby. We would use our discretion as to how much of the information about the detail was given. Did you want me to comment on getting consent? It's about consent and what's it going to come to me? We would always aim to speak to the victim of the domestic abuse that we're talking about, and that would be saying that we're going to speak to the universal agencies that are involved in the child's life. Depending on the nature of the incident, social work could hold that information and never see that child, whereas teachers are seeing five days a week and it may impact on how they can support that child in the future. I would seek consent of the parent adviser if she had. Sometimes families will describe very personal reasons. The secretary is a neighbour and they won't want schools informed. You use your discretion again, perhaps speaking just to their teacher, not discussing even names with anybody else. I would say that, using professional judgment all the time as to how much information is protecting the children without infringing on people's right to private life. Currently, you're already using professional judgment. You're already deciding on information that I should share or information that I shouldn't share without consent. Initially, the first thing that you would do is approach someone and ask for consent. Normally, the first thing that we'd be doing is checking that the family are okay, so part of that would be—we'll discuss with the school—that's not always possible. Sometimes we can't make contact with the family for whatever reason, so it may well be that the other agencies would be approached before we have gained consent. I was going to say that the difficulty that is always the level below child protection and what we do—I think that child protection is quite clear. Yes, absolutely. In a way, it is in school, and that's absolutely fine. If it's below child protection and you don't have consent or you have tried to gain consent and that has been refused, in my experience, you would probably go to an adviser of some description. We've got a child protection officer and you would probably do it in an anonymous fashion and ask for advice. It's hard to say without going into absolute details of situations where sometimes it has then not been shared, nothing has been done, or in other situations it has, because you're going into the minute detail of why one was okay and why one wasn't. In those circumstances, most named persons would be going to an adviser, anonymising and asking what do you think, and it's normally a social work that we're probably talking about that we probably want to share it with. You've then gone into the realms of us having named persons, which I was talking about in my current practice. Have local authorities looked at ways of supporting staff within social work, within education, in terms of providing them with some of these places to go, some information, what's the development? Although named person isn't in statute, we have been using it in our area. That's how we operationalise our business, if you like. Sorry, I've forgotten the question now. I was asking about what has been put in place, in terms of what local authorities intend to put in place. Now that you're saying that you are operating a shadow named person, what do you have currently in place for your staff in terms of seeking some of that support and guidance? You normally work in a team within a school anyway, so it would be working and talking about information that you have within the team. It would be going to normally at regional level. There is an adviser who you can speak to. Normally there are educational psychologists who would, probably on a monthly basis, visit the school and, again, in anonymous situation, you would bring up pupils that are causing concern. Has that been working well in that shadow system, in terms of supporting staff? Yes, so far. Jackie, sorry if you'll indulge me. Could I ask you about what supports do you think that the local authorities have put in place for particularly a school's child and family social worker? There's obviously the line management structure, so a worker, if they were in any doubt about information sharing, they would be speaking to their line manager. We do have requests, for instance, from solicitors for information, and we would seek advice from our legal section and also the data protection advisers within the local authority. In terms of education phoning us about what do you think about this piece of information, we have in the locality relationships with head teachers in the local schools in your area. It is quite possible that you would get a phone call just, but that's not a formal structure, that's much more informal. You've met different venues, so they would seek a bit of guidance in that, and also all the formal structure of social care direct. Can I just confirm, though, for the record that, for both of you, step one with any information would be, in normal circumstances, with immediate child protection concerns, would be to seek permission to share that information? It wouldn't be something that you would be immediately looking to share that information without seeking permission from child of their appropriate age or parent or caregiver. Well, I suppose it would depend on, you know, that there's a myriad of different pieces of information. For example, Jenny may phone to say, look, this is the umpteenth time this child has come in grubby, smelly. It's not necessarily child protection, maybe a family needing a wee bit extra support, mums. We don't know them, I think that's the crux of the matter, that they're not a family that we're familiar with necessarily, so