 Good morning, everybody. I'd like to welcome you to everyone to the fifth meeting of the Education and Skills Committee. Can I please remind everyone present to turn off their mobile phones as they can interfere with the sound system? I've received apologies from Johann Lamont, and Ian Gray is attending as her substitute. The first item on the agenda is a declaration of interest, and as this is the first meeting of the committee that Ian has attended, I therefore invite him to declare any relevant interests. Thank you very much. Item 2 on the agenda is to consider taking item 5 in private. Oh, sorry, Fulton, my apologies. Yes, just to draw members' attention to my register of interests, I'm a social worker registered with the Triple SE. Thank you very much. Item 2 is on the agenda is to consider taking item 5 in private. The committee will be discussing its approach to engagement and media work as part of its pre-budget scrutiny work. Are we agreed that we will take item 5 in private? Item 3 on the agenda is a panel on children's services. This is the fourth of six overview panels following on from earlier panels on skills, post-16 education and attainment. These sessions will inform consideration of our future work programme, and the overview will end with a session with the Cabinet Secretary. I welcome this morning Mike Burns, vice convener of the Children and Family Standing Committee, Social Work Scotland. Duncan Dunlop, chief executor of Who Cares Scotland. Mary Glasgow, director of Children and Family Service and External Affairs, Children First. Malcolm Shaffer, head of practice and policy, Scottish Children's Reporter Administration. Members will be aware that in August I met with Mary and three kinship carers, and Gillian Martin met with Duncan and young people who had experienced care. We then both had a session with children from Cowdenbeath primary school using a kit bag, which is an emotional literacy tool promoted by Children First. I would like to put on record our thanks to everyone who met us that day. I think that we were both very affected by the experiences of the people we met and the way the kit bag was used by the children. We will now move on to questions. I will ask a couple of questions first, and then we will move on to my fellow committee members. I would like to start off by asking Duncan and Mary how they felt the fact finding meetings went. If you would like to share your perspective, Mary, you first. Certainly the feedback from the kinship carers was that they found it immensely helpful to speak to the committee about their experiences and they felt heard and would really welcome the opportunity to raise the issues for their families, particularly that issue around the lack of early help that was around, both for their own children, which led to their grandchildren being placed within their care, but generally they were really keen to emphasise to the committee that the lack of community-based family support for families and children and then kinship carers at the point of placement and beyond is a real issue for them. Thank you very much, Duncan. I guys find it as usual when they get to speak to members of Parliament, or in this committee room, or outside it in particular, that that's really where they can really engage and have a great conversation we're dealing with that day. So thanks very much, and they're happy to do that in any other place going forward so that people properly understand the issues that affect them. As I said on the record, both Jolly and I found the whole session very rewarding and very interesting. The other question that I'd like to ask all the panel members is do you see your role in helping to close the attainment gap? If we could start off with yourself, Mr Shaffer. Our role is to intervene where children are not receiving sufficient care and in particular where there is a need for compulsion. So if children are not attaining and not attaining due to circumstances at home and where there is a significant concern, then where we come in is to identify children that need to be brought before children's hearing, children that are in need of compulsory measures of supervision. Can you give me a practical example or a concrete example of how the work that you do has helped to close the attainment gap? I think that where children are not attaining at home because of circumstances, say they're being neglected due to poor, perhaps parents got drug abuse, perhaps there's domestic abuse within the family, and services have tried to help on a voluntary basis, but the door is shut, they're not getting anywhere, or there's no improvement in the children's circumstances, then that's where the children's hearing system can come in and that's where you may need to identify an alternative placement and look to in particular whether the child needs to be in substitute care or whether there's alternative family care which can offer a more nurturing experience and allow a child to properly achieve attainment. Is there any way of monitoring the impact that that would have on the attainment or would that be too difficult? I think that's something that the national convener of Children's Hearing Scotland is looking at in terms of his duty to report to Parliament and in particular the sort of outcomes for children who have been referred to the hearing system, has it made a difference? That's not an easy question to answer, but it is something that we're trying to grapple with, we're looking at what the outcomes we want to see are and how they can be appropriately measured, so that's work in progress, if you like, and it's a very important question for us. Okay, thank you very much, Mary. At Children's First, we see our role as twofold. First of all, as a provider of national and local services across Scotland to children and families to offer practical and emotional support to those families whose children are furthest away from attainment in schools, so those who are affected by poverty, by domestic violence and abuse, by long-term trauma and attachment difficulties within their family relationships, so we view our role very much as helping those families to tackle some of the barriers that prevent their children doing well in school and have a range of supports available to do that. Also, we feel that we have, as a second aim in our organisation, a duty to bring the voice of the child and the family to these discussions. What we hear very much is that most of the families that we work with want their children to do well. There are hardly any that I've ever come across who don't want that, but they do face incredible challenges around poverty and disadvantage. One of the things that they tell us is that they need us to speak for them to committees such as this and also to the public in general to say that there are very real practical resources that these families need in order that their children get the best possible help that they can. For us, our role is twofold. It's to deliver practical and emotional support like the kit bag that you saw in schools which encourages teachers and educators and all of us to realise that those children have incredible strengths. They often find it difficult to have their voices heard, but when you allow them and encourage them to develop their emotional literacy, they can really change culture within schools and encourage teachers to view them with more compassion and more understanding and see their problems less through a lens of behaviour and more through one of which is a communication of their distress. We take that part of our role really seriously to be a strong advocate for children and families. The other final thing I would say is that often we hear professionals, politicians and other people describe these children through a lens which is the issue that they are affected by, but they are the same children in our experience. The children we support that struggle in school are the children that are affected by neglect, poverty, domestic violence. It's really important that the attainment lens or those children are viewed through a lens which is not just about attainment but actually sees them in their whole life as part of families and as part of communities that face disadvantage. The approach to supporting them and tackling that attainment gap needs to be a very broad one. I think that there's a recognition of that. Again, I'll ask a similar question. How do you measure, or is there a way of measuring the role that you have in closing that attainment gap? One of the things that we do as a third sector organisation is that we have to report in very great detail to our funders and those who commission our services the outcomes that we achieve. We have an outcomes framework where alongside children and families our work will design bespoke support packages where they will look for to record the aims that that work has and then track those families and children every three months to make sure that we're on track. For instance, some of the work that you saw with the kinship carers, most of those children in kinship care will have a support package, will meet with the kinship carers and there will be very practical things that we'll aim to offer, so support around helping those children from the trauma that's led them to being looked after away from their own birth families or support around getting children to nursery places, making sure that they're accessing all the health support that they require getting to school on time, those very practical things. We have a mechanism by which we can track and measure those, but the most important thing is the feedback that we get from the children and the families themselves and also the direct observation. We can see very clearly what a relationship-based type of support can offer a family, the sense of relief that you notice, the ability to families to understand why they've got themselves into the difficulties they've got. More importantly, you can see the hope that you can offer these children that life can be better in the future. That's probably the most important thing that we can measure. It's not always the easiest in terms of quantifiable measures, but we're absolutely convinced that we see that and they do tell us very much that that's what makes the difference. OK, thank you very much. First, who cares Scotland represents the care experience population? We don't deliver any care service directly to them. We're literally whereby we help them to connect together and find their voice and their identity. We do that through a number of routes. The first thing to realise about this population is that you'll often find that there are about five years behind in their educational life course or journey from where they should be. That's because education isn't a priority for people living in a house that's full of domestic abuse if you're potentially a young care age, six, seven, eight, and you're looking after your wee brother and sister. Really, what's going on at school isn't a priority for you. You go to school and often that's a safe haven, but paradoxically the school, because you haven't got the social behaviours and the skills to fit in there, not been taught them, you're also up to eight times more likely to be excluded from that school, which is the one place you feel okay. So there's a big barrier within that and this is because they don't have necessarily the skills and tools to fit into that environment whereby all of our children understand the culture we teach them from very early days through the love that we're able to give them the stability in our homes, how to connect with them. So one of the main things that we do as an organisation around that is via the corporate parenting training in the main in terms of what we do to educate all corporate parents and schools would certainly be that under the local authority responsibilities under corporate parenting. In terms of understanding what's going on for those children's lives. So the teacher instead of just looking at the behaviour and seeing that as a problem that's disrupting their classroom, can in actual fact think about it and see the qualities in this child or young person and how can we help integrate and get them on and overcome some of these issues. And there's some really lovely examples. There's a girl we're speaking to yesterday who's heavily involved in our organisation now and it was actually her high school up in the highlands where she really felt was her home. We see it every time with a young person that makes it through to adulthood in terms of surviving far less thriving they found love somewhere and love's a really important feature and outward mainstream social work services and other services that may be involved in your life the vast majority of these children go to school but it was that high school where this person really found that they felt home. They could dry their hair in the mass teachers office they had their own teacup and the staff from by the end of fifth year the cook at school would give a toast in the morning the janitor would cut the keys there was numerous examples she ended up doing a washing down in the same school because she moved numerous places and it was five different houses she lived in in her last year but that was the school where she felt loved and connected. And I think therefore sometimes we have to realise as professionals which might come in with one purpose to educate her other areas there's a huge amount of roles that we can play in understanding