 Good morning and welcome to the 11th meeting of the Education, Children and Young People Committee in 2024. We have apologies this morning from Ross Greer. Our first item on our agenda is an evidence session on the Children and Young People's Commissioner Scotland strategic plan 2024-28. I welcome Nicola Caleen, the Children and Young People's Commissioner Scotland, Nic Hobbs, head of advice and investigations, and Gina Wilson, who is head of strategy, Children and Young People's Commissioner Scotland. Morning all. I would like to invite the commissioner to make a brief opening statement, which I understand will include a video clip highlighting how children and young people helped to develop the strategic plan. Thank you, Nicola. Good morning. Thanks, convener, and to the committee for inviting us here to share with you our strategic plan and how children and young people across Scotland have helped us to shape this. I feel very fortunate in the timing that I have been appointed into the role of commissioner just before the UNCRC act was passed by this Parliament and a time of major reforms in many areas that should continue to develop and enhance children's rights in Scotland. I also feel fortunate to have come into the role six months before we were required for a refreshed strategic plan to be lead in Parliament. That provided a really unique opportunity to work with the team and children and young people to look back at what has been achieved and forward at what more is required to be done. As hopeful you will see, this plan has the voices of children and young people throughout it. It is guided and influenced heavily by their priorities and I want to take the opportunity to thank all of the children, young people and adults who have supported them to contribute in many ways to the plan. Throughout the session this morning, I am looking forward to sharing in more detail how children and young people shared their views and opinions in multiple different ways with us and what we will begin to take forward as key pieces of work around about the themes in there. But firstly, we wanted to start by showing you this film that illustrates how children and young people have been involved. Welcome to the new plan from the Children and Young People's Commissioner of Scotland. It tells you how and what the commissioner will be working on over the next four years. In it, the commissioner commits to work hard to make sure all children enjoy their rights and to challenge adults who make important decisions to keep their human rights promises. The commissioner creates resources for children and young people to tell the commissioner what they thought through a special survey, taking part in workshops and running events for adults who work for children. To come up with the plan, the commissioner worked with young people all across Scotland in communities, in clubs, in schools and online. The team made a special effort to work with children and young people who don't always get a chance to take part and have their opinions heard. They took part in lots of different activities, discussions, artwork, music and games. It was lots of fun. If we were a commissioner for a day, we would make a safe space in school in which everyone can access in case they are struggling with anxiety stress, mental health challenges or additional support needs. To this, we would make it compulsory that schools have a dedicated room for people to go to for support, perhaps a sensory room, which is accessible to all who are struggling to cope and need a break from school or just need someone to vent to. We would also make schools more accessible for those with disabilities by installing some foreign infrastructure. Young people from Northfield and Tory videos for it. I would make sure that within schools, particularly secondary schools, life skills such as personal finance and just more relatable skills for further education and moving out of home. So I think teachers should be more patient and also allow people to have their space. Northfield doesn't have a lot for deaf people to have a lot for hearing people. Northfield deaf people don't have a great time or a nice class. No bands. There's no time for any class because I don't know if I just have a teenage or an organ class. Is there one time or a great time is a quick message that you asked me? I don't know if you like for them because you need to know next period or one time or a great time. Ready to know. Sport has is A-E-I-O. A-E-I-O. Could you sing that? Do you know to sing that? A-E-I. A-E-I. We all try that together? Yes. A-E-I-O. That's just a tiny snippet of the many, many children and young people who contributed in different ways, so I look forward to sharing more about that and how those views have shaped our plans. Thank you for listening to that. Thank you very much, Nicola. We're going to move straight to members' questions and I bring in to start off this morning Liam Kerr, please. Thank you, convener. Good morning. It's a very ambitious and comprehensive plan and you've set out a number of outcomes, understandably, so how will success be measured in relation to achieving this plan? Thank you. It's absolutely our responsibility to be ambitious as possible for children and young people. I think that's a really key part of the role, so I'm glad that you recognise that. Within the next four years, we will be extremely ambitious for children and young people across the plan. In terms of measuring impact, I thought that it could be helpful to reflect on some of the ways that the office has done that over the past few years but also how we will do that, moving forward as well. So I'm going to pass to Gina quickly to talk about some of the historic ways that we've measured impact and then I'll cover off how we're going to look at that, moving forward. Great. Thank you for the question. So, there is no one way in which we measure impact with the work that we do because we do so many different types of functions, so whether we're trying to influence law, policy or practice, whether we're trying to improve children's involvement and participation in decision making. So we use a range of different tools. If I can turn to maybe legislation and policy impact first. During the last term, the last commissioner's term, we were very focused on legislative change. The former commissioner had three main priorities. One was around UNCRC incorporation. The other was around the age of criminal responsibility and also equal protection from assault. So the way in which we measured our success was to what degree we were able to influence the legislative change in all three of those areas. Two of them, I think we can say, were quite successful at the age of criminal responsibility. We're not quite where we want to be but we've certainly made progress on it. We also look at how we're viewed internationally. So we work as an office with a lot of the UN human rights treaty bodies and other international organisations. If I can use as an example our work over the last two years to influence the last general comment on a right to healthy environment, our office was able to bring the voices of very young children into a global stage and we were recognised for developing an engagement process which was good practice and hadn't been done elsewhere. So we brought really young voices from Scotland into a global piece of work that's now there to provide advice to everyone on what we should be doing around a right to healthy environment. We also work directly with children and young people to ask them for their on-going and constant feedback about the way in which we work and whether they find it effective. So if I start with them be our own young advisers group, so we have a standing group of young advisers at the moment, we have 25, and we ask them constantly to reflect on the way in which we are delivering our work. So are we meeting the objectives we've said we're going to and how do they find it to work with us and we're constantly evolving the way that we do work with them based on their feedback. Not everything does work and we do respond to that and change our practice. We do try to reach out much more broadly to other children and young people as well, to ask them whether work that we have done has actually made a difference to them. So I'm thinking about children and young people who are in secure care, care experience, children and young people, are they aware of our work, has it made any difference to them, we ask them for feedback on that as well and try to reflect that in the work that they do moving forward. We also provide a lot of expert input into professional conferences, so we try to influence practice and we're then often provided with feedback about the level to which that's been taken on board. So whether that's in health or education or justice, we'll provide expert input and then often be responded to afterwards to say, well this is what we've done with what you've told us so we can see the line between our work and the evidence and impact. Do you want to come back in Nicola? Is it helpful for me to touch on a couple of the additional pieces of ways that we're going to measure impact over the new year? I think that the committee would benefit, yeah. So as Gina mentioned there, a focus of the office over the past few years has been looking at legislative changes and measuring impact and how we have contributed towards that because often we're doing that alongside many other contributors. But as we're moving into implementation quite a lot of our focus over the next few years will also look at practice and actually how are young people experiencing and enjoying all of their rights in Scotland and how is that being impacted by the incorporation of UNCRC? So one of the ways you'll see within the plan that we focus quite a lot on action research. So we will very much be focusing over the next few years and making sure that through action research, commission research and continuous feedback from groups of children and young people across Scotland we will be gathering on-going real live insights from young people to say actually how are you experiencing your rights around about these thematic areas that we've identified and we're going to be publishing an annual piece of work which will share those insights from from children and young people across Scotland. So some of what you saw in that snippet there that you know the insights that children and young people have shared have been so useful, so meaningful and so helpful. A big part of our office's role is to ensure that we've got that live truthful data about what's really happening for children and young people in Scotland. So we'll be doing that through action research across the year and we'll be publishing annually to say actually this is what we've managed to gather, this is what children and young people have told us and viewing long-term whether we're seeing progression throughout that. I would like to come in on a supplementary on that theme before we progress forward. