 I'm very happy to contribute to those discussions about Scotland's long-term ambitions and bring my own perspectives, ideas and challenges. Many years ago, when I was a student at Murray House, one of my placement supervisors said to me, Cathy, you tread where angels fear to tiptoe. When I gently told the mafia-like community centre management committee that they couldn't ban young people from being in the building at the same time as the tapestry group. So, you can imagine how thrilling it was then to be asked to be deliberately provocative tonight. So, first what you said you wanted to know. How is Scotland doing and what do children tell us? The children's parliament's been working with and listening to children for over 20 years. We have a huge bank of evidence on our websites through films, reports and consultations, and it's all freely available and easy to access, so please do have a look at it. I don't have time to go into too much detail, but generally children feel that Scotland's doing well in relation to how it thinks about and delivers services to children. We have a great policy and legislative framework that's attracting international interest. Children find adults in their communities to be generally friendly and lots of children feel loved and cared for. They love the landscape and the beauty of Scotland and they're excited by our history. So that's the general picture. When we drill down, we get a more complex picture. 75% of the children that we work with come with additional support needs. Some have very chaotic family lives, many struggle with anger and emotional self-regulation, some are extremely shy or timid and others have difficulty with relationships and engaging positively in school and in out of school opportunities. All the children on our referred programmes come into this category. This morning, four children from our Streets Ahead project in East Lothian and three children from our Seen and Heard group for Loot After Children in Fife attended the second annual cabinet meeting along with seven MSYPs and Madeleine was one of them, who was at the cabinet table this morning. They met the First Minister, Deputy First Minister and other members of the cabinet. There was retolds at the back, she was also sitting at the table with the children and young people. Our children raised issues that are important to them and other children across Scotland. So the first issue was around children's relationships with their teachers. And while the children said that they have some great teachers, they said they feel that there's too much shouting, which makes them feel scared and unable to learn properly. They feel teachers don't always treat boys and girls equally and the East Lothian children had done an experiment to find out what happens to boys and girls who talk when the class has been told no talking. What happened was the boys got a row and the girls didn't. The children raised the issue of bullying again and they said that while adults always tell children they should tell an adult if they're getting bullied, when they do, often adults will say just ignore them or they'll actually make matters worse. And children feel adults should stop and think before they call behaviour bullying and they think there's a difference between an unkind remark, someone having an off day and consistent bullying behaviour. Children who are care experienced said they wanted to be defined by the whole person that they are and not by their personal circumstances and they asked that when social workers visit them in school could they please not wear their official badge because then everyone knows they've got a social worker. This makes them feel different and they can feel embarrassed and feel a loss of privacy. So far I've presented a bit of a mixed picture and we're getting it right for some kids and others feel that there's a lot to be done. First we're not very provocative. So let's move on to something that I believe is a potential to make a difference in the lives of all children but even more so in the lives of children who most need our support. If it's said that we have evidence in Scotland that a particular approach sees significant improvements in children's lives and forms the basis of a culture change that will have a legacy lasting till 2030 and beyond I expect you'd be keen to hear what the outcomes were and to learn more about it. The outcomes that we see for children are improved emotional well-being and resilience improved relationships with peers and adults increased commitment to school and learning. Would you still want to know more about it if I told you that it's the implementation of a children's human rights approach that achieves these outcomes? With such a consistently negative narrative it's understandable but nevertheless disappointing that human rights has such a negative reaction from so many. A children's human rights approach transforms cultures and encourages the development of mutually respectful relationships between children and adults. From this foundation we give children the very best opportunities to develop the skills and the values that they need to thrive. One of the barriers to implementing a children's human rights approach is that folk think that it's A, a means by which children get to do and say whatever they want B, they think it's wish you was, you do gooders who think that children shouldn't take responsibility for their actions or C, that adults lose control. Nothing could be further from the truth. A few years ago children's parliament ran a programme for children aged 8 to 12 who were on pathways to offending. The funding required us to work solely with children in this category so there was no opportunity for us to create the protective mix of children that we prefer to do. All the children came from very dysfunctional family situations that had significant issues engaging positively in school and in out of school activities and were clearly on the path to adolescent intervention programmes and some of them inevitably and eventually prison. We worked with the children over an intense of 8 day period and it was tough. The children's behaviour was challenging. Children communicate how they're feeling through their behaviour. At school generally behaviour that's considered challenging is usually dealt with through punishment. If we're to realise the potential of all our citizens and create true equality and aspiration and opportunity then we need to pay attention to how we're supporting those who face the most adversity in their lives. James was 10 when he was referred to children's parliament because of his significant anger issues. He was getting into fights in the playground on his way home from school and when he was out playing with his friends on the east end of Glasgow. At the end of one of our sessions he sat down beside me and he said a boy heeded me at football the other night when we were playing in the park because I got the ball off him and I didn't even fight him and I can fight. I asked him why he didn't fight him and he said because children's parliament taught me to feel proud of myself and I asked him how that felt and he said brilliant. Now if you think about James's life, his inability to self-regulate his inability to stay at fights and being in constant trouble at school what happened to him over the course of 8 days is really pretty remarkable. We didn't administer any medicine. We didn't put curfews on him. We didn't give him a row when he made mistakes. We gave him unconditional positive regard and that sits very uneasily for many people. But they say he was naughty. He needs to learn the consequences of his behaviour. He needs to be punished. Yes, he needs to learn the consequences of his behaviour. But what would we achieve by punishing him? Six years of school with its ethos of reward and punishment hadn't equipped the children to operate as confident responsible people. What would more of that achieve? The definition of insanity we know is to