what's going on for our children in order for them to actually get on and thrive and the one other thing we did in the last 18 months was really work with the Widing Access Commission and that's what we brought again via a corporate parenting type focus of our work here's the care experience understand the barriers to why the university is an aspiration and never even dreamed of and what it is that can happen and we were really proud of what came out of that in terms of looking to give them full bursaries to go to university from next year and there are a number of ways in which we want to continue to educate and inform the Scottish public through to corporate parents and right up to this Parliament in terms of what needs to happen and what life is like for the care experience people because until we understand that perspective and how they actually see and understand life which is different from the way the vast majority of us do we're going to continue to exclude them. Okay, thank you very much Mike. Social work's got to be focused on outcomes and I think from that perspective we need social workers that are passionate about attainment we need teachers that are passionate about inclusion and I think we need to recognise that for all of our services particularly within now health and social care constructs that we need to be passionate from pre-birth through the early years we need to be focusing on making children ready to learn we know that for social work if children are attending nursery and attending and attaining well within school then their care circumstances and their needs are much greater promoted within that environment we see some really good examples around kinship care homework clubs focused in on helping children to attain the bit around working really closely with colleagues in education about assisting attendance and attainment and again we've seen really good examples of mainstream schools holding on to young people yes, measuring that is about times looking at issues around the reduction in exclusion but again within our own authority at the moment in Glasgow we've been looking at for residential care and also foster care as benchmarking not just attendance at school and that being a particularly high level but then looking at issues around attainment so I think from that point of view we see it as being absolutely intrinsic to what we need to do as a profession and as a provider of services okay, thank you very much I'd like to ask Liz Smith thank you, convener in the last Parliament and in the Parliament previous there was a lot of discussion about how better we could look after youngsters beyond the age of 16 the legislation reflected that I wonder if I could ask how you feel we are progressing in ensuring that the chances of those beyond the age of 16 are improving I don't mind who goes first thank you very much I think in the last Parliament and actually in this committee room with the education and culture committee really something happened there which was a seismic moment in terms of what we'll go on with in social policy in the future we got them beyond what happened here was particularly looking at the children and young people's act 2014 where this committee did and it came out particularly to our officers in Scotland who care Scotland officers and they started speaking and what listening was the main role to care experienced people and a lot of them were those young people 16 plus into the early 20s in terms of very much telling what life was like before care, during care and after care and it was a remarkable moment I remember there were very emotional scenes for us too that eventually got passed and the one piece within the article was around raising the care leaving age of 21 and a remark that we started giving evidence to this committee in December and it was 2012 by June we did a last session in here in 2013 where we actually asked after just listening to stories we asked for the care leaving age to be raised to 21 and by December or January the 6th it was announced that the Children and Young People Act would actually be amended so that there was the care leaving age of 21 so that was six months and that's from what my knowledge is extremely fast in terms of how these processes work what that did was we went ahead and asked did that happen and what we realised was that was because care experienced people finally found their care identity they found their voice, they found their collective consciousness and we then looked at it in terms of well what will we do next so that the Scottish Parliament elections we went oh we'll ask for return to care that was one of the things we wanted to look at and it's still something that would very much matter but what actually came out of our deliberations and that was what's returned to care why do we have to put in the statute book that people have the right to return home surely there's something fundamentally wrong with the system whereby you have to pick up a piece of paper and a policy document to say I actually have the right to come back to your house to live with you and that actually brought into light really what was the system based on and it's a fundamental question we really do want at this time of Parliament to look at is and because of what's really happening now in this growing care consciousness is this entire system has evolved from something over 150 years ago an industrial revolution that's when we started out having residential care and institutional care and yes it has changed since then it's not to say it's the same at all there are well over 100 years old 150 years old really innovative things about Dr Bernardo as we see we're celebrating it in terms of setting up basically the early form of foster care there was always kinship care in that sense and then we looked at institutional care why are we still using the same structures of care today why are we still looking and presuming that that is fulfilling the purpose of a very different society in a different childhood and we've moved yes we have from trying to make children into being economically viable entities for our society to look after service, the empire to then if you look it was only in 1970 we sent the last boat to Australia with children from our care system and what actually then happens is if you look in the 80s and 90s we started to look at abuse we suddenly started to be uncovered in our institutions and we came to a real protectionist culture of care but not one piece of our legislation our policy, practice or guidance has been informed by care experienced people apart from that element that article within the Children and Young People's Act around the care leaving age and our ask is an actual fact to see why don't we and wouldn't it be a cathartic really solution focus process to stop and look at the entirety of a care journey because we will look from the name person we'll look at child protection we'll look at the children's hearing system we'll look at looked after reviews we'll look at kinship care, foster care we'll look at residential care we'll look at looked after at home care and the child will go right through that cycle cycle numerous times we will then look at their outcomes whether they're good or not we'll look at education, nursery, primary school secondary school, further and higher education we'll look at whether they're unemployed or not we'll look at mental health, sexual health physical health we'll look at justice we'll look at housing and homelessness any one of those issues and there's a lot more any social wellbeing issue that this Parliament look at disproportionately care experience people or those in the cusp of care will be asked to how does it affect you and what we're saying is we look at that entire journey of our care and protection system and we look at all of the consequences and that comes from it and we say look the one piece of magic that we found so empowering was we looked to the care experience and we asked its voice what it should do and our ask this time is can we actually just look at it from the care experience perspective what is life like and what will we learn the beginning that the prevention work from the name person but in the controversy around that the one thing that's been absent is that the voice of the child right through to after care to the life and the life course as an adult because we also know that the cost of this is off the scale two years ago the previous children's minister said it was £2.5 billion of a life course of this so what we're really asking for now is let's not just look at the outcomes 2016 and return to care or something like that let's actually take stock understand that this parliament and this committee release the care identity in such a liberating movement for a socially just country to accept and embrace and say let's look at their lives and understand that we can change the entirety of the care and protection system could I just follow up and thank you very much for a very comprehensive answer could I just follow that up by asking what parliamentary process you would like to see in order to do that there's several layers to this one is there has to be in our mind a root and branch review yourselves are best predisposed to understand what that can be whether that's a commission, an inquiry or something else that places the care experience right at the centre so we focus on them not exclusively others need to be involved but we've never given access to that voice and alongside that this has to affect and feel every single Scott this is about attitude shift if you actually probably look at what will come as a consequence of that the vast majority of bureaucracy which is constraining our system from loving our children if you look at our bureaucracy at the moment we'll talk about attachment, wellbeing we'll talk about social pedagogy we'll talk about nurturing not one of those words is used in the playground that my children go to they talk about love and all our children in care are most vulnerable those have been traumatised that word does not exist that's a controversial word so what we're saying is yes we have to look at it in our legislation and potentially we have to draw back a lot of it and we have to really engage and show the political leadership and the leadership in this country that says to scots this is okay we have to see and seek the strength in these children and enable them to feel part of our communities in our societies we have to feel as though we are able to love them and they are loved and we can connect it and that's a political leadership so there's an attitude and cultural shift of reform but yes there needs to be a review of what's going on just to finish on that point obviously this committee in previous times has looked substantially into kinship care and done major reports into some aspects of this do you feel that we need to broaden the appeal of any commission that we were to set up as a Parliament I think it should look from there if you want to look at it the care experience perspective on the entirety of the care and protection system so if I look at kinship care that's one small piece of the jigsaw of what will probably affect their lives children do not normally just sit in one care placement 68% have three placements a year they will go from looked after at home to kinship to foster back to being looked after at home to residential they don't just sit in one place we do a lot with our membership we have well over in less than two years we've got 1100 members who joined who has gone to care experience and when we ask them that fact not what your current care placement is but what care placements you've existed in the vast majority are naming looked after at home kinship care foster care they've been in several places again we want to look at one piece of it but we have to look at it from the child's perspective I've been through many parts of this journey please look at it from my life okay thank you Jolyne do you want to come in first of all I want to echo what James Stornan has said about meeting with Laura and Chadell I haven't stopped thinking about it since and it was great to see the documentary last night on STV Who Cares which was very affecting and I'd recommend anyone catch up with it and it was great to see those two amazing women tell their story and I think I absolutely echo what you're saying I think their story is the most important thing in this whole conversation what I'd like to ask is do you think the work that's been done to achieve early permanence and that came through very strongly from what both of them said to me in that time that I spent with them is we had Chadell for example who had achieved early permanence with a foster mum who she now calls mum and we had Laura who didn't and Laura's life was I mean Laura's the fact that Laura is now a parent herself and a loving relationship is an absolute miracle after what she's been through so do you think this what the work that's been done in achieving early permanence and greater stability for young people is going to help create positive outcomes and how do you see it's working and I'd just like to just get your general thoughts on how that's working out on this one I think that it's connected to the whole system so I mean in relation to the issue around continuing care recognising is that that early permanency is critical and it is that bit about being decisive within the early years about the management of risk so that remains critical but is