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. I'm just listening to you, Gina Wilson, talk about getting feedback from young people. Just to delve into that, could you talk to some of the things that your office have changed based on the feedback of those young people, some specific examples? Yeah, so specifically on our young advisors group, in the last few years we had around 40 young advisors and we'd split them into three different groups and they were doing specific pieces of work. One of the group was helping us with our own internal governance work, one of them was working on a European project and another group were working on our mental health investigation. The young people fed back to us that some of them felt like they were getting much more interesting opportunities than the others, which I think was fair enough because some of the work is a little bit drier, if I can be quite candid, some of it sounds a lot more interesting to them. They also felt like they weren't able to bond with all the other young people that were part of the other groups and felt like they might be missing out on some of the learning from the experiences they were having. We did try to see if we could bring them all together to do work collectively, but it didn't really work because they hadn't built relationships together, they hadn't had enough opportunities to do that as one collective. So we've changed the way that we're offering our support to young advisors now. They are all one main group and we're developing a whole training programme that we're going to offer to them so that they can develop skills in the areas that they're specifically interested in. So they can still go into subgroups if they want to, but we're not going to divide the group in its entirety and we're going to offer them better support and training opportunities because that's probably something that some of them lacked confidence in. Some might not have put themselves forward for opportunities because they weren't actually getting enough training to feel like they could really put themselves forward. So I think specifically in relation to how we support our young advisors group, we have really changed the infrastructure around that and thought very carefully about how to better support them to be involved in scrutiny of our work and our own governance processes and understanding that. Thank you. Liam Kerr, back to yourself again. It's not an unrelated point that I'd like to ask about and something that you've both talked on already. I was really pleased to see just how wide the consultation was and how, and we saw it on the video, just how many views were taken in and the voice that you gave to children and young people. How, going forward, do you propose to communicate with not only those who contributed but children and young people more widely on how much progress is being made? I'll touch on a couple of ways that we're planning at the moment. Throughout the strategic plan and other ways of working, we're trying to look at ways that we can work broadly on broad systemic issues and also very targeted with particular groups of children and young people at times that are necessary and bringing them into, their voice into, some of that systemic issue work and also thinking about that and how do we communicate and how do we work with children and young people. Moving forward, we're looking at, for example, I would love to talk to you at the appropriate time about the work that we're planning around about education and there will be groups of children and young people that we feel their voices are underrepresented within the on-going discussion at the moment. We'll be thinking that we are planning to do some very specific work about building stronger relationships, having targeted support and engagement with our office and that will be built in throughout. There will be some groups of children and young people where we've continued to very much be about either myself or members of our team connecting with those young people or groups that work with them to have either in-person or on-going feedback. We're also continuing to think about what's our role more broadly and how do we communicate with children and young people. The engagement plan that we put together for the strategic plan allowed me to experiment a little bit with different ways of communicating with children and young people. I hope that you might be aware that we were doing some online assemblies and we had 7,000 children and young people attended that on that one day, so we're also looking at ways like that as well. We already have our website, we have our social media content, but actually where are children and young people and how can we use some of the infrastructure that we already have to have an on-going communication look with them so that we are absolutely making sure that we're keeping them updated, that we continue to promote their rights to them and the adults that work with them, but also they get the opportunity to continue to challenge us and ask us. You've got the young advisers that we work with systematically, we have some groups of children and young people through thematic projects and pieces of work. There are groups of young people that we know are particularly vulnerable, so as part of our work some of our team will be building on-going relationships with those settings and looking at that broad infrastructure for ways of communicating. Perhaps just on that very final point, the plan talks about supporting or prioritising those children and young people whose rights are most at risk. Can you talk a little more about that, perhaps how you will assess who that is and what that actually means as it takes shape? Again, we're looking at that through different lenses. For example, if I talk a little bit about the education piece of work, when we were doing our engagement plan, we looked at, through our child rights impact assessment and also by looking at the analysis of consultation with children and young people that had already happened, we were actually doing an assessment, a gap analysis, of where our children and young people are already being asked for their views, where they already have a conduit to support them to give their views and where there are particular gaps in that. We identified groups of children and young people that actually there were not a huge amount of consultation or evidence that we were able to find and therefore that's how we approached targeting some of our in-person work through the engagement sessions. We're going to continue to look at that again through some of the thematic pieces of work that we're going to do. For education again, we're going to have another look at that gap analysis and say actually across education what can we find already, where are there well-represented groups, they will be part of the conversation but actually where do we have to do more work. That might be us doing that work but it also will be us ensuring that others are aware of those gaps as well so that we can approach that. We need everyone together to be able to address that. One thing that I should mention is that we're publishing another paper within the next two months which is an evidence paper which will give you all of the information about all of the groups that we worked with, what children and young people told us and how that's informed a strategic plan as well. Then there are some groups of children and young people that we've already been working with over the years and we understand already that they're very vulnerable in terms of children and young people so there will be some on-going work. It's a combination of the child rights impact assessment that we have undertaken already and we will update and we'll be using that to look at the gap analysis of actually where do we think there are children and young people that either their on-going relationships will sustain or there are actually some concerns that their views aren't already understood or there's a need to ensure that they have got some support to understand their rights, to understand how they can advance those, have access to justice around about that. So it's quite a systematic approach, ultimately, is what I'm trying to say. Very grateful. Thank you. Thank you very much, Liam Kerr. Now back to you, Ruth Maguire. Thank you, convener. I wanted to ask about the UNCRC and could you talk to what work your office is doing to ensure that public bodies and schools are ready for the commencement of the UNCRC act? Great, thank you. So a very high level, this absolutely informs all of our work and hopefully that comes through the strategic plan as well. As I mentioned earlier, implementation now is going to be a key focus for us. A lot of the work that we'll do around promoting children's rights will focus on UNCRC and continuing to ensure that children and adults understand that. As you'll be aware, our office will be one of the statutory consultees in terms of looking at the child rights scheme. I'm just going to pass over to Jeane Anseif that there's anything you wanted to add. We sit as a member of the Scottish Government's Strategic Implementation Board on the UNCRC as well, so that we're kept up to date on where public bodies feel that they are in terms of preparedness and the resources that are being created to support them in their readiness as well. We are at the moment reviewing the guidance that's been created for public bodies and we'll be responding on that in a couple of weeks' time. It's probably useful to be aware of the work that we're doing around our legal powers. I'll pass to Nick to say a little bit about that. Although the delay to passage of the UNCRC bill was frustrating, the one positive of it was that it gave us a window of opportunity to think about how we wanted to use the litigation powers. We've taken that opportunity to develop a strategic litigation toolkit with the involvement of experts in strategic litigation and a project that draws on the experience of global children's rights litigation and that helps us to set out the way in which we're going to make decisions on strategic litigation cases, which cases we're going to take in what circumstances and make sure that we ourselves are litigating in a way that child rights compliance. It's also obviously really important to say that we don't want to litigate if we don't have to and so we would expect to be taking an approach with public authorities where we might be raising issues, but in the hope that we wouldn't need to end up in court, they would take that opportunity to rectify whatever issue we're raising and identifying with them. What's your assessment of the sort of volume of issues that might be out there at the moment? It's difficult to tell what's going to come through the door. I mean, I think we are probably expecting a significant number of contacts with the office, I would say. Not all of those will be cases that could be taken, so I'm sure people will be approaching us as they do now with issues and frustrations about how they or their children are being treated by public bodies that may not kind of fit within the scope of the UNCRC Act or may not be litigation and will have to be very sensitive to how we deal with those. Some of them will be cases that relate solely to individual children and young people and will want to make sure that we're able to support and signpost people to the appropriate routes to get legal advice and support to take those cases themselves. The cases that we want to take are the ones that are going to have the most impact, so those that offer the opportunity to change the law, to establish precedents, to address issues where there are systemic rights breaches that affect maybe large numbers of children or perhaps a smaller group of children but in a really fundamental way. That's why we've taken that step of developing the decision-making framework, so that all of the decisions that we make are really clear and transparent and accountable and grounded in children's