it might be that we would contact the health visitor immediately and just say, you've been in the family home, what is your experience? Is this unusual? Do social work need to be involved, or could the health visitor offer the family a wee bit of support? So I wouldn't say that we know that the first thing we would do is phone the mother and say, the school's express concerns, we're going to phone the health visitor. So you would already share that information? Yes, I would probably seek information back. I suppose it's just investigating and assessing at that stage, but it does mean sharing the information that the school of contact is with that concern. Yes, I've already mentioned my concern about the conflation of child protection with wellbeing, and it's connected. The other concern is, what is it? Will the promulgation and formalisation of wellbeing indicators trigger unneeded and unwanted attention is a huge question? And the corollary of that is, will it increase mistrust? We already got systems where information is shared informally, and if we legislate and formalise some of this material, the concern would be that there would be overly formal processes in place. As I say, based on what I've challenged, I'm quite disparate, I've set of wellbeing indicators, so that's a concern of mine. But are we not already using those wellbeing indicators quite widely in, obviously, education and health and social work? We're using that as a common language to speak about children and their development. It depends what you mean by wellbeing. I'm talking about the perfect principles. We're already using those right across our child's development. Right, Mr Keir, you wanted to come in. Yeah, I want to remember the original question now, but I was going to say that about getting support for children, we've done something in the early years that I'll just give you an example, and we're looking to extend it. We have placed, and I think health and social care partners that helps us do this, we've placed social workers in health visiting team. So we've got a team of health visits with a social worker who's managed by a health visiting manager. So until it turns purpose, they're part of that team. We've taken child protection away from them, we've taken looked after children away from them, so they're purely there to support and assist families. So the health visitor will always ask and identify with the family what issues it might be, it might be with relationships, it might be a whole minute of things. But the health visitor will always ask, I've got social work here who haven't got that, can they come and support you? And the answer, nine times out of ten, has been yes. Girfech is about getting the right help at the right time to the right person. And again, as I said at the very beginning, let's not forget getting it right for every child. And it's about how do we pass, and it's not about a teacher becoming a social work assessor, it's not becoming, but it's about using different people's skills. And to do that, you have to share information, to utilise someone. So social work, we've got great skills around assessment, building therapeutic relationships. So what we do is, with consent, we involve them in a verli early. So it's a new model doing things, and we're looking to extend that towards our five to 18. Can we do that within schools? Can we get that support right at the very point, so it becomes preventative, it becomes early intervention, but it takes the stigma of social work intervention away. It's just using the right skills, the right people, but you have to share information to do that. Joan? Yeah, just really briefly reflecting on everything that you've said today. If I were being the devil's advocate, I would say that one of the reasons some of our young people were failed because of professional misjudgments and not speaking to each other, and that has been the driver for this legislation. I wonder what some of the evidence that we've had has suggested, and I think that you, Dr Cleedon, in particular, have suggested, that if we formalise this, you lose the intuitive instinct for understanding there's a problem, and that there'll be defensive practice. To what extent do you think that it's a problem? In essence, if that's the case, the very thing that's driven the legislation and driven the name person, which is early spotting of signs, then we're going way in the other direction. I wonder if it's overstated to say the danger defence of practice, which would be worse than the practice that we have currently. Does anybody? I think—I agree with you entirely, and that was one of my fears. It's not that the practice that we have would look much different from what it's proposed, but when there's any refocus on information sharing and the potential for workers to be prosecuted or whatever, for information sharing, there is inevitably a kind of pulling back. People may be not sharing enough. I think that, certainly from my experience, when the name person was trialled in Glasgow, there was definitely a lack of information coming through from different resources, and when it was abandoned, the situation reverted to the information sharing that we have. There are quite a lot of mechanisms for information sharing between health, police, if we have a referral that is of a concern, and I know that they say below child protection, but very often it is the information sharing that makes us decide whether it is child protection or not. The IRD process, which is a tripartite discussion between police, health and social work, is almost within 24 hours of the referral. From the information that we get, we can either move to child