keep doing the same things over and over again and expecting different outcomes. So let's do something different. We have an opportunity now to break the cycle working with children and the adults around them in their homes schools and communities to build trust, mutual respect and therefore stronger, safer, more resilient and cohesive communities that will serve us now and in the future. Children's parliaments working with government and others at the moment to create a coaching and mentoring programme so that the mystery of a children's rights approach is removed and its potential realised. One individual, one group, one community at a time. James didn't not get into a fight in the park because he was scared an adult would see him and give him a row. He didn't get into a fight because he understood deep within himself that he had the power to choose to behave differently. He had the power and the resilience in him to make a positive choice not to get into a fight. This learning and experience will lead James into new patterns as long as he is supported on that journey and not punished for the times that he gets it wrong. He now knows for the first time that he can do it. That's the legacy of putting children's rights to respect for their human dignity at the heart of what we do. It has benefits for the whole family. When James's family came to the celebration event and we put a lot of effort into making sure that families get along to these things I went over to his dad and I said, are you James's dad? At which point his dad's face went chalk white and I could tell that he was expecting me to tell him all the things that James had done wrong because that's what normally happened. When I said he's been brilliant, he's worked so hard, he's been so helpful with all the other children, you must be really proud of him. It's moving to see the reactions that parents have. For many it's the first time that they've had a positive interaction about their child and this then gives us an opportunity to engage the parents and the wider family in the work and often it gives teachers a fresh opportunity to talk about the child from a positive place. Jack Ma of the World Economic Forum said recently education is a big challenge now. If we do not change the way we teach 30 years from now our children will all be in trouble. The way we teach, the things we teach our kids are the things from the past 200 years. We need to move from knowledge to soft skills, values, belief in themselves, independent thinking, teamwork, care for others, knowledge will not teach that. How do we move towards a shift in culture that will support these aspirations? How do we all get on the same page? I used to think that as long as adults are treating children kindly and meeting their needs, why is it important that we push for work to be named rights based, a children's human rights approach? The answer to that is because unless we do, adults retain all the power and children are completely dependent on adults creating the culture, ethos and values of kindness, trust, empathy and human dignity that children see they need and which evidence supports as the cornerstone of a healthy, happy and safe childhood. Placing knowledge in the hands of children helps children take a level of responsibility for their own safety and well-being. If a child doesn't know that adults are not allowed to do whatever they want to a child, why would they tell us when an adult is doing something that makes them feel worried or scared? Think of the Rotherham girls. Think of the footballers recently outside the Supreme Court saying we're passing on the guilt and the shame that we should never have had to carry. Why didn't someone speak up? Why didn't they speak up when there were children? Because they didn't know that adults are not allowed to do whatever they want. Because they didn't think adults would believe them because they thought it was their fault. It's in all our short, medium and long-term interests to think about how we create cultures around children that respect their human rights. This is our long-term security for healthy, happy and safe children and communities. In 2030, I hope children's experiences reflect respect for their human rights and that they feel valued and loved members of society. I hope they feel able to speak up for themselves when things are going wrong for them, knowing that adults will take them seriously and involve them in making things better. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child gives us a set of minimum standards against which we can measure how we're doing and below which we mustn't fall. It's the golden thread that each and every one of us personally and professionally can hold onto to guide us towards best practice and ensure that our children grow up with respect for their own and others' human dignity. If we get this right now, we can look forward to 2030 with hope and confidence that we've built strong, capable and engaged communities where people of all ages feel valued and able to play their part in shaping Scotland's future. One of our early infuerties was Kate Gilmore, UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights. She was addressing the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child recently and she said, every individual child amidst all of their and our diversity is entitled by affirmation of this convention on the rights of the child that you hold in trust to a common human dignity. In these, its children, the world has both hope and duty. The largest generation of adults that the world has ever known gives us unprecedented opportunity for investment and precious responsibility for protection. This isn't a niche issue for people who work with children and young people. It's the responsibility of all of us to build a country that values our youngest citizens. I was talking to a friend the other day about this presentation and she told me that after the heavy snowfall last week she answered a knock on the door and two boys from her street who she knows to have been living in very difficult circumstances were there and their behaviour isn't always what we might consider socially responsible. The boys were grinning up at her and they said, we've cleared your path, do you want us to do your pavement now? The boys hadn't done anybody else's path. She felt that they were acknowledging that she had never judged them. She'd always given them a smile, a kind word, a question about their day. What she had done was recognise their right to be treated with respect for the fact that their children, their human, and we adults, all of us are the duty bearers to support children on whatever journey they find themselves on. She was being an unfairty. I hope you'll consider being an unfairty if you aren't one already to sign up for and standing alongside children and young people in Scotland. I didn't actually work out how to use these slides beforehand, I realised halfway through. So at some point there's going to be, Rob's going to make a slide up here which has a big lovely drawing on it called the Unfairty. Last year was our 21st birthday and we launched our Unfairty's campaign because we wanted to bring together adults who feel committed to doing their best for children in Scotland. It doesn't mean that you know everything about children's rights, it doesn't mean that you don't make mistakes. We had a discussion at our team meeting recently about the need for us not to set ourselves up as experts. We're doing our best on this journey too. Unfairty's are adults, or in fact children have demanded to be unfairty's now so we have children unfairty's who stand up alongside and speak up for children. So it's very easy to sign up on our website, go to our homepage, you'll see Unfairty's and I think the children at the cabinet meeting this morning managed to persuade several MSPs and senior officials to sign up so it's really difficult. You get a really nice badge. And that's all I have to say. Thank you very much.