human rights standards. We're going to find out very shortly what the volume of cases is going to be, and that's both exciting for us. You're confident that you have the capacity to deal with the volume of inquiries? If you're not sure how many there will be? We'll find out very shortly. It was never going to be the case that we were able to take every children's rights case in Scotland and we were always going to have to make really careful and deliberate and often I suspect very difficult decisions about what cases the office is able to take forward, but that will be the proof that will be in the pudding very shortly. For the benefit of the record, I guess, and for setting people's expectations, because that will be important that people don't have the incorrect expectation of what you can achieve, who do you anticipate or who should be in touch with the office to highlight any cases that they feel reflect systemic issues? We've already been talking to and we'll continue to talk to the legal profession, so through a number of different areas there's a children's rights strategic litigation network that we're very engaged with, and so we've been reaching out and speaking to solicitors. We'll be developing work with members of the Faculty of Advocates, and so we would expect that the majority of cases that we're likely to take forward ourselves will be coming from legal practitioners rather than from members of the public. Is there any assessment that, or I suppose how would you reflect on that approach in terms of sometimes those whose rights are being impinged on or not realised that they actually have the least capacity to engage the legal profession? How do you address that? Yeah, it loops back to the comment that both Agina and the commissioner made earlier on about making sure that through the work that we're doing we reach out to those communities of children and young people who we've identified as being most at risk, because part of the reason for that, of course, is exactly the point that you make about those are the ways in which we might be able to identify potential avenues for use of our formal powers of investigation or litigation. Holding duty bearers accountable for decision making and delivery of commitments to children is outlined as our strategic objective in the plan. How will you do that? First of all, this has always been part of the role of commissioner to be a champion for children and young people and to be looking at who is accountable and responsible for delivering on children's rights. It's a clear one to continue to do. In terms of how we'll go about that, it will take different forms in different moments. I think how people are held to account or how duty bearers are held to account depends on what the issue is and when that's happening. To give you an example of different ways it may be about one-to-one meetings, having conversations, the office, sometimes if they identify an issue we'll write to. You know, particularly duty bearers and ask for an explanation about things. Sometimes it can be a more public challenge if appropriate. I'll continue to take the approach about looking at what is the issue and who is responsible. Are we aware of who is responsible? Sometimes some of the challenges for children's rights and services are not always clear. There are many different ways of doing that and we'll continue to assess what's the most appropriate way at the right time. Another thing that I'd like to mention is that we are looking at sometimes how challenging it is to understand when commitments that have been made to children and young people have been delivered or not and how to hold that accountability. We are looking at the creation of a more complex accountability tracker. For example, you'll see in the strategic plan that young people have really strongly identified those top three themes of education, poverty and mental health. We're looking at some thematic long-term pieces of work around those. In terms of mental health, this is the first piece of work that we're going to look at an accountability tracker. To explain that a little bit more, you'll be aware of that. Sometimes if I use Scottish Government as an example, as a duty-bearer, there will be recommendations made and commitments made by Government. Sometimes then those commitments will result in additional reports, additional action groups set up, there will be minutes from those, there will be actions for those. Sometimes when you're trying to follow the thread through of when a commitment was made to children and young people and what's happened with it, it can become very complex trying to track that through in all the different ways and who's responsible for that. We're going to be looking for mental health in particular across the board to see what have been the commitments that have been made to children and young people across multiple policy areas that relate to the services to support their mental health. How can we track that better so that, whenever we are having conversations, meetings and we can see that there are deadlines, we're absolutely crystal clear on that and we can share that with others as well. I think that it will take us a while to get that first track up and running. Again, I'm really keen with the team in terms of the big meaningful longer term pieces of work that we take the time to do them well. We're looking at that within year one. By the end of year one, we would like to have it there up and running, testing if it's useful and it's really making a difference to our work. Longer term, if we can make it useful, we would also like to see whether it's possible that we can make that public as well. That in itself will help us to hold duty bearers to account, but it should actually help children and young people and adults that are working with them to be able to do that as well. People will rightly look to your office, Nicola, to really fiercely champion children's rights. I think that all of us around this table would acknowledge that, although as a headline, we all support rights of children, everyone wants to see them upheld, when we get into the details of legislation or even policy, I guess, or policy choices, budget choices, rights do come into conflict, how will your office assist in dialogue around that and contribute to ensure that discussions about rights are meaningful and that that interaction is spoken about? I have been pleased when coming into the role and seeing how the office works about the level of engagement and involvement with Parliament, MSP briefings that we provide and that on-going contribution. That will absolutely continue as part of our on-going work. Where there are complex issues and where we assess that we have the skills, the knowledge and the capacity to be able to contribute towards that, we will continue to do that and want to help as much as possible. We absolutely recognise that when it comes to human rights, it is complex. It can be really complex in that the necessary debates have to happen within Parliament, and we want to continue to do that and provide briefings where we can, and also have meetings and conversations in any ways that we can help. I just want to check in and see if Nick or Gina have got anything that you want to add. Just very briefly, further to that, how do you have those conversations with children and young people? In terms of my experiences of working with children and young people over many years and my experiences over the past six to seven months in this role, children and young people are often much better than us in terms of adults that have these conversations. In age-appropriate ways, I think that Beryl supported. A lot of our work is often about allowing young people to lead the discussion as well. The engagement plan that we were doing over the past six months was about encouraging children and young people to tell us what the issues were. We weren't necessarily going to them with some of the really challenging issues that are going on at the moment, but we were saying, tell us what the issues are. However, there are ways that children and young people can be brought into discussions. They are often really excellent at listening to others and are well supported in appropriate time and age-appropriate ways to be able to involve them as and when it is appropriate to do so. Thank you for everything that you have outlined. You have pretty much covered a certain degree of that, but when it comes to promoting access to justice for breaches of children's rights, because that is a commitment in the plan, how are you going to approach how that can be resolved? It is fine to say that this is wrong and we are going to sort it out, but how do you sort it out and how do you approach to bring on board in legal terms if it comes to that? I will start and then I will pass over to Nick. Again, that has been a piece of work that has been on-going. What has changed over the past few years and is coming is that we have additional legal powers to be able to approach that in different ways. Some of the work that has happened historically has been exactly as I have outlined that if there is a particular issue, we can identify who the duty bearer is, we might make an approach directly and challenge that. That can be through meetings, it can be through letters. It might be an approach to say who is the group that is responsible for setting principles or standards for a certain issue and is it appropriate from a children's rights lens that we are the right organisation that would challenge and approach that as well. The office has had many successes over the years with that approach. With the addition of legal powers, that has given somebody described it in the consultation as the office more teeth. On behalf of children and young people to actually say that we want to explore this more in advance of using legal powers as well, which has also been really useful. Again, I just want to pass over to Nick to see if there is anything more in terms of our newer powers that he would like to add. I think that it's important to think about and understand where the office sits in the broader access to justice landscape as well. As I touched on earlier, the scope and scale of the office's resource means that it's not appropriate for us to be the only route through which children are able to access remedy and redress. Obviously, what that landscape looks like depends on the particular issue that you're considering. Within ASN, just as a support needs, for instance, you've got the tribunal process, which exists. That doesn't exist in other areas. It's important for children to be able to understand the different routes through which they might be able to seek remedy for a potential rights breach and then be able to access the support that enables them to do that. The Scottish Government, at the moment, is doing some work on non-judicial routes to remedy. That has the potential to be really positive in terms of providing children and young people and those who support them with a bit more of a road map around the different routes through which they might be able to raise and resolve issues. Our office is obviously part of that in terms of the legal powers that we have for those systemic, significant rights breaches. However, it's also about making sure that remedy is available as close to the child as possible. You don't want to have a child, you have to go through a very complex legal process if the issue can be resolved very quickly and very close to them. That is going