protection or say, I actually know, it's a single agency response, whether that be health, social work or indeed the police. I think that the point was made earlier about using people, the information and the skills that they have. The one that we don't particularly use well enough is education, and it's maybe there that's going to be the biggest problem in terms of knowing what to share and what to share. I mean, I was a school teacher for a long period of time. You see in a child every day, you actually invisibly see the deterioration in spotting the increased absence and so on. So educational feels like it's been a critical place to spot the early signs, but how well integrated is it into this information sharing process? Do you think that there may be a drawing back from from schools giving information if it's too formal? I think schools are just a wee bit wary about it. I think probably this time last year, maybe slightly earlier, I think they were freely sharing information and it was all about this basis of trying to get early help for a child. I think they are very wary of it now and it's building that back up so that the benefits of the information sharing are possible again. The last question is, when you have competing interests between the parents or the carer and the young person, how are those managed? In most circumstances, I'm thinking of a young person. I mean, I know someone just now who's an historic case who confided in his social worker about low-level problems that we have with his family and that immediately went back to the family, which compounded the abuse. Regardless of his legislation, are you confident that we understand the difference between the interests of the child and the broader interests of the family? Is that going to be helped by the legislation? I think that that comes down to the individual judgment of practitioners. We have situations where a young person has wanted counselling because of something and didn't want the school to know the name person. That is perfectly with that. I think that the child was 14, perfectly within their right. I know that we need to look way, way back to Gellwch and the Gellwch principle and about decision making of young people in terms of their own rights. We have to respect those. It's not on the individual basis. Again, there's one formula that we can see yet within every situation. It depends on what the situation is. Can I just ask Jenny Bran further to your point to Joanne Lamond? You're concerned about schools that they're wary of sharing information. That's not presumably within the school. That's to other agencies within the local authority. Other agencies, yes. I think probably because in some respects this sort of bigger role that we have as an aim person that is a new one. Where we were told that we could freely share, we did. Now that that's kind of in question again, people are a bit reluctant understandably and want to check with someone before they share that they are in fact doing the right thing. Although almost without question any cases I've been involved in, the teacher is wishing to do the right thing. It's about helping and it's definitely about the child, putting the child at the centre and not necessarily parents etc. If I'm overstating this argument, just tell me. If we enshrine all this in law, that situation becomes more challenging. The point that was made earlier on about lawyers starting to become involved and they need to legally check the position that a teacher may or may not find herself in. In other words, is this an improvement or what we have at the moment works effectively? I'm not sure. No, I don't blame you for not being sure. I'm not sure any of us are sure. Thank you. On those last points there, particularly around the unwillingness to share because staff think that they may well be prosecuted. Really what you're looking for here I suppose is reassurances, that's not going to be the case. Hopefully at that point then the staff will start to go back to what you were talking about earlier on. Also, correct me if I'm wrong but would there not need to be, the code of practice obviously has to help here but obviously there has to be guidance and training in place to make sure that within the parameters that the staff are confident about what it is that they're doing. Will it not, once it happens, if it happens, does it not just bed in? Major changes happen but then a year down a line or whatever you find that they're just part of what you do. It's a serious question, I don't know, but you've been through change before and thought it was horrific. That will be the reality and it's just that initial refocus on information sharing that everybody kind of takes a step back and becomes a little more reticent about information but yes eventually it will embed into the system and they'll revert to what is the safest for children. Sharing information is long and weary as Joanne was saying, the notion that every agency has a piece of a jigsaw and we get the full picture when we put that information together. I know there's concerns about families' invasion and private life but that piece can also be, there's concerns in one agency but actually the other pieces of the jigsaw ameliorate those concerns and the agencies don't need to be involved in families' lives. It's not all about us finding a route to be involved. As we say, you don't have that invisible army of social workers just desperate to go into everybody's house to do stuff. Okay listen, thank you very much for your attendance today, that was a very useful session. I'll suspend for a moment or two to allow the witnesses to leave before continuing. Thank you very much.