that point about as you're recognising it's the whole system we're seeing that early permanency is contributing to assisting kinship care has made a massive contribution to the whole raft of children to remain with our family that has enabled the system I think to then focus but in relation to that issue around continuing care the challenge is absolutely massive in relation to putting the investment into early family support where we remain locked in and we're not in the position where everybody recognises and supports the aspirations of the Christy commission but we've been really really failed your demand and we've been really poor in terms of making the impact so that early decisive around permanency has got to have a moral and social element to it which is about the fact that the scaly family support needs to be in the community as well so that you're able to provide families with ethically a position where we're saying we've supported that family as best we can to then be in a position towards permanent care and consequently it's the points that I think has been made I think we've made some really good progress in relation to continuing care I think if you look at the scaly young people who are remaining in care they're remaining in care longer they're more and more in care at 17, 18, 19 up to 21 we've replicated that in relation to the finance in relation to kinship care so I think the picture is positive I think there are really solid foundations so this issue about love to me love is an action in the compassion of the Parliament elected members to replicate that in relation to the investment that's gone into kinship care into residential care you look at the care inspection in relation to foster care so I think that was replicated last night to say there's an immense amount we need to celebrate and we need to promote early permanence has implications for the hearing system and in particular for our decision making and we have made moves in terms of a greater understanding of the impact of attachment the greater understanding that early decisions are important for children in terms of preventing delay preventing children being moved to and forward or once a child is before children's hearing how many moves does that child have to make before they establish permanence and what we've seen in our permanence research is there are too many moves taking place and children being shuttled between different carers not having stability not having that one person and that was one of the key messages for me from last night about the difference just one person who's always there how frightened some of those people were saying that they were when they were moved that came across very strongly for me absolutely and also what we say I was struck by the child who talked about when social worker was taking him to home said you'll know why and the impact that had on on him you know so there's lessons for us all within SCRA we employ modern apprentices young people who've been in care to work for us also to advise us on issues to do with recruitment and policy and also in the process of establishing the young people's board which will oversee and look at our work as corporate parents to see that we fulfil our responsibilities within the course of the young person's self-rehearing Iain Gray has got a question maybe you could come in after Iain I just really wanted to follow this up and kind of come at it slightly from the other side which was Duncan you used the statistic that 68% of care experienced young people that you work with saw three placements each year so that's an astonishing degree of impermanence and my question I suppose is from your perspective and reflecting the experience of those in the care system how do you stop that because it's easy well it's not easy but it's clear to talk about early decisions and getting it right first time but that possibly increases the risk of getting it wrong first time and making it difficult to correct that how can that balance possibly be struck because it does seem to me that if anything is going to undermine the possibility of somebody feeling a sense of being loved it's being moved around from pillar to post constantly that it has to leave somebody feeling that the system and society has no place for them I guess taking decisions quickly and making sure that they are the right decisions which will have a good outcome well I think that again it's a perspective of which we take this we talk about children's rights we talk about them being paramount and they're just not in reality, article 12 there's over 36,000 hearings last year less than 2% of those did a child have an advocate present so the voice wasn't heard that's coming to a formal procedure where it's all about you working in your best interest people trying to do the right thing and you have no ability to have a voice articulated in there and not all of these are babies and very young children some of them are quite old enough that could really get the perspective across if we were to go to court we'd have a lawyer if only 2% of us had a lawyer in court or if we had an issue at work we'd have the right someone there to represent us the children's hearing Scotland that's been in 2011 was meant to be enacted around advocacy since 2014 and there is some research going on with government and we've been involved with that but I'm a bit worried that it's going to come out with an outcome that's far too low brown far too focused on the hearing itself what we actually have to look at is how do we give them voice one of the best things of protection is independent from the system is that child is someone independent that they can speak to and their relationships is looking at the quality of the environment the sofas, the paint it's a comfortable place to live but I don't look at whether that child is being loved in the place that they're actually living and so if we want to look at it in terms of this we have to start looking at it from a child's perspective they tell us time and again when you come into our lives I'm taken into care particularly if they're older because of crisis but you knew the issue was there you may be monitoring or involved with my family for quite a while actually trying to help my mum overcome her addiction or get out of an abusive relationship and really take some practical steps to make her life better there's some great initiatives going on around the country in that regard but it's not wholesale people don't get the support they want and what children and people tell us is why didn't you try and really intervene not just monitor it and if you intervene and you manage to fix my home life great and if you didn't then why didn't you take me to one place like Shaddell last night in that programme and just to care for two years that's not stability psychologically I'm a belonging here how do I get my identity and so really what we're saying is there's a need very much for them to have a voice and appeal to this committee to really look at the level of advocacy that will come out of the full implementation of that and needs to happen relatively quickly in our opinion and the other part to this is we have to open this up to Scotland we have not enabled we realise there's a hell of a lot of good Scots out there who don't understand care the rhetoric out there is he's a damaged dangerous difficult children they're not, there are children when we get difficult behaviour get closer we really do believe that you can get easily enough foster families or whatever they'll be called caregivers in the end who get close and own these children and it's not just that whether it's running a football group or any other group in the community accommodate and understand the behaviour and get close to these children and make a broader conversation to be had in Scotland as well as looking at how we give them a voice I'm going to follow on from what Duncan said one of the issues that we see very much is the impact of trauma these children have not got to where they're at because their lives have been simple or without difficulty and the uncomfortable truth is it makes these children sometimes difficult to look after because they display their distress in a way that adults find difficult one to understand and two to deal with and three there is a huge lack of trauma informed attachment informed support for families to deal with that so just yesterday across my desk came an email about a kinship carer who has her three year old grandchild as a result of her daughter's death due to drug and alcohol use who's seen this child as completely out of control described tantrums difficulty settling at night what she described as a distressed child who hasn't made sense of what's happened to them and her absolute inability to get any support for that child that does not medicalise that child or put her on a waiting list for a CAM's appointment so one of the most important things that we think that you need to do is think about making sure that all professionals wherever they come across children are attachment informed they understand relationships they understand what children need in terms of their development to thrive and grow we talk a lot about it to help to distill that information and to practice and secondly we need to think about trauma recovery services for these children and their families who look after them and we need to stop waiting until they get into to school where they can then decide that they're a difficult or a badly behaved child and exclude them we need to think about early trauma recovery which recognises that how else would these children be with some of the experiences that we've got and not wait until they need a CAM's appointment and then view them through a medical lens which pathologises their long-term family difficulties as if it's their own mental health problem and so one of the things we would really advocate the committee to think about is early years family support as early intervention as possible but also really good high quality trauma recovery because these young people go on and be parents and they are remarkable I wholeheartedly agree that their survival is a remarkable thing but we then expect them very quickly to become parents without really helping them overcome some of their trauma and then they quickly get back into that loop of child protection neglect in the system because they've not had help as parents Can you maybe explain a bit for me and on about other committee members what you mean by trauma recovery support that isn't a medicalised model because to somebody like myself that sounds like psychological help but that's clearly not what you mean but I want to know exactly what you mean as the intervention is missing there Absolutely I don't deny there will always be a need for very skilled psychological support for children but what I mean when I talk about trauma informed recovery is that every professional understands and attributes behaviour to something that's happened for a child that we must recognise that when we're viewing children whether it's as carers or whether it's nursery teachers or primary school teachers or whatever it is children are not inherently badly behaved they do not display behaviour in order to make all of our lives difficult it does make our lives difficult but actually what they are trying to do is communicate distress where feelings are not discussed you've not had love and care routinely and regularly modelled for you it becomes very difficult to describe your feelings so you don't have control over your emotions you're not contained in the way that those of us who've come from loving secure families are so what we talk about when we mean trauma informed support is that we encourage adults to listen really carefully to what children are saying or displaying at a time trying to understand what that might be about get curious about why that child is not able to sit still in a class or is violent or is disruptive and recognise that the way in which all of us engage with them where we are compassionate thoughtful, loving kind and not blaming and get into conversations with those children about what's really going on and then try and access early help for that family so what you're suggesting is I'm trying to think of a way of putting this that isn't pejorative but a lack of skill or understanding or training or expertise amongst those who are engaging with the children we're talking about rather than a whole separate service so this is about teachers, doctors health visitors understanding trauma recovery and how to deal with that a missing service I think it's a bit of both I think there is a huge lack of resources there's a huge lack of family support resources to offer early help to prevent these children coming into the system in the first place and then I think Duncan mentioned culture we know more than we've ever known about how children develop how brains develop, how as humans we need to connect, feel loved and make sure that we're human beings but we've not really disseminated that science in practical ways across the whole professional spectrum that children come across so we do need to get better at making sure that all of our training for all the professionals that work with children and with all of us is attachment informed and trauma informed it's a rapidly developing science as you like but the evidence is incontrovertible that the most important thing for children is to be loved, is to be cared for is to have consistency