to require, I think, quite a holistic assessment of where the gaps might be, particularly around things like advocacy and legal advice and representation. We're doing a piece of research at the moment that we're hoping to publish fairly shortly, which is helping to map out the advice and advocacy provision across Scotland for children and young people, which will help to inform us about where the gaps are and where we might want to put some of our resource. That's useful. I suppose that it fits in with the strategic plans statement that the commissioner's office will work as an independent children's rights institution, because you need to have a focal point in a place that people know that they can go in order that, if there are a, they need to know what the rights are, but b, if there are people or organisations which breach these, they need somebody of expertise to know what direction to head in to have that resolved. As this approach then, this is what you're going to take in order to uphold children's rights going forward. Can we get an idea as to a scale of timescale sort of idea? In terms of approaches, I think that strategic litigation and legal powers is just one part of it. The way that we're hopefully presenting the strategic plan is to show the connection between them all. In terms of timescale, the new powers will commence this summer. We've been preparing to operationalise those, so we would imagine at some point this year that we would see those coming into fruition and us moving forward with that. However, our approach to protecting, promoting children's rights is actually about everything that we're doing. It's that continued education. It's that continued insurance that we understand across Scotland how children are really enjoying their rights and realising those. It's the continuation of targeted work with children, young people and those that work with them to ensure that we've got that feedback loop. Then looking at the different skills, functions and powers that the office holds and selecting what's the most appropriate at the right time. Thank you very much indeed. Before I ask specifically about the promise, I was wondering in terms of those that you consulted, in terms of the care experienced children, I'm looking for some more information about how you involve them in developing your strategy. The strategy itself and how we involve children and young people in a world touch on care experienced young people within that is, as I mentioned initially, we looked at what consultations had already taken place, so there is a huge body of work around about the independent care review, the work of the promise, who cares Scotland, so that work was already included in our initial desk-based analysis. We then worked on our smart survey where we wanted to send check those key themes that children, young people had identified, so we distributed that as widely as we possibly could, and that was through schools, that was through news clubs, informal settings as well as online. Then we had our targeted, either in-person or online work, and again through that we worked with some care experienced groups and we had some care experienced young people who were present within mixed groups that we worked with as well. What was really, really interesting for us across all of the groups that we worked with, particularly within the targeted groups, is how recurring the themes were around about the themes that you see in here, so education, regardless of which group of children and young people and what their particular circumstances were, they all wanted to talk about their experiences of education, so that was again why that has come out so strongly within the selection for the strategic plan. It was interesting that prior to recess, we had a session with some young people through, facilitated by Who Care Scotland, and it was quite a frustrating session for us to hear what we were from these young people. There will be a note published of that that I would certainly direct your office to take great cognizance off and have a look at. They mentioned that you just send out a survey and then whenever we hear from you again specifically and perhaps that's the survey, we didn't quite get to understand what survey it was that they were referring to, maybe it was yours. What role do you see the commissioner's office in relation to keeping the promise by 2030? The feedback that we were getting is that that's quite some way, it's quite aspirational. There's, I guess, the sort of high level responsibilities that will take as a corporate parent and also continuing to where appropriate contribute towards scrutiny. You'll remember I was in as part of an evidence session recently around about the promise and raising our concerns as well about that need for the detailed implementation plan, so continuing to add our voice to support for the work that is required to be done, the need for the detailed implementation plan and also I know that there's been calls for actually understanding the investment plan that will go alongside that. The work in earthenmatic areas as well will be part of our commitment to actually looking at it. Again, as I mentioned earlier, children across the board talk to us about their experiences of education and, as we're all aware, children and young people who are care experience can have put their outcomes across many different ways in education being one of those. That's why we're looking at a really long whole system. Children-led look at education and actually how can we now look very visionary whole system at what needs to change, so we will be absolutely planning for a number of groups to be shaping that and be part of that with us. I anticipate that care experience young people will be part of that as well. I can't speak too much around the detail, but what we did here was that the promise was great, but there was always generally a but afterwards. It's great to have a visionary and a whole system approach, but when that comes to how that impacts on young people, that's quite disconnected from reality. I was wondering, in terms of monitoring progress on the ground, what will your office be doing and what work will that involve? We've got the evidence to challenge the reality. Within the strategic plan, again, it will be a general, on-going looking at you'll see in our objectives that we do have an on-going commitment to continue to monitor law policy and practice. The work of the promise will continue to be of importance, and we will continue to monitor that. At times, if appropriate, we may add and contribute towards that, but our key commitment within our strategic plan is about looking at what are some of the services that children and young people who are care-experienced are experiencing day-to-day and where they are not working for them. Again, pointing towards the work around about education, children have said to meet so strongly that there are so many things that can be better about the education system. We recognise that their voices are not as heard within the current debate, so there's been excellent work that has happened over the past few years in terms of commissioning really great reports and reviews around about that. That, I guess, is our key question. I know that we've got a member specific around the education reform agenda. I've got colleagues coming in with that theme, so you'll be able to elaborate then. I've got a couple of supplementaries. I've got Willie Rennie first, and then we'll come to Panda. I just want to be blunt. They were pretty angry when we met them, and they think that nothing really has changed. They think that there's a lot of talk, and there's a lot of plans, a lot of documents, a lot of surveys, but nothing really happens. That's why they're angry, they're cynical, they're sceptical, and they gave us a pretty hard time because they think that we're part of the problem. Are you angry about it as well? Are they right to be angry, and are you sharing that anger with those in positions of power? I am frustrated about what more can be done for all children and young people in Scotland, including care-experienced young people. It will be part of my role to share that frustration on behalf of children and young people, as and when it's appropriate. I hope that that helps to answer. It's part of my responsibility to hold duty bearers to account. When I met children and young people who are care-experienced, they talked to me about a number of things that we're really challenging for them right now. I think that, although we've seen from the work and the progress around the work of the promise, we'll be very aware of great examples of progress, but we aren't great at systematically embedding change and allowing all children and young people to feel that change and all care-experienced children and young people to feel that change. There is much more that needs to be done. Give me an example of great progress on the promise and very poor progress or no progress. That wasn't part of the engagement that came out for the strategic plan, but when I met some care-experienced young people in advance of that, examples that they gave me were around supports for through care and feeling positive progress. That is a good example. The support that I know that has been pilot programmes that have developed around about care for pregnant mothers, that holistic support. Those are areas that you're aware of as well. There are examples across Scotland, but we are still struggling not just with the promise, but across many areas of children's services to take good examples and good pilots and then systematically embed them throughout our services. That is why, again, in the strategic plan, we are interested in implementation. We have lots of good legislation, emerging legislation and great policies, but how does it convert into the reality for children and young people on the ground? You are thinking that the lack of spreading good practice is the bad example, or have you got anything else that they should be angry about and are right to be angry about? Any child or young person who is having difficult experiences right now has the right to be angry, and I feel so pleased that those young people felt capable and able to come in here and tell them exactly how angry they are. The lack of ability to spread is an example of how much more, how much better we have to get at enabling that to happen throughout systems, but I have heard many other examples from children and young people, including care experience young people, of how we are still not getting it right in many different ways. Some of that, again, will be published in the evidence paper that we are going to publish in about two months, just checking with you. Again, there will be lots of evidence within that. Pam, Duncan Glancy, thank you for your patience over to yourself now. Thank you, thank you, no problem at all. Thank you and good morning. Thank you for everything that you have said so far and also for the video that I found really interesting and a nice way to put across the points that young people have made. Sticking with the theme of laws, policies and practice in the broader picture, obviously we have spoken there about the promise and young people really were angry. One young person said at the end of the session that they might as well name it something different, which really stuck me. In your strategic plan, you highlight that the aim of your organisation is that laws, policies and practice will fulfil children's rights. In addition to the promise, are there any other laws, policies and practice that you are concerned about in terms of fulfilling children's rights? I will highlight education. If appropriate, I could talk more about the... It's fine, but the supplementaries might feed into that from Mr MacPherson. Children and young people in their ways talk to us about lots and lots of different ways of how they are not at the moment experiencing all of their rights. There are many, many different ways. We have chosen to focus on the themes that are out here because they were very consistent. As I mentioned earlier, we worked with numerous targeted groups, including asylum seekers and refugees, care-experienced young people, disabled young people, young carers and many groups, which will be clear in the evidence paper that we will publish. However, the remarkable consistency was how strongly those children and young people wanted to talk to us and were concerned about their experiences within education, but also their experiences relating to poverty, the cost of living crisis and worries about their friends. If I touch on one of the big thematic pieces of work that we are planning to do, ultimately—in fact, two of those thematic pieces of work—when we are looking at education, what we are going to commit to is putting children and young people's voices back at the centre of the discussion about education reform. Our commitment within the strategic plan is that in the work plan that follows it, we are going to create a set of principles and priorities with children and young people for education reform in Scotland. That will take us a number of years, so when we have been looking and reflecting on some of the most impactful work that the Office has been able to do over the years, it has been looking at what are really systemic issues that will take a long time to change and how we can approach and add value by bringing together different organisations of children and young people and those who are trying to work on that. In terms of how we are planning to go about this, our plan is, as I mentioned earlier, to look at where those children and young people who are furthest away from enjoying all of their rights within the current education system. We are going to do a systematic review of where are their groups and those who can support them to contribute really well, and where have we still got some young people whose voices are not as well heard within that as well. We are going to work to build relationships and trust with those groups of young people. Based on how they feel they would like to be involved, we are trying to create a way in which they can have their voice heard. We can look at all the different issues across the whole system within the education system. That will result in us creating child-friendly collaborative spaces, where we are looking at education professionals across the board, from the formal and informal sector, involving academics as well, involving those youth workers, creative practitioners, to come together and to listen to the voices of children and young people who are furthest away from enjoying the education system and beginning to work together on how we create that education reform agenda with those core principles that are defined by children and young people. That is a key strategic piece of work that we are planning to begin now, and it will take us some time, but we think that it is absolutely critical to ensure that children and young people retain at the core of the education reform agenda. I should say that we absolutely recognise that there are lots of amazing educationalists, teachers, support workers who are trying and working extremely hard. There are many children and young people who are having really positive experiences just now within schools and our education setting, but there are many who are not. It is really important in this show that we are really honest about that. We express how strongly children and young people have asked me to work on this and as an office to work on this, and we are really excited about developing those links with those groups to bring them back into the conversation. Some of the reports, the Ken Muir report, the Morgan review, excellent pieces of work, and they really stressed the need for children and young people's voices to be listened to and to be connected into that. We know that we are not starting from scratch as well, but we want to look at some of those groups that actually have not been enabled to do that and to try absolutely best to ensure that we can, wherever possible, bring them into that. On that particular point about education, is there anything? First of all, did you say a couple of years of the timescales for that? We are hoping that we will have this created within two years, but the first part of that work will be about identifying those groups and building trusting relationships and setting that up. There will be lots of different strands and will be defined by children and young people, but that is the timescale that we are setting at the moment. In terms of specifics on any issues within education, mental health and poverty, is that the paper that you are going to publish in a couple of months? The paper that we are going to publish in a couple of months is our evidence paper, which will share with you what children and young people have said throughout that entire engagement process. We also have a paper in which we will be looking at actually within our education system what does the legislation say, what does policy say and how did we set that again? What are the issues that children and young people have recognised with us? What we are also looking to do over the next few months is look at the issues that children and young people have identified and how we might code them against the current education system. What is about clarity of purpose of the system? What is about training and support for staff working within the system? What is about resource? That will not be published by the summer, but the evidence paper will, but that is another piece of work that we are starting at the moment. That is really helpful. I am hearing some concerns that were highlighted earlier on the promise that education is really kind of up there in terms of concerns about laws, policies and practices that would fulfil children's rights. The next question that I have is about funding, if that is all right. Could you maybe set out what monitoring your office will undertake to understand the impact of tightening financial settlements for the Government and local authorities on children and young people? We are very specifically going to be looking at this from the poverty lens. We are again from the poverty piece of work. You will see that we are looking very interested in what is the connection between decisions that are made about funding, particularly for this piece of work at a local level. We will have some links into national work the fact that the child poverty action plan needs to be renewed by 2026. We will be looking at how children and young people are involved in that as well. We will be taking an in-depth focus look at how decisions are being made and how are children's voices visible and taken into consideration when voices and services or funding decisions are made around that. Our piece of work that we are looking at—a thematic piece of work that we are looking at poverty—is very specifically looking at what is important to children and young people that are experiencing poverty, how is that understood and how is that connected or not to decision making at a local level. We are not at the moment looking at the totality of resources at the moment across all of Scotland but taking a really in-depth look at communities across Scotland and how children and young people are experiencing poverty within those and how that connects or not to decisions that are made about them. That is helpful. Will that include looking at differentiation and how some of those policies might impact on specific groups such as care experience groups or disabled people? We have written out all local authorities and asked them if they could share with us what consideration they have given to children's rights with their current budgets that they have set. What we are doing with the analysis of that, we will not be looking specifically at budget lines but we are trying to look at what assessment have they made of children's rights and have any particular protected characteristics being considered within that. We are hoping to try and do the analysis of that and maybe publish in about summertime what that looks like but to try and give a bit of a picture to what extent children's rights and protected characteristics have even been considered at a local level when budget decisions have been made. That will feed into the longer-term piece of work that the commissioner was describing there but we at the moment do not really have any kind of picture about to what extent at a local level children's rights have been considered. Have you been concerned about any decisions that you have seen in that particular space? Concerned overall about reduction in budgets, concerned about the impact that it has, I think that you will be very aware of that. Almost all sectors that work with children and young people are raising concerns around reducing budgets and the impact that that has on them. Non-statutory services are particularly vulnerable within that so services such as use work many children and young people often can identify or we want them to be able to identify a trusted adult that it can make a huge difference to them. So general concerns around about on-going that reduction in opportunities for children and young people, how those choices are made around about them, whilst we have workforce across many different areas really saying we need support, we need investment. Thank you. Is there room for one more? I was also wanting to ask a question about your budget and in your paper you say that the budget outlined is the minimum required to deliver our current statutory functions but there is some unpredictability. Could you tell us a bit about what that unpredictability is and what conversations you are having with the Government about that? So what we really wanted to ensure is that we were really transparent about the fact that the new legal powers that we're taking on, they are new and you know we're asked earlier a question around about level of ask for that and how so we're having some really pragmatic, this is a pragmatic budget for us where we're actually saying that we will be looking at what do we have the capacity to be able to do so that's the budget that we've put together and we will be making choices on that but actually we do anticipate that over the next year the two years we'll have a much better understanding of what could be possible so it was really important for us to say actually we will work really hard as a team to cope with the allocation that we have, we're very conscious of the difficult financial climate that we all operate within but these are new powers, there will be opportunities for children and young people that come within that so therefore we will approach Scottish Parliament corporate body really over the future as we understand that better and say whether there's an opportunity for more. So it was really just about being transparent about that whilst working really sensibly and pragmatically as well. Thank you, I appreciate that, thanks very much. Nicola, can