but I would also add that when the worst does happen and it does for those children we hear right across the scale of the services that we provide that there is a huge lack of trauma recovery there is a huge lack of support services for both parents carers and children themselves just to talk about what has happened so the kitbag work that we offer in schools and that some members of the committee saw is a practical tool where you can encourage children to develop emotional language to describe the things that worry them to do that individually to do that in families and to do that in schools and it's not particularly clever and it's not particularly difficult but it's not that easy either we really need to encourage everybody to just get better and to be able to talk about those things that have happened that have been difficult and sometimes the talking in itself is the recovery waiting until the distress is so compounded that children are self-harming or not able to attend school or have various difficulties that prevent them engaging with ordinary life is probably too late for very specialist support to come in so what we really need is that trauma informed professionals to support a community level that's targeting whole families I'm going to move on to Fulton now can I just ask, we have got a lot to get through today so if you can try and keep the questions and answers a wee bit I'll put up the group I'm quite interested to hear what the panel's views on the permanency question as again I know we've touched on it earlier I think that it is a very very difficult and sensitive area because the experience of working in that particular area isn't an easy decision to make or be involved in so I wonder about the panel maybe particularly Mike thinks would be helpful for Parliament or the committee to look at in terms of ensuring that practitioners across all the various services feel confident to make the decision about permanency earlier because there is a fear of getting it wrong and I think Ian Gray touched on that as well I think that the point that you're raising is that it is a dilemma and it's a traumatic and painful decision and we should never underestimate how challenging that is for the system for the children's hearing system and the court system to get right but I do think that the point that you're raising is that the issue about the need to be decisive and to proceed for the best interests of the child does need to be paramount and I think in terms of the child protection review and the issue around neglect I think it's been rightly identified that the children's hearing system and particularly the children's hearing improvement partnership needs to look at permanency in the context of child protection because it's all part of the same issue and it is that bit about where as I was saying earlier we need to be absolutely, we need to create a level of family support that's first class to then be in a position that we're then able to make decisive permanency decisions and I think picking up Mr Gray's point about saying we then do need to be in the position where we are monitoring that placement movement for young people so that the matching process is critical as well in relation to permanency if we get those decisions right for children we then subsequently know that we can be in the position where we can act decisively and we can give them the child that they deserve following on from that I think I would want to touch on the marion up if you like of the child protection process and the children's hearing system because these are two of the most formal processes a young person can go through and I think there has been steps taken over the last few years to ensure that both processes are working in alignment with each other but I think there is more that can be done for example and I don't know if it happens in some parts of the country but certainly not every pair the attendance of a children's reporter a local children's reporter at child protection conferences I think would be a massive step forward on that aspect I agree with you that there is work that still needs to be done on this particularly in terms of everybody's understanding of what are not two different systems, they are part of the same system they are part of the same process and it's a matter of understanding of where one hits the other it's a matter of where the hearing system comes in as I said earlier where compulsion is needed there may be an identified problem, a child neglect issue which agencies can work on the call is when is enough enough when is the level of concern such that you need to bring it on to the next level when you're not getting co-operation it's not achieving change and I think in particular in cases of neglect we we sometimes drift with cases it's much easier dealing with a specific incident which is definable where you've got a continuous pattern of behaviour when is enough enough when you intervene now I think it's important that reporters have clear links with agencies whether attendance at a child protection I mean I've been to child protection conferences in the past sometimes they are valuable in terms of collecting information but routine attendance may not always be necessary when you don't have much to contribute because you may not know about the family so I entirely take your point about the co-element of a reporter being in touch with local agencies and being able to have dialogue whether it needs the physical attendance at child protection conferences not always I think that the point that we're trying to make was not so much about the semantics of whether a reporter would attend an individual case conference I think the point that I was trying to make was to combine what's been said around the table today and by all the panellists in terms of these are two very intense processes and it's a young child and their family that are going through them and I can say they're intense processes because I know from my experience as a worker that they're intense processes you're going and you're making the case sometimes twice and they're both very serious processes and quite rightly so so what I was more getting at was rather than an individual circumstance was does the panel think that there's any way that the committee can help to look at the marine up of those processes so that we're not talking about young vulnerable children going through them twice and also bringing in making sure that their voice is heard in the process and I'm a big supporter of advocacy agencies however I also do think that when there isn't an advocacy agency in place I do think that most the majority of social workers who are working in children's services do advocate well on children's perhaps as well so that was the sort of point that I was making Can I just add something there just the point about at which point decisions are made and also just bringing in child protection case conferences and children's hearings one of the things that regularly comes up from us, from kinship carers and also family members is that difficulty that parents have or carers have in engaging with those processes because they are incredibly formal as you quite rightly said and they need to be there are a large number of professionals in the room discussing families most complex, distressing, private matters and one of the things that people often talk about is how difficult it is to actually contribute to those conversations and one of the things that the new children and young people act we were very pleased to see was this idea of family decision meetings and one practical way of making sure that wider family can get involved in making decisions about children at an earlier stage or even stepping in and offering supporters through family group conferencing and so at children first we would like to see more emphasis across the country in developing those types of very practical ways in which wider, broader family members can get involved in planning for children's safety and can then also contribute to formal decision making processes in the child protection system and in the children's hearing system because it's really really important that to make as Mike says the right decision for children we need to make sure that all other alternatives have been explored thank you very much the brief point is that we can focus on the points and the processes but for this to be and they're quite sudden because the decision can be made particularly in the children's hearing system and then all change for a child or young person that they didn't realise was coming or even potentially an option and that's not just leaving your house and your parents let's leave in your potentially your school, your pets, your grandparents your friends all the physical environment you knew that in itself can be quite a traumatic experience for children and I think there's a way in which we need to look at these processes which is a bit more extended and a bit more fluid in terms of understanding from the child's perspective how can this be a little bit more natural well maybe not natural but a little bit more not so alien so how do we get to know potential care caregivers beforehand how do we stop this being so often such a sudden thing that comes because of a moment of crisis if we can see problems of building up within families and we can project where a child might need to end up or go whether it's in kinship care or in another foster care placement and it's really about well how do we then start introducing that child to that possibility to the possibility of a new reality in a more organic and natural way and there's different ways in which we can start to look at that rather than it need to be so defined by the point of process and the child moves so I do think that if we look at it from a child's perspective we might get a better, a different answer we'll move on to Convita you've got a question I'd like to look at staffing in the broadest sense and maybe starting with the children's panel I understand there's about two and a half thousand volunteer panel members at the moment and I think we've all seen the adverts and the press desperately seeking more and I think the figure is they're looking for another five hundred and sixty is that a topping up or is it additional members I can't speak with complete authority because obviously this is the work of children's hearing Scotland rather than ourselves but my understanding is that that is the normal figure that they're looking for per year across Scotland and it may be a combination of panel members having served their term and not continuing further or panel members who've moved on because of their life circumstances I'm not aware if from Children's Hearing Scotland whether there's any particular extension of numbers my suspicion is it's more replenishing those that have moved on I suppose I'm curious about this because it's also a case that the number of referrals is at an all-time low and I was just curious whether we're having a number of panel members for any particular reason or if as you say it's maintaining numbers and there seems to be a difficulty in the recruitment in terms of the referrals have dropped but actually the number of hearings and other types of business has remained more steady so the referrals dropping are those who are not ending up at hearings anyway the number that appear at hearings is still of a level number I can't answer because I don't know in terms of the issue of whether they're adding extra there's certainly demands upon panel members we know that and through the years we've seen a huge number of public coming forward Do any of the panel have any information on that? We're involved in training the new tranche of panel members every day we do one section of the seven parts of the training we're involved within that and we do part of the recruitment selection bit too and from my understanding is to replenish the parts about a 20% turnover of that but I think what's really interesting is that we do focus quite a lot on the children's hearing processes and how we make that better in all credit to SCRA and the children's hearings in Scotland in terms of what they're trying to do and I know that you mentioned that the young person's board are trying to do but that's a moment in time and it's very easy for us to look at and legislate and look at the process that happens there and it does matter how you go through that process how accommodating it feels to the young person and the family that's involved in it but it's really the wider system that they're going to be part of the trauma that I've experienced and is there really a quality for the foster family to meet my needs available out there and that's one of the questions of looking at staffing I was really quite disappointed to see this year even in Edinburgh that they were recruiting for professional foster carers it was a career and I don't see parenting as a career Coming to foster carers there is a question about availability of foster carers and there's an increasing number of children going into foster care which often can be a good thing I believe that the target in Scotland for 2016 is 800 foster carers I presume that's 800 additional replacement I suppose that the issue about scale and about what is then required in relation to foster care I think is really important and I think from that I'll go back to the bit about within our own city we've got 1,000 foster carers but we now have 1,000 kinship carers so those 1,000 