I go back just a little bit just to ask, you know you spoke about some of the decisions that are going to be made around budgets and how you will advocate for, always advocate for like youth work etc but how do you help young people understand the decisions that are being taken because they'll not understand why so is there work that you're doing to perhaps help them? The work that I think is really important for us to do is to probe and challenge on whether that's happening at a local level. So you know we're really interested in how systematically children and young people are involved in decision making so that's a big feature for us in the strategic plan and whether that's systematically embedded and whether that's been done in an age-appropriate way and whether there is a feedback loop on that. I've you know we find that children and young people are able to understand complex issues, they can understand when if there's not enough money to do everything that choices have to be made but we often see them not being included in that so that when we wrote out to local authorities recently that really was an inquiry on our behalf to say actually how have you included children and young people in ensuring that they know what choices are being made so the role that we will take across the board will be to continue to highlight good practice where that's happening well but to continue to probe and push for children and young people to be included in conversations and for that to be done in a really appropriate child-friendly way with appropriate timescale for conversations to be able to have and that to be understood and then we will very specifically look at this in detail through our thematic work within the poverty area. Thank you very much. Ben Macpherson. Thank you, Caneera. Good morning. It's already been touched on how you plan to influence education reform, what areas of that are of priority to you and why you want to influence it. If there's anything more you want to add about education reform, please do. I appreciate that you've already touched on that with Pamdolton Glancy. I was also interested in priorities that you might have in terms of post-school education reform. Obviously we've had the Wither's review as well so I'm just grateful for any of your thoughts, commissioner or colleagues. I'll pass over to Jeane A and I second to respond a little bit more on our behalf but one thing I would say in terms of post-school we did have young people involved in the consultation who were currently attending school or currently attending an education setting in some way and we had some young people who were at college and there were so many positive examples that they were drawing on in terms of the approaches that they were experiencing in college. They were able to draw out some really key differences within that and how they felt as if the holistic education system could benefit from some of the good examples and positivity within that. Within the strategic plan, from a somatic point of view, we aren't starting with post-school destinations in terms of college or further education. We will be looking at primary and secondary school as a starting point but we're continuing to look at any good examples. Jeane A, anything you want to add? I think it's a really interesting question and we would really hope to have further and higher education professionals involved in those discussions with us because that transition through all stages of education has come out really strongly to us from children and young people about being something that they find can be limiting in some ways. Sometimes that's what's driving the exam system that we have or the process that children and young people feel they have to go through at secondary school so we will try to look at it in the round. We will probably look particularly with the lens for care experience children and young people because obviously our remit extends up to 21 for children and young people who have been care experienced. I think that as our education focus develops, the post-school experience will probably be an area where we will specifically look at what's happening for care experienced children and young people and what can we learn from that that would be then applicable for all children and young people? I presume considerations with regard to employers and the apprenticeship programmes over and above, not over and above, as well as higher education and further education. Very much. I think that we're hoping that Nicolaus described some of the child-friendly collaborative spaces that we're going to try and create over the next two years to look at education, what are children and young people saying that they really value. I think that he saw a little bit in the video that we showed earlier where we've heard so clearly we want to actually learn more life skills. We want to learn really valid skills at school. There's so much we can learn from the apprenticeship model and from the further education model that would be absolutely applicable right through education. I think that they'll want to involve professionals from right across those spheres in those discussions. I'm just going back to schooling and the considerations around reform. I also really noted the part in the video about life skills, financial awareness. Are you going to seek to be pushing these issues in terms of education reform, curriculum changes? Our starting point is that we're not looking to push single issues. We very much want to build the relationships with the children and young people. As I mentioned earlier, we're looking at the data that we've already gathered. How would we initially code that? Life skills have come through strongly, but children and young people also talked about other elements within the curriculum where they felt that there were gaps or things were out of date and talked very much about how they learned. As a starting point, we're not looking at pushing a single issue, but we will be looking at what are complex issues related to curriculum, what are complex issues related to teacher training. That approach to begin with will evolve as we go into those spaces, talk lessons to children and young people and involve that group, which is a very diverse group of educationalists around about that. As Governments already have a lot to consider from the various reviews that have taken place in recent months and years, do you feel like the doors are open to speak for you to feed in your thoughts? I very much hope so. We've already been having a number of initial conversations with some senior civil servants. We've met a number of other public bodies that are responsible for different elements of education. We've had some initial conversations to see what children and young people are telling us. The UNCRC act being incorporated here is what education should be from a children's rights perspective. Where are we on that journey? Giving an initial steer towards the piece of work that we're planning, which is still in development stage, those conversations have been very warm and very interesting. Although earlier on, Pama mentioned that it will probably be a two-year piece of work, our intention will be to publish as we go. Whenever we have a child-friendly collaborative space, the learning from that will be sharing. There are many different organisations that we want to involve in that, and we want to create outputs as we go that we hope will influence. You've touched on that a little bit already, Nicola, on the curriculum for excellence, and in particular the broad general education. Teachers in schools are expected to determine the curriculum. How do you ensure that schools are consistently, in that education space, directing towards the five elements listed in the UNCR article 29? I don't have a specific answer to that question. It will very much be a part of that broader conversation that we're going to enter into. We're going to look at how teachers and support staff have all the information, resources and support that they need, and look at that through different lenses around what training. Initial teacher training, what CPD, longer term training is there. I don't have a specific response to that one just now, because that will become part of the discussions that we want to have. Thank you. We look forward to seeing that develop over the next week, while Stephanie Callahan is over to herself now. Thank you very much, convener, and thanks for coming along today. You're probably aware that some of the themes from the committee's work that we've been undertaking recently are the additional support for learning, as well as the work around the transitions. It's been quite clear that sometimes different services don't really work that well together. I'm wondering if you've got any particular views on how public services could work together better to support the right outcomes for disabled children and young people? In terms of the additional support for learning and disabled children, that's something that's come up very strongly through the consultation that we've been doing, very aware of the inquiry that the committee has been undertaking and the learning from that. In terms of how organisations can work together, part of that we will explore through this piece of work, looking at education. It will be very much about listening to children and young people's perspective on that, but also looking at some of the challenges that we already know are there. We know that there are challenges around about time. As for professionals, we know that there are challenges around about the need for partnership and collaboration needs to actually be planned and be supported by leadership and management. There are quite a lot of ways of working that are known, but what we're quite interested in getting to is that, underneath that, why is that not happening? What would have to change to allow that to happen, and who's ultimately responsible for being able to create that change? That's an indication of how we want to dig quite deep when we look at that. Perhaps something like, for example, co-ordinated support plans. That would be something that you would want to focus on. Co-ordinated support plans are a big issue in terms of not being created for many children and young people. It's an on-going issue that we will continue to look at. I imagine that, yes, it will come out within that. Again, what we're keen to do right now is to not jump in to a particular issue and connect with the children and young people and focus on the issues that they want to raise and then bring people together to look at that from a—bring the issues together and say, actually, where do they sit? What's underneath them? Make sure you're looking at the whole picture. Yes, absolutely. I'm wondering as well whether the learning disability and neurodiversity bill are coming forward and the possibility of a commissioner. I'm wondering if you get plans to contribute or feed into that as it develops or what you might already be doing or what you might be planning to do in the future. Sure. We will contribute towards the consultation on that, and I'm just going to pass over to Gina, who—her team—pullied on that. We have had a number of discussions with the Scottish Government's team as they've been developing proposals around this, and we are looking at the moment to respond on the learning disability and neurodiversity proposals. Within that, which I imagine you're touching on as well, there's obviously a proposal for another commissioner. We have spoken about our views on potential proposals for other new commissioners as well and making sure that where those are taken forward, that any potential duplication or overlap of remits is reduced so that there's not additional complexity or confusion created for children and young people. That's probably one of the things that we're most concerned about is that this is already a very confusing and adult-driven landscape for children and young people to know where they can go for support. We want to make sure that things are as simple as possible for them to know where they can get some support, so that will be part of our response on that bill as well. Are there other challenges as well that you see around that possibility? Are there opportunities that you see in it to perhaps work together and do some cross-work? There are no proposals with any of the new potential commissioners for our office to receive any additional resource to work with them, so I think there would be probably questions around how has it anticipated our offices will work together when we have a strategic plan, we are directed by children and young people, how would Parliament envisage that working? Will we all be asked to respond on the same issues? How will we ensure that there is non-duplication between our offices? Other commissioners may put a limitation on how we're able to use our powers, particularly our investigation powers. There are lots of considerations in there around what the unintended impact might be for existing offices around how we're able to fulfil our functions. I think that you've probably heard from both my colleagues today how much of our focus has been on disabled children. We wouldn't want to see any limitation on the work that we are able to do in that area, particularly around additional support needs, which will be a really key theme as part of our education work, so we probably do have lots of questions and possible concerns about those proposals as they're coming through. I think that's really good to hear. Your young advisers group as well, the video was absolutely excellent and it was great to see such a wide range of children and young people being represented in that video there as well. In your report as well, you've got that quote as well, that adults need to step back and see why your behaviour isn't great, there's always an underlying thing. I'm just wondering what kind of representation do you have from groups of young people with those particular challenges around additional support for learning disabilities, et cetera? How is it that you look at that as a proportionate thing or is it something that you balance out and sometimes there's a need to have more of them on the young advisers group or is it more about the young advisers group interacting with others in those groups and bringing things forward? It's a little bit of both of those. When we recruit for our young advisers, it's an open recruitment so that any young person can apply but we target specific organisations and ask them to see if there are any children and young people they're working with who might be interested and we offer any additional support that's required to support them to engage with us. If they needed a support worker with them, for instance, to be able to engage with us, we do say that we'll provide support to do that. We try to make it as open as possible. I'm trying to respect the confidentiality of our young advisers as well. We do have young advisers who have additional support needs within the group. We try to have a group that's balanced and has as many different characteristics as possible so that what we're getting in our young advisers group is a really broad range of experiences and views but we recognise that you cannot possibly cover everything within one single group of young advisers. We do specific work with organisations who are supporting children and young people who we want to make sure are engaged. For instance, if I can talk about one of the gaps that we have, we really wanted to have a young BSL user as part of our current standing young advisers group. We haven't been able to recruit one at the moment but what we are doing is building our links with organisations who are working with groups of young BSL users and we're doing targeted work with them. Where we recognise we have gaps, we're setting up relationships so that we're able to do targeted work with groups of young people that they're supporting to make sure that we're constantly hearing the diversity of views. That's really helpful. It was great to see some BSL in your video too, thanks. The subtitles were too far for me to read them, I'll have to look at that later. Ben Macpherson, please now back to yourself. Thank you, convener. I just wanted to ask a question that Nick Hobbs has engaged with me on in terms of considerations with a debate that I had a member's debate on Scottish football in January. Just for transparency, Nick Hobbs and I had a meeting over the recess about this issue. Nick, I just wanted to ask both further to—and commissioner, I apologise if it's okay if I ask Nick. I just wondered if following our meeting in recent weeks and also the debate in the chamber here, if you were able to update Parliament on your concerns around the way in which young people are considered within Scottish football and as economic assets and your concerns about that, the commissioner's office's concerns about that. I get striking that this issue about how children are treated within football has now straddled the remits of three different children's commissioners, which probably gives you an indication of why we've arrived at the position that we've arrived at around seeing great force in the argument for independent regulation of football. It's been because, despite a huge amount of work by the petitioners, Real Grass Roots, who raised the issue originally, over a decade of work by the Parliament's Public Petitions Committee and work by our office, Scottish Football and the SFA is still not at the place where it needs to be in terms of recognising children as rights holders within Scottish football and putting in place the protections from imbalanced legal relationships that need to be in place. That's why we were very supportive when you had your debate of the argument around regulation. We remain supportive of that. I know that there's a round table that's been committed to. We're really keen to see the outcome of that round table. I think that it is time for the Scottish Government to step in and think about either specific legislation around this issue or potentially a consultation about independent regulation for Scottish football. We'd be very supportive of seeing that happen. It's an issue about young people being contracted in law effectively and not being able to have the agency to move between clubs in a way that would be right and reasonable. That's where your concerns derive, isn't it? That's right. It's the imbalanced legal relationship between players and clubs, the power that that gives to clubs and the restrictions that that place is on children about where they go to play football. You'll be aware that, in the member's debate, I propose that as well as the round table, which is happening, that it would be in the interests of all involved in the concerns and issues around Scottish football if there was a formal consultation undertaken by the Government before the end of this parliamentary term. Is that something that the John's Commissioner's office would support? Yes, very much so. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for attending. I just put on the record that I enjoyed your wee video as well, especially the use of the pentatonic scale for the young children. Just before I go on to my main thrust, I just wanted to pick up on something that my colleague Stephanie Callahan was asking about in terms of the potential of another commissioner for learning disability neurodiversity. I'm assuming that you're aware that the funding for all the commissioners is top-sliced off the SPCB budget. Therefore, it's a law of diminishing returns that the more commissioners, the less there's going to be to go round given the budget constraints. I just wanted to check that you were aware of that, and did you reflect that in your submission to the recent research into the potential for a new commissioner? We've certainly reflected concerns around about allocation of budget and resources in their submission to the parliamentary inquiry around commissioners. For the different commissioners, we'll reiterate those points. We are absolutely aware that there are so many issues that are still to be addressed for young children and all the people in Scotland in relation to disability and all the different reasons why those commissioners are being proposed, but it was really incumbent on us to be able to raise the concerns that we could foresee if there were additional offices brought into play and potentially not fully funded themselves for the expectations and potential powers that they were given, but also if that did have a negative impact on funding being reduced for our own office and our ability to promote and protect children's rights. We have been quite open about that, and we'll continue to be so. The substantive point that I wanted to move on to—obviously, I've read your strategic document and, of course, there's a lot of mention about children's rights and rightly so. The flipside, of course, is your responsibilities as an organisation. I appreciate its early days, but I wanted to ask what assessment you've made thus far of the implications of the cash reviews on children's rights and your responsibilities therein. It is early days, however. The cash review has raised some really important issues in a really open way. The first one that I think is really important is about the polarisation of the discussion and debate around supporting healthcare for young trans people. First of all, I wanted to highlight that, for any trans non-binary or children and young people who are questioning their gender identity at the moment in Scotland, it is so important that we can already see in the media and online that the nature of the discussion is inflamed at the moment and that children and young people need absolute maximum support. There are also some important issues in there around evidence and research gaps, so all children and young people have the right to have the highest attainable standards of health. We would absolutely see that not just for trans young people but across the board, that wherever there are gaps, we would look to see that addressed. This was a report about England, but I see that the Scottish Government is looking at the report at the moment, so we will be interested to see what the response is. One of the things that I thought would be helpful to raise is that, just a few weeks ago, and I think that the committee will be aware of it, the Royal Society of Pediatric College has also published a report that is worried and waiting about healthcare for all children and young people in Scotland. While the cash review has raised some really important issues, I think that, for the Scottish context, there are some really concerning systematic issues around waiting times and lack of access to healthcare for many, many different children and young people across Scotland, so we are also looking to see what the Scottish Government's response is to that report and, again, as part of our on-going work for monitoring law