kinship carers are looking after 1,300 children and that in some respects has reached a point where no matter the quality of our marketing and our marketing and our profiling within the city has been received awards is actually saying at what point does recruiting foster carers become more and more difficult and that I think is still for the committee to grapple with the fact that I think numbers are easy to move around but when we talk about 1,500 15,000 children in care the scale of that for the country is massive in relation to how we meet that need how we get into the issue of matching and how we get into the issue of reducing placements I think I've tried to understand whether supply and demand are actually working here or if we have a significant problem in these areas I think there are other issues to take and so I'm often struck by the fact that again within Glasgow we've seen children on orders going from something like 3,500 to 1,900 the demand for social work in terms of getting it right for every child has meant that more and more children are in care under voluntary measures so they're in care under section 25 and consequently are not viewed or seen by a children's hearing system and consequently it also means that when you look at children on the education within a game within our own city we have something like 295 social workers dealing with 12,500 open cases so it's not just the scale in terms of those children that are profiled as looked after and accommodated by the children hearing system it's the scaley children that are in care under section 25 it's the scaley children that are on the education and then it's the scaley children that are open across a whole range of social work departments that needs to be understood Do you think that perhaps to some extent hides the scale of the issue We tend to focus on the one side I think that there are issues around percentages and around particular issues that I think give a snapshot but again I think that the point of the committee has constantly put back to us is to say we need to understand that as a whole system and we need to understand the scaley the whole system to understand what's going on because when you start to talk about relationships relationships are based on quality quality is based on time if social workers are completely saturated with the levelling need that they are dealing with then that erodes their ability to meet arranging needs at early stages on the education care right the way through to permanency and that's something that is a feature across I would say the 32 local authorities within Scotland Well I was coming to social workers actually because on paper there's a record number of social workers and yet we hear that they're handling ever more cases but some of the headline figures we see don't really indicate that I think that again that goes back to the fact that there needs to be a shift in a transformation in the whole system and I think that's been one of the issues around the named person the named person was about facilitating early support it was about facilitating early family support in terms of a lot of the work that colleagues like Mary do within the third sector that early family support and what that is meaning is we then need to be in the position of prevention we need to be in the position of diversion if you don't have that infrastructure within local communities then what happens is that that work escalates into social workers then doing early family support and social workers then being in the position where we're asking them to meet a whole range of needs and a whole range of duties and I think that's where for colleagues like myself and Mary we're saying there does need to be in a sense within Scotland if we're serious about the early years and we're serious about family support then we need to have an infrastructure unique for us in social work is that we're a profession that is actually saying to everybody to say to politicians, to the media and to the community we're not the solution and you can't keep thrown social workers at some of these social problems we need a response that is whole system and we need a response where there's a levelly family support that goes on Colin, can we pull it to a close? Can we pull it to a close? Okay just briefly what is the major shift that you would like to see that would make that step change? Early years, earlier intervention and more robust family support Thanks very much Duncan you wanted to come in and then Ross Yeah I think there's something there around when we're looking at foster families where we view care it's in a sense that yeah we have 800 deficit I think there's a really interesting challenge for us as a country the refugee crisis we've had in the last 18 months or so that's been very affecting the wider UK there's something like looking at the UK and the equivalent number of families willing to support and aid refugees as deficit that we have for foster families in the UK the reason is we know why that refugee child and that family needs it we've seen them bombed out in various places in Syria we've seen them in Denguys and the Mediterranean bombed out in anbulance recently and we've seen them in the jungle in Calig we know why that child needs help the problem is with some of our narrative around our children and young people who are most vulnerable to what Mike's talking about in the early years and our communities writes to those who are needing care is we do not have that narrative going on every day in Scotland about what our children most vulnerable children in care and protection need and our question is really we can make this a lot simpler we can make it a lot easier we can give access to understand what our experienced children need if we look at it from their perspective we enable them to connect with their identity and tell their stories and one of the features of this is we do have to then look at some of what will come of this as a simplifying of some of the bureaucracy and some of our overprotective measures I don't mind using the example I was giving the other day whereby a woman who got divorced 25 years ago was told that her ex-husband 25 years ago had to give her a reference as to whether she'd be a quality foster carer and that's the sort of thing that happens if she pulled off from wanting to engage in the system that would have been a very good person she'd been a loving caring family to her child no thanks if that's what's going to happen I'm not going to be engaged and we know there's a way that some of these things have to be played out but we really have to look at some of our over protection of a system which is protecting us it's protecting our roles, our professions and our organisations and it's not necessarily providing the most access to the most loving homes and protecting the children okay thank you Ross I always want to touch on the allowances for kinship carers I know it was changes were made so it's equivalent to what's paid to foster carers and that's what local authorities are doing in Aberdeen, just as an example the cost of doing so was around about half a million it was very welcome that the Scottish Government took forward some funding to help support it was still shortfall of about £142,000 I would like to get an idea from you on what is it like across all local authorities is there disparity in terms of provision across other local authorities is there more that we can do in relation to resource and looking at the recent figures I see that the number of children in kinship care has actually slightly fallen back and what you think the reasons for that are Can I just come in just with one point, we children first manage the national kinship care service and deliver local services to support kinship carers in communities across Scotland we very much welcomed the provision made in the 2014 act but that does only apply to those kinship carers who have formal care arrangements and it does not include the many thousands of kinship carers who informally care for children and that's the biggest single issue is the inconsistency across the country not only in financial support but also in access to longer-term family support and support with children who display difficulty and need trauma recovery so I think that there is a real issue around disparity for kinship carers up and down the country and we certainly kinship care is one of those provisions that for children has really potentially very good outcomes because they can be reared within their own families maintain those connections but there are also some very complex difficulties that it can often look like a quick and simple solution to take a child from one part of their family and place it in another but there are often very good reasons why that family historically has had difficulty and what's really important is that assessment at the time of placement really takes account of what really led to this whole family getting into this situation and I couldn't agree more with Mike around the time and resource that we need both within early years family support early intervention family support to help families at the earliest possible stage but also for social workers who at the point of assessment at times of crisis often really struggle to get the time to get into the kind of depth of what's really going on in a family so they can make the best possible long-term decision at that point a placement made in haste will often break down later and lead to all the concerns I think that it was a really good example of, I think it was really welcome to, I think it was 10.1 million that was facilitated in terms of moving towards equivalency I think that your point is quite right Mr Tholms that that caused a number of authorities some significant challenges in what was a very difficult financial settlement but I think again there was a real consistency of commitment by elected members across councils to meet that commitment and I think within social work Scotland I know again across local government and there's been a real eagerness to get to a point of consistency so that for people in Scotland that that is applied there was obviously a bit whereby in relation to the previous challenge that what was agreed on was local equivalency so that the equivalency that took place was in relation to the foster care payments that you were making and those foster care payments then subsequently they vary significantly and I think again that the Scottish Government recognised that that will be an area that we need to reconcile between the whole plethora of foster care payments to get into a position where kinship care and foster care is getting into a position where we streamline and simplify that Ross, you're finished, that's fine thank you very much Richard, you've got another question you'd like to ask clearly much of the discussion today has been on the systems and the processes for dealing in Scotland with children who need protection or care what I was wondering was if you wanted to comment on the underlying trends and the causes of in Scotland needing care in the first place in protection in your experience in your careers what have you noticed in recent years in terms of the trends, in terms of social economic factors I accept we're always going to problems in society and families but I just wondered if there's any specific trends that you've noticed perhaps I can start in terms of trends within the hearing system I've been a reporter for 41 years so I've seen a huge change in terms of the sort of why children are referred to us today in compared with how they used to be and without question the most significant advances are in the area of better understanding of the circumstances of children it's not that this wasn't happening before it's just that we weren't picking it up so when I started as a reporter overwhelmingly the referrals were about children's behaviour children offending children outwith parental control the focus very much on children's being the problem whereas now I think we have a greater understanding of the problems which lie behind that a greater understanding of the impact of domestic abuse in particular upon children and I think ever since the grant of referral was identified and made under the 2011 act to clarify and see the impact of that and it's one of the most common sources of referral an impact of which perhaps has been more significant in recent years has been the impact of substance abuse parents with substance abuse problems and their impact so I think we are moving to a stage where referral trends can see far more action being taken on in relation to under ones than there used to be if you look at trends for instance for child protection orders then you do see positive evidence of very early identification of problems to a far greater degree than existed before and much of this as I must stress is not that it wasn't there before I think it's just a little more understanding of what the issues are I think I would agree with that as a social worker now for 25 years both in the local authority statutory sector and now in the third sector for the past 15 years I think one of the key trends has been a much greater understanding of the impact of their experience on children and all of us and I think many important improvements have been made in that and that professionals do understand that one of the trends that I would definitely agree with though is this increasing understanding of the impact of domestic abuse on children and