policy and practice, we will be looking to see what needs to be done and what is being done around that across the board. Of course, there is a consideration of safe access to healthcare. Article 33 of the UNCRC notes that children and young people have a right to be protected from harmful drugs, and one of the take-outs from the cash review is issues around the prescribing of puberty blockers to young children and the impact they state that it compromises bone density. With that in mind, I appreciate early days and a number of organisations will need to be looking at that. How alarmed do you feel about that, although you have set out what trans and non-binary children might be looking for, against the potential for harm being administered to them by being given these drugs too early in their development? Have you made any further assessment of that specific issue, rather than the general context that we have talked about? It is not a specific issue that the office has worked on today, and I do not have a fixed view on that. What we would say is that the Scottish Government is looking at this and decisions around medical care should continue to be made by medical professionals. As part of our on-going work to monitor law policy and practice, we will be looking at what the Scottish Government's response is. I am sure that we will all watch this area with interest. The commissioner will have been aware of the debate that has currently taken place about behaviour, distress and violence in schools. He will also be aware that the cabinet secretary is preparing a report and action plan. I am interested to know what involvement you have had in that action plan, particularly what your views are on some of the emerging issues around exclusion, around boundaries and consequences, about resources and the effectiveness of restorative practice. Any behaviour that is presented by children and young people is a form of communication, and all children and young people should feel able to be safe and feel well within educational settings. I have already spoken about that and the need to understand the reasons for that distress behaviour. That has fed into why we are looking at education reform, because we do not believe that that can be solved, if solved is the right word to use or progressed, by looking at it with a single issue lens. Our approach is very much about why children display distress behaviour when that happens. We have to ensure that the adults around them have the right support that they need. That will be sometimes teachers, sometimes support workers, sometimes it will be other adults working with children and young people. In terms of the specific action plan, we have not had a role in the development of that, although we had some attendance at the summits that were held by the cabinet secretary. However, our key message is very much about there are multiple complex challenges within our current system. It can be better, and that is why our contribution towards that is looking at that from a child rights approach with children and young people. What are the principles and priorities that we have to take to address those complex issues? We are all aware of and move things on. I want to be a bit more persistent about that. I asked about resources, exclusions, restorative practice and about boundaries and consequences. I get the general thing and I get the understanding that the approach of understanding why young people behave the way that they are is really important. However, we also have to think about what everybody else in the class and the teacher experiences are. It is that balance between the two. How do we achieve that balance? Therefore, what is your view on those specific issues that I have mentioned? In terms of all the children in the class, when I was meeting with children and young people, they talked to me about ways in which they were worried about each other, and they talked to me a lot about things that could be improved within the education system. I had to push them to talk about behaviour as being an issue because they were not raising it. That is really what led to that quote of a young person reacting to me pushing them and saying, but are you worried about behaviour? A lot of adults are talking about that now, and that led to a passionate young person saying, if adults are worried about that, they have to address what is underneath that. Essentially, we can prevent lots of challenging behaviours happening. We can prevent exclusions happening, but we have to have a system that is well resourced, that is aligned to the purpose that we believe, that aligns with UNCRC, that is able to deliver on what curriculum for excellence did set up and hope for children and young people. There is more to be done to be able to get to a point. We have much more understanding now around about children and young people's developmental needs, children and young people who are neurodiverse and what they need in a particular setting to be able to support them, but that is not being implemented systematically throughout our system. That is what we want to get to, a plan and a vision with children and young people of how that can be. I am not trying to dodge very specific, but the point that I am trying to make is that, by answering and giving you a view on each one of them, I am just going to keep coming back to the same issue, is that we have to connect all of these, we have to look whole system now, that is what we fundamentally believe and that is the approach that we are going to take. If there is anything else that you want to come in with, will you? Because Stephanie Callaghan is wanting a brief supplementary on this. Thanks very much, convener. Just to pick up on what Willie was saying about boundaries and consequences and exclusions, you have already said that these things are all linked together. I suppose that part of that can be bullying and a child who is continuing to be harmed and perhaps feeling that they cannot attend school or having really big challenges around that. I am just wondering if your intention is to zoom in and talk about those issues with young people and ask them to take that step back to and look at both sides of the equation, because we know as well that boundaries and consequences are actually really important for helping children and young people feel secure. Also for perhaps children whose behaviour is perhaps difficult, stopping them as well sometimes from spiralling into other behaviours that when they are looking back in a few years down the line, they are not looking over their shoulders and thinking, oh my goodness, I cannot believe that it got to that point, or that I was responsible for things happening. I am just wondering if that is something that you have talked about and how to approach that. When we begin to develop the work around about education, first of all it will be about developing those relationships, trusting relationships, but it is very much important for us to allow children and young people to talk to us about the issues that they want to talk about. We will be guided by them and then we will be supporting looking at what does that fall into, what are the different categories, and therefore how do we support that to be connected. We will be very much guided by children and young people. Bullying did come up a lot whenever we were doing the consultation with children and young people and when we looked at what children and young people were saying, there were lots of ways of describing different examples of bullying that we feel were actually children and young people describing examples of discrimination. We are interested in that through the education reform work that we are going to be doing as well. We are actually looking at what are the incidents that are happening and how are we understanding them and what can be done to support that more. I have to say that a lot of what children and young people did describe to me and us was a lot of broader frustrations around supports that they required, not necessarily being in place and the ways in which things were being taught and the ability for that to be different. As I mentioned again, the focus for the children and young people was actually saying that there are different ways to do this and it could relieve pressure, it could help us all to be included and they had lots of really good examples of that, not necessarily focusing so much on their behaviour. It was much more around about actually how could this be better for all of us. I think that it has definitely summed it up really well that actually the boundaries, the consequences, the frameworks, the apparatus that you create in a classroom keeps everyone safe. There is not a bit punishment. I do not want to go back to the days when I used to get beltied every second week at school. I do not want to go back to that. I want to have an understanding system and that is a far, far, far superior way of doing it. But just now there is a fear amongst teachers pupils that I speak to and there is lots of them that come to me and say that it is intolerable in their circumstances that it has got to change and there has got to be that boundaries and consequences and apparatus to make them all safe. I am disappointing that you are dodging it and I do not know why you are dodging that because I think that it is about every young person feeling safe. I get the bit about resources and support rather than dealing with the symptoms, you have got to deal with the causes, get all that but that is not working just now and it is not going to change overnight so what else can we do to make sure that young people feel safe in the class? I absolutely agree that all children and young people should feel safe and all adults that are working with them within our education setting. I also agree that appropriate boundaries, consequences and routines help children and young people to feel safe as well so we do not disagree on that but I think that what my job is to do is to ensure that you hear what children and young people have been able to say to me and they have told me about examples where they have used a fidget toy to be able to support them with their coping and they have been told off and shouted at because of that and made it to look away, made us to put it away. They have told me about examples where I found that many children and young people were actually developing coping strategies and the system itself was shutting that down or was not recognising that for what it was so I think that it is so important in my role that my role is to actually come and say but this is what children and young people have told me and this is the choices that we are making around about how we will continue to bring them into a space where we can ensure that their voices are heard in this complex discussion about education that's one of the concerns that I'm hoping that I've raised through the strategic plan objectives is that you know we've had these great reports we've heard people say children and young people need to be more centered within this we're going to attempt to try and do that so I'm sure we'll have lots of you know discussions to come okay notes of making sure children's voices are heard I think we'll conclude our questioning session and I'd like to thank you for your evidence this morning and that concludes the public part of our proceedings we'll suspend the meeting to allow our witnesses to leave and then we'll move into private session to consider our final agenda items thanks very much