on wider society but I do think that there still is much work to be done there we do a lot of work with children and families who are involved in the justice system the formal justice system and we do see a trend where there is continuing inconsistency between the way in which families or parents and children are treated within the hearing system and in the criminal justice system where there's lots of protection within the justice system for witnesses where they're vulnerable at times but they may well then find women and children in the same room at a children's hearing alongside the perpetrator so there's some work and improvements to be done there but I would definitely agree that the trend for greater understanding of the impact of all of these issues is improved one thing I would say though that we certainly see in our early intervention family support services is the increasing impact of material and emotional poverty on families and communities in a way that's increasing recently so if I think back to my early days as a social worker in Pollock and Glasgow 25 years ago we did see terrible levels of material poverty but we saw that over the years improve seeing levels of deprivation in family homes that is beyond well beyond what's acceptable and has really shifted back to somewhere that we shouldn't be anywhere near just now so children who sleep on the floor with no mattresses with not enough food to feed them with food banks with families who have insecure tendencies and have to move around and that growing trend towards that material poverty is something that has a huge impact on all of the areas that the committee is concerned with in terms of attainment child protection and all of those processes we have to do something about child poverty and we really welcome the forthcoming child poverty bill we really look forward to what that's going to do but there needs to be a collective push to tackle that growing trend Do you have any comment? I mean maybe one of the broader issues I'd look at is that we understand there needs to be a strengths base and that's a perspective on this particularly if you look at the care and protection system a lot of the children are seen as that we must work in their best and Tracey must do the best for them it's not seen as an active participant in this and if we can engage them and understand that they actually have a vital role to play in their own lives and their own development then that would help but there really is a clear lag in terms of the development of things like that. We do believe that the young persons participation and the care experience perspective not just one child but looking back on what they needed will really give us a very different solution to what we currently have which is much more comfortable and natural and we should invest in that. I think to add to that I mean I've been 30 years in social work and working in six local authorities in Scotland and Melbourne Australia and I suppose looking at some of the trends I think that we've tended at times to focus in on drugs and we know our problem is about alcohol and about and I think also one of the things that we need to concentrate much more effectively on is the role of men and the role what it means to be a father in 2016 and I think we need to nurture that, we need to encourage that I think some of the work that Glasgow have done around the recovery conversations with young men has just been outstanding in relation to beginning to get them to talk about what it means to be a dad I think that Mary articulates really well the issues around the inequality gap around child poverty but I would say as where we are at the moment is that I've never been more optimistic I actually think the foundations that we've built in Scotland kinship care around foster care around residential care around the early years 10 years ago I remember a colleague saying to me we know what it is that we need to do we actually need to get we need to support parenting and it's whole and I say to people I'm not sure there's a more difficult task in life than being a parent and I think that's the task that every one of us nurseries teachers society at large needs to be in a position where it supports more effectively than what we're doing and picking up Mary's point about the inequality gap that we've got on occasions in some of the community as a disgrace and that's some of the things that I think we really need to make a difference on but I think the foundations are there I think that some of the solutions are facing us and I think we need to be decisive about taking some of the steps forward Mary's point about the childcare and childcare you've got a short supplementary film you said Thanks a lot convener just as a wee point Mike mentioned the role of dads you'll be aware of the work that Barnardo's and Poulman have done recently and they had a reception in there very room actually not too long ago and that was very impressive To watch that. That was very good. The point that I was going to make is following up from Richard's comments about the changes in terms of referrals and such like. I think that although that's to do with how advancements have been made in terms of joint-up working across services in both Mike and Mary spoke The experiences, and, in the time from when I started, there was a consistent change over joint up working, and the amount of training that became joint up with health services and others was very, very positive. What I would ask is, does the panel think that that's something that will continue and that each of you guys' agencies will be promoting? submarines, I need to be optimistic because I now work in a health and social care partnership so we collectively work with health visitors because the quality of the work that it's doing day-in and day-out in relation to the early identification and intervention or early engagement, oil engagement which is critical, that skill to be able to assist people where there are challenges. I mean Almost every parent including myself is defensive. That is the natural effect that they have, that is what has been a critical engagement skill. On of the things that we are seeing within health and social care partnerships, that is not just a partnership between social work and health. That is a partnership between social work and health humans, education, the third sector, housing, and police, and above all a partnership with parents. Is that what you're seeing? You're seeing all these other agencies taking part in this health and social care partnership, or is it what you would like to see? I think that if you look at that and recently getting it right for every child, I think that that has created a culture and an ethos where 10 years ago I was working in Glasgow line managing health as line managing school nurses, line managing CAMHS. That was a position where, as we are now, the outcomes that we want are the same. It goes back to that first question that was asked about educational attainment. It's about saying it's not either or it's and in both. That's what we want for children. I think that the relationships that we have with education, the relationships that we have with health are all there to take us forward where I think in terms of the Christie commission and in terms of us really making an impact is the scale of investment that we need in the third sector and the scale of investment that we need around the work that they're doing to be in a position where you can support parents and you can give them a range of choice. You can allow them to engage and that's something that probably up to now has been a bit haphazard, but we need to move from a programme approach to a much more project approach to a much more programme approach. I again think that, as we know some of the structures for health, some authorities have engaged with education, some authorities have engaged with health. What we are clear about is the attributes of the professionals and the attributes of the adults that will be critical in whatever structure you design. I'm very confident to hear that. I was in CHCP eight years ago and that was not the culture then, unfortunately, although there's lots of good work. Different experience. That's fantastic. Sorry for that. Anybody else want to come in on that point now? I think that that's right, but I do think, certainly from the third sector perspective, we still tend to see commissioning and development of services through budgets and structural constructs around who's got the money for what. One of the things that we would be really keen to see is the co-design of what works for families in a relational way alongside them so that communities are really encouraged to develop the solutions for some of the problems that we face. We still all too often see imported programmes or approaches landed on some of our most vulnerable communities in a way in which they just do not feel connect with them. There are some great improvements being made, but from a third sector perspective, there's a bit of a perfect storm right now. We know exactly what works that multidisciplinary relational community-based services can and do make a huge difference. Right now, resources have never been tighter. We very much welcome the named person principle, but I have a real concern that the better we get notice of what's really going on for children and families, the earlier we notice the need for help. We really need to be prepared with that early help available for them, otherwise it's not going to deliver on all of those laudable principles. Ross has a question, and then I'll come to you. I've certainly been very struck by the level of comfort and security that a number of young people feel when they're at school, very much like what Duncan was referring to earlier. In the specific case that you were talking about, there was a lot of informal support given to that young person. Thinking about the kind of formal support and services that schools can provide or the other services that they can direct young people to, have you seen a consistency between schools and how they're able to support young people? I think that what's really interesting in building on that is that we often get stuck in this bubble. It's about health, it's about social care and we'll work with social work. If you look at what we're trying to do in terms of people to understand the care experience, their life is not with social work. They don't have a lot of interaction with it, they might live with it. Even if they're living within the care system, more than half of their life is outside of the house, they're in a school or in other places. What we've really seen improvements with is when the whole country becomes more care-conscious, whether that's through corporate parenting, but it's actually more a community parenting perspective. So we've seen it whether it's with the police. There's huge issues we need to make progress with the police and they are engaging in that journey with us. Ridiculous attempts with police being called out to residential houses for the most trite reasons you can't believe. I'll not give you too many examples on that one, but you have the same with issues around travel. How does a child get around? How does a child get access to leisure? The same with housing, education, culture, jobs. There's been a number of issues where we have to look at if these are our children, how are we actually going to bring them up? We all have a role to play with that and it's not just because I have the primary task as an employee of the public sector to deliver one thing, a bus service or work in a classroom. I think that we look at it. To be honest, it comes down to individuals. I've seen great teachers really embrace it and go, thank you for this. I can champion this in the school. I want to do it from the primary school to the high school and other teachers going, really? You expect me to do more on top of everything else I've got to do? No, thanks. That's not my job. I think that this comes down to an attitudinal perspective in terms of what does our culture actually expect of individuals and what they're going to do with it. Beyond the classroom, that teacher needs the support of their colleagues in terms of the head teacher but also the teachers in the class area. The parents will come in and complain about the child that's caused problems for their child. There's the advocate, the pushy parent type idea for their child. My child's education is being disrupted. Wouldn't it be nice if that same parent started to look at what they could do to help to teach you with a child that's being a bit more disruptive and include them? Again, it's this attitudinal thing in the conversation we need to have more of within our country as well as within various training and awareness raising measures. I think that it does come down often to leadership within schools where you've got very committed informed head teachers who can create a culture of compassion and love within their school. For those most challenging children that a lot of teachers really just want out of the classroom because the pressure is on around attainment, then you can see some really good results. One of the things that our work in schools tells us is that there is some real inconsistency in school culture. One of the things that's really important is to make sure that we recognise that within the attainment challenge, engagement and support to parents from schools is incredibly important. Schools need to see those children as part of a wider family system and a wider community. There are many great examples of in-school work that have good results where the engagement with parents is respectful, encouraging and genuine. We need to do much more of that. I think that that's one way that we could really tackle the attainment gap. We need to remember that it's broader than the exam results that you come out with. For some children, attainment depends on how often you actually get to school and how often you get to school depends on your parents' ability to have the wherewithal, the resources both emotionally and physically to get you up in the morning. Give you breakfast, have you wear the right clothes, have you had a gym kit, make sure that you've done your homework and get there. For many children, they walk into a class and what they can be greeted by is a rower for being late or a tell-an-off for not having their homework completed. Often many of those children have survived and got through a morning that most of us would struggle to cope with. We really need to broaden our understanding of what attainment and achievement means. Family support and engagement with schools has to be one of the most important elements that we focus on. I've got one broad question and one specific question. It really follows on from what you said, Mary, to one of the previous questions, about there being a sort of a tension between the drive towards a relational approach, but essentially we're stuck with a sort of a budgetary institutional context. Right across policymaking, there are tensions between the things that we look at in terms of the measures that we have and the things that we need to do to affect those. I think that in this context that's really apparent. At the start we talked about, there does need to be a focus tonight and I agree with that, but actually the way we really tackle that is about through relationships and love, and I think that's the thing that's sliding clear. That's possibly at its darkest when you hear things from the programme again last night that you're more likely to go to prison than go to university if you're a care experienced, but the things that will impact, and again listening to the people last night, is that we need more relationships and love in the system. My question is this, and it's from both directions. At ground level, given that we are stuck with institutions, that's how we make the interventions. How do you actually structure in love and relationships? I think that we've had some answers in terms of talking about trauma recovery, but I'd be interested in how you expand that across services. From a policy making perspective, what do we need to do to actually... How can we measure those things? Can we measure those things? What do we do to understand at that macro level how much love there is in the system if you don't mind me putting it in that way? One of the things that I think is that we've created a bit of an industry around this thing called parenting, that it's become this formal construct that we think that we can teach people. Although that was for good intention, there have been some unintended consequences of that. I was struck by a book that I was reading recently and also an interview by a developmental psychologist in the States who talks about an approach to parenting, which uses an analogy around carpenters and gardeners. On one hand, there's the carpentry approach, which is that we think that we can shape children, we can make them, we can mold them, we can fix them if they break, we can do a lot of work with them to make them be the kind of citizens that we want. Alternatively, there's more of an organic natural gardening approach if you like, where you create an ecosystem which is nurturing, which is supportive, which is loving, which gets rid of some of the practical barriers for parents and which just allows children to flourish in their own families, in their communities. Certainly one of the things that I've seen in the last 25 years is that we go round in circles with this. We actually do know what works. We know that families need to have their emotional and practical resources to bring up children, but we've tended to think that there are some short term solutions that we can apply to people as if they're all the same. We can put them through programmes and we've invested a huge amount of money in formal programmes that we've imported from other parts of the world most often. What we've done is squeezed the love and compassion and the relationship out of our engagement with children and communities. If we really listen to the evidence and the evidence is incontrovertible around attachment and child development and brain science, if we really listen to that, what we would get back to is strength and communities. We would tackle poverty and inequality, we would give people decent houses to live in, we would connect people with each other and we would stop treating them as if they need to be fixed. We would support families to come up, families and communities to develop their own solutions to problems and support that through, for instance, my personal experience as I grew up in Westerhales in the 1980s. It was a really difficult environment potentially. The thing that made my childhood support was the fact that there were community workers in community centres, there were volunteer parents who volunteered and delivered lots of different supports locally. There was a neighbourhood that, despite whatever its external challenges looked like for me as a child growing up, felt like somewhere that I was loved, cared for and nurtured. There were challenges but there were connections. I think that we've over-professionalised a lot of the work that we do with families and we need to invest much more in community-based support so that we encourage the assets that people inherently have. People want to help each other and if you squeeze the love and compassion out through over processes because you're terrified of what might go wrong, you do have these unintended consequences. Duncan? There's a couple of things I would say in this. We're not stuck with these institutions. We believe we're stuck with them. Many of them are 150 years old. I've been involved in a review of the New Zealand care system, which is based on our structures because we exported it there. They looked at this and said, what's going on? It was a financial cost, so they have a different structure of government, so it's all within central government. They said, who's costing us the most over the lifetime costs? They came back to those who are in their care system. Cracky, we're in charge of that, what's going on? The outcome of that review is that they're aiming to end secure care. Secure care in this country, I can't remember exactly the figures on it, but there's less than 100 beds, less than 80 beds for secure care and it's costing something around £20 million a year, and we have no idea of the outcomes of that. I know that we can probably find out a lot of those people who have been in secure care and are not all in a good place, many of them will be important in other places. Why do we assume we need that? We don't. I've had people who have gone back there who have been in prison and secure care and they go, this was worse than prison in terms of a very closed, very low-sealing place to be and it was different. The question is, we have to go, why do we have all of these different institutions? What Mary is saying is, because we've driven out the love and compassion, we don't even expect. In Monday in Westminster, foster carers are asking if they want to become unionised. They want sick pay. A child in terms of how does that look to me as a child? How does that look to me when someone wants sick pay or they want respite care for me so they can go on holiday and I'm left behind? There's some real crass things that go on to send really bad messages to children which they subliminally take in. We have no expectations of a member of staff to love a child. If you look at residential care, it's managed and run by staff. Many of foster carers have paid allowance fine. They have to have skills to overcome exactly what Mary has talked about with trauma and we have to get communities to understand what these children are. This is why there's a need for a different type of conversation here around and it is based on love and it is based on listening and we will get a very different answer potentially in terms of what we currently have. There's not the expectation from where we're starting with this that we would necessarily have all of the same structures and institutions of care but it would definitely need what Mary is describing in terms of what's the hells back in the 80s, in terms of some of that community support and understanding that we talked about within schools, people going above and beyond and the leadership to do it. We start saying it goes out into all of our public and community services but there's a really exciting opportunity where Mike was saying we know what we need to do and the thing that will give us the courage to do it is we're starting to listen to those who have been affected by the system. I'll be a constructive conversation and it's the care experience voice on those on the edge of care that can lead that. I'll follow up specifically in terms of outcomes and care experience in children in further and higher education, especially when it looks at higher education at just 4 per cent and the drop out rates are quite high. I mean again, I mean I think obviously it does come back to what children and needs when they're taking that next step is support and relationships and that's what a lot of these young people seem to be lacking. What specific things can we do to support our care experience in children in terms of their steps into tertiary education? Are there specific things that we should be looking at now to support that? Dame Ruth Silver's widening access commission made some very good specific recommendations on access to further and higher education, including issues like a full bursary, not just a grant to get to university, not just assistance with loans. There's been a lot of work done with the Scottish funding council to help them to tick the box campaign and it's done the university now says it's not just before you come to care, you can tick the box so your care experience. We have to understand that it's a very loaded term. The care identity is not something that's around like let's say the LGBT community or let's look at disability or race. This is a very new term and I'm very nervous. A lot of our care experience has been very nervous. Why do I want to tick that? Why do they want to know that about me? That's never been something that's positive. There's a whole cultural shift we have to go for it. But the perspective I'd like to put to this committee is why do we need that? If not every other child or coming from let's say a less wealthy background doesn't need a grant to get to university, why am I giving it to our care experience children? And the point is because we know that system is not going to help them succeed to be able to get to the point that they can go to university and thrive like every other child in this country. And it's the exact same when we look at mental health. A huge focus on that at the moment, yes, 50% of our 5 to 17 year olds who are in care will have a mental health problem. Why? The point is that care is in the way that these processes are happening to them is adding to the trauma of which they're going through. We can look at any single social wellbeing issue and it comes back to that child and we can try and put. And it's not to the greater thought, it's a really great initiative. The Widing Access Commission will do it in a lot of other areas too. But why are we having to do that? Because something hasn't worked earlier on. Physiologically these are the same children when they're born. And we may well be taking more of them into care when they're younger, but look what's happening to them so that they still want to get to 16, 17, 18. It doesn't work. Ashley was on that programme last night and she had four attempts to do the access course and get to university. She's doing great now. She has a third attempt at university. We had to give that support. But what a trauma she had to go through and experiences to do it. And our point is great, let's make that change there. But our ambition and our outcome are really ought to be in 10, 15 years. We shouldn't need that type of additional benefit for care experienced people because it should be happening earlier in the journey through life. Two things. One is, as I said previously, access to support to recover from the emotional trauma that children have experienced. The other thing that can help, we heard last night in the programme and we know very much that children talked about having one key relationship that would stay with them over a long period. Certainly we see through the use of volunteer befrienders and mentors the key difference that they can make in terms of helping children from out with the system to really focus on their future, to really encourage their aspiration and to support them, mentor them, push them and encourage them to achieve their goals. I think that that's one very practical way that we can support young people just to give them a kind of relationship where somebody is just interested in them achieving their best and that's often something that they've lacked. The issue is that this is still about fine judgments and we're making that earlier point about saying that we need to be decisive in the early years. One of the things that we're recognising from research and from reality is that you've then got to sometimes be pragmatic because we have been in the situation of stepping in at 14, 15, 16 and 17 and young people, terms you move, still then end up going back home. The outcomes, the scale of the investment when you're talking about a secure bed that's 250,000 a year, when you're talking about high-cost care that is 200,000 a year, 150,000 a year, when you add that on year on year, the outcome that we've achieved is in no way to measure it with the investment that we made. So there is a bit about saying, I have to be wary of the notion of rescuing all of the children in Scotland. I live in a world where there needs to be at times really, really difficult, painful judgments, painful compromises that social workers will tell me as the head of service, we're facing those day in and day out. It's the bit about where we get to a point where we are, in a sense, being still saying, where do we need to be decisive? Where do we need to get it right? And there are instances where we need to be pragmatic and we need to recognise that we say to front-line social workers, you can't operate at times whether it's learning disability or older people, you've got to understand the public pound. And that is a bit about that, that also needs to be at times replicated in childcare. In relation to positive outcomes for care leavers, looking at the stats that I've got here in the percentage of care leavers that do go into positive deaths nation, there was genuinely some welcome progress from 2009 up to 2012 where it rose from 57 per cent up to 78 per cent. Since 2012 to 2015, it's remained fairly static. In fact, there's a slight dip from 78 per cent and it's now 77. I would be interested in getting your comments and thoughts on why you think it's remained static over such a long period of time and what may have resulted in that very slight dip as well. I think it's, as I mentioned, challenging, and although, you know, even like for myself where you say that times, you know, I remember saying it in an economist, Alan Sinclair has done a lot of work around early years, education is the root out of poverty. And he said, no, it's no on occasions because it's what the education system inherits. That's why we go back again to the criticality around early years and earlier intervention. Because what we recognise in those instances is education can only deal on occasions with what is inherited. That consequently means that overcoming those obstacles at 15, 16, 17 is Mary's articulate throughout about some of the challenges, about the trauma, about the behaviour within school, et cetera, et cetera. But I would say, as you have highlighted, Mr Thomson, that I do think that progress has been made. I've seen that in the city around the UC mentoring. Mentoring being used in terms of employability across the council family, but also in terms of the Wheatley group. We're looking at that within health and social care at the moment. So we are, as corporate parents, beginning to look about saying critically how do we facilitate any employment and how do we facilitate to lift in aspirations and life chances. I do think that, as you have highlighted, there is progress on there, but I would recognise that we have a lot more to do in relation to sustaining young people for longer within school and marrying that out with a level of good mentoring that's around. I think that we need to take them with a dose of cynnysism, some of these statistics, to be honest, because if you take out and you strip out training in activity agreements, that figure around 77% will drop. You'd be pushed if it's near a 60%, to be honest. That comes back to the question, where was the significant relationship? We've talked about it a lot this morning in terms of being able to set that child aspirations, to help them to engage. I'm yet to meet a caregiver who doesn't want a job. At that stage, when they're leaving, they really want to get on and do it. They might not have the tool bag to do that, but they really want to go and achieve. We employ a lot, but 30% of our staff now are care-experienced and probably have looked over the course of 20% of the care-experienced trainees. That is some journey. It's brilliant. It gives the heart and soul to our organisation. What we really find weird doing is teaching them how to work. They're brilliant skills when you get them there and what they can do within that environment and then a sense of where do we go next with it. I really think that we have to go back to where's the relationship and where's the aspiration. Exactly what Mike says, so much of care will be right. I've ticked the box, I've sent the form, they've left care or they've gone back home. Within three months, any of all the therapeutic work and everything else can be undone by the behaviours and environment that they're going to live with them when they get back home. Interestingly, around about 36% of care leavers went into further education. That's quite a substantial number, which again is welcome, but looking at that, like I said, that sort of slight dip, has there been any impact on the changes that have been made in the college sector, where we have seen a reduction in flexible and part-time places from your own experiences? Has that had an impact on people looking to get into college to get a place? Has there been challenges presented with that? I think that really positively from the college perspective, I think that they've begun to recognise that for young people coming through the experience that they've had, they need more than one attempt, they need more than one goal, they need a level of sustainability. Again, within Glasgow, we've had some really positive feedback about that being being understood really well and really comprehensively by colleges in relation to the level at times of patients, and even like with our own young people, young children, you recognise that making a mistake, no getting it right the first time, those things need to be available. I think that that's something that, again, there's a lot of progress to be made, but I do think that it's a wee bit similar to what we're talking about, whether it's schools or whether it's nurseries. It is about replicating where the best practice takes place. On that, we've done a lot of work with the Scottish funding council, we're now reaching out to all the further and higher colleges and universities across Scotland on this, and what's been really interesting that comes out with the education form of it is the beginning to recognise care identity as a port-as-a-sense protected characteristic under what would be human rights legislation. That actually really helps matters, so they will have designated people that really begin to understand care, if they can get under to help care experienced people to state that they have a care experience, etc. They do get more chances, there's more accommodation if they're not turning up to courses, we do get support around them, they will look for who's the supported person around it. There's real progress in terms of what's happening within that, but there is also, again, the strain on how many places are actually available. I want to allow you to talk about corporate parenting, Duncan Dunlop talked about some positive outcomes of that. We're only about a year on from that being officially in place, so I'd like to give you the opportunity to talk about how that's impacted on the ground. It was a particular focus on, I suppose, the thrust behind it of allowing young people to actually have their voices heard, so I'm interested in your views on that. We think that there's been a great learning journey for us with the corporate parenting because it's enabled us to get care experienced people in front of decision makers, people with power like yourselves, but also, if you look at the local authority community planning partnerships around just about every local authority now and those areas, we are connected in with chief execs of councils, whether it's the chief execs of health boards, etc. That has impact, they get their voice heard and then various things happen. What we also have within that is now a champions board network that's developing live changes trust to support and development of that whereby just children who are in care and those who've been in care recently are enabled to sort of weekly or fortnightly groups to two, three times a year come together with that exact same people who are the leading corporate parents to understand their lives and experiences so they can make differences with it. And a bunch of people are really making great progress with this. We've seen really small ones like SQA, Scottish Qualifications Authority is a name corporate parent. They're really, you know, they would celebrate exam results there with children in care. That's, you know, it's a very small one. But if you break it down, I think there's a list of 24, 26 corporate parents. We break that down. It's over 120 different agencies. And you can look at what SCRAs want to do with the children's hearing system. We want to have our own care experienced board to hold us to account. It's great, but how do we replicate that for 120 plus agencies? Because they all need to understand these care experienced lives. It's a broader and longer conversation we have to have. And we think that what's come out of this with the corporate parenting, the care experienced voice and identity is really flipping this conversation. How is life, how are you experiencing it? Because they come in touch with every single agency from the police to the health to any other part that we can think of within public service interacts with the life. How are you experiencing life? Because if we understand that, we get a better off, better understanding. We would like this committee to come and meet the care council. It's like our national champions board. They will come and meet you whether you can fit it in your schedule once or twice a year. You can bring members in here to help you understanding how corporate parenting duties are actually being upheld by various people who hold that out with it. For us, the major thing is, and we will put more and more pressure, the more and more we find that our voice as a care experienced community is how can this committee help make sure that Scottish ministers in particular who hold their health to account for this are care-proofing what is going on within our society. We are really questioning the value of certain things, whether it is secure care and other forms of expensive care. At the same time, we are making sure that those children have voice. We need to make sure that having a voice within all of these processes and independent advocacy really isn't a level that is acceptable. We feel very positive about the corporate parenting duties that are upon us. We've been trained by Who Cares and it enables us not only to develop ideas about ensuring better participation and a better experience for children and young people at hearings, but also for somebody to check whether we're doing it properly and whether we're fulfilling our promises. That's where Young People's Board comes into play. It enables us to sense-check it with the source that can speak most authoritatively about that. It's early days of development. We're doing it jointly with Children's Hearing Scotland so there's an overlap that covers the entire system. I think that it will produce and is producing a number of significant cultural and attitude changes to how we involve young people in the process. Mary Might, do you have anything that you'd like to comment on? Just echoing some of the points that were now inspected in relation to corporate parenting. That illustrates the focus on it. Children's Champions Board training with elected members has shifted. What was often seen as being primarily just the responsibility of social work is now, again, owned across the council family but also, again, within the new health and social care and with education, we've been able to profile it with colleagues in adult services, particularly around mental health, particularly around addiction and around areas about transitions. I think that where we've seen in Glasgow, for instance, £14.2 million invested in 13 brand-new residential units that are state-of-the-art. Going back to the point that Mr Tom is waiting about, kinship care was a desire to match that funding and to see that out. I think that all of that, in a sense, has seen a trend going back to that point that's hugely positive. I think that it's solid foundations that we can continue to build on. I would agree that we were involved in the drafting of the guidance around that part of the legislation and the discussion in the room from partners across different agencies was incredibly hard. There was a real commitment for people to take their responsibilities as corporate parents seriously. I think that there is much improvement in that area, always more to do, but things are going in the right direction there. Thank you very much, and at that point we will finish this session. Can I thank you all for your attendance this morning and for your evidence? It was very useful. That brings us to the conclusion of the public part of the meeting today, so could I ask people to leave the gallery?