The Annual Participation Programme

We talked to our members about human rights, after our advocacy supporting the movement for incorporation of the UNCRC in 2018. Over 80 members shared their views including their knowledge of rights and how well protected their human rights are. We developed a report called ‘Navigating the World of Rights’ in December 2020 to help us share members’ views with decision-makers. For example, the #AllOurRights report on the new human rights law in Scotland, and the National Taskforce for Human Rights Leadership report, which references the barriers to rights faced by Care Experienced people.

We continue to engage with various working groups designed to understand how to incorporate and implement various human rights treaties in Scotland. Such working groups include:

• Scottish Government’s UNCRC Strategic Implementation Board (SIB)
• Scottish Government’s Human Rights Bill Advisory Board
• Scottish Government Human Rights Bill Lived Experience Advisory Group (2 members)

As part of a coalition organised by Liberty, we were part of campaigning to save the Human Rights Act 1998, which succeeded in June 2023 when the UK Government confirmed it will not proceed with the Bill of Rights Bill.

We supported two young people as part of the Together ‘Rights Right Now’ participation project by Together which fed into the SIB above until April 2022, and one young person as part of the ‘Rights Detectives’ project since July. 

We have been supporting Jasmin Pilling, a former National Representative Body member, to write, evidence and submit a petition (PE1958) to the Scottish Parliament’s Petitions Committee. The petition received hundreds of signatures of support and aims to bring about lifelong support for Care Experienced people. It is currently being considered by Parliament, and members participated in a roundtable discussion with the Petitions Committee in April 2023.

We are working to make sure the new human rights framework in Scotland recognises Care Experience as a lifelong identity, strengthens independent advocacy provision and ensures that Care Experienced people are protected as an equality group which faces greater barriers in realising their rights. 

We submitted evidence to the UN Committee for the Rights of the Child via. Together Scotland, highlighting the right to family life, education, health and participation. This resulted in the Committee making many recommendations to the UK and Scottish governments. Check out what they were in this thread. Our evidence on restraint was also referenced in the report of the Children’s Commissioners of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales in November 2022. We also contributed to a Joint Civil Society report to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in December 2022.

Our members fed into our early Covid-19 Impact reports from April and May 2020 with their experiences during the pandemic, their ideas for ‘building back better’ in our Covid-19 Recovery Planning report in February 2021 which was shared with the Scottish Government. Videos on the impact of the Covid-19 response on Care Experienced people’s finances and information and digital access have since been developed for Corporate Parents with this evidence.

In January 2021, we supported members during the pandemic to submit questions to the Promise Scotland about the work they had planned to turn the findings of the Care Review into reality. The Promise Scotland team then filmed a Q&A video, where Fiona Duncan, the Chair of the Oversight Board, answered the questions submitted.

In June 2022, we created space for 46 people with care experience to engage with the Scottish Government’s Keeping the Promise Implementation Plan. This included involving the NRB in the design and delivery of the event. Our participants learnt about The Plan and asked questions in the first session through a series of interactive posters we developed to explain each chapter, supported by our staff facilitators. Our interim report  ‘Paving the Way’ prompted media coverage, a parliamentary question (S6W-10246), and a successful parliamentary motion (S6M-05477) supported by 19 MSPs, as well as various follow-up influencing meetings with decision-makers across Parliament, Government and Corporate Parenting bodies.

We also engaged our members on the whether the Scottish Government’s proposals for a National Care Service would help or hinder Keeping the Promise in February 2022 with an event called the Bairns Supper, which engaged 8 Care Experienced people. We shared our Bairns Supper report from February with the Scottish Parliament’s Health, Social Care and Sport Committee as they consider the National Care Service Bill. Our views on lifelong tailored advocacy provision were picked up in their analysis in November 2022.

Our views, along with others, informed the Scottish Government’s decision that ‘more evidence is required to decide where children’s health, social work and social care services are best placed.’ We also received a video from the Minister for Mental Wellbeing and Social Care Kevin Stewart MSP thanking our members, committing to ‘work with organisations like Who Cares? Scotland, and people with lived experience, to ensure services are truly co-designed with the people who use them.’

In 2021, 55 Care Experienced people shared their views on sexual and reproductive health (see the report here), including how they want to learn, that they want autonomy in making decisions about sexual health, and services to stop stigmatising Care Experienced individuals for being Care Experienced, or for other parts of their identity. The NRB shaped the recommendations for change which influenced the Sexual Health Standards by Healthcare Improvement Scotland.

In 2022, we worked with Corporate Parent NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHS GGC) Health Board to involve Care Experienced young people in co-designing refreshed workforce guidance about relationships and sexual health, taking into account the views gathered in 2021.  32 young people aged 13-26 living in the Glasgow area took part in this project over 25 meetings, including young refugees, young mums and young people in secure care.

As part of our APP Care Experienced Parents theme, we engaged with 45 members on their experiences as a parent who grew up in care. Interim findings were used to support the implementation of the 2-year-old offer for Early learning and Childcare, as committed to in the 2019 Programme for Government.  

The ‘Believe In Us’ report was published on Global Day of Parents in June 2022 with 11 recommendations for change which have been shared with partners and decision-makers. We held an influencing event for the report during Care Experienced week in October 2022, called the ‘Wee Meet’, where NRB and other members influenced decision-makers across relevant Government areas to implement findings. The CEO of HomeStart said, ‘the real impact of this report is in the richness of the quotes from your parents. Those are so powerful, honest and often raw that it is emotional to read even without knowing the individuals.’

The Digital Wellbeing project ran from October 2021-2022. It brought together 4 passionate members to explore and develop resources for our members and Corporate Parents on digital wellbeing. The members were trained on research, digital rights, social media and design skills. Following a scoping exercise, they chose to design a survey on digital wellbeing, focussing on online safety, digital rights and online relationships. Their survey received 92 responses from the findings, they created an online toolkit of resources that includes a report, podcast, reflective videos, blogs, a relationship mapping tool, and a storybook about rights. These were developed as part of the wider engagement with 154 members. A group member Megan Kay and our Digital Participation Office Lisa Moore presented this project alongside representatives from the EU Commission, META and other youth delegations from across Europe at the COFACE Families Europe DigiGen conference in Brussels in November 2022.

Who Cares? Scotland staff sat on the Scottish Government’s National Implementation Group and short-life working groups for the Staying Together and Connected: getting it right for sisters and Brothers: national practice guidance. We worked with 16 young people aged 6-27 to ensure their voices were heard on sibling rights. They engaged either via. a group which met monthly in the national office (‘core group’), a group in Moray, or various 121s and case studies presented by advocates. Some of the group will be meeting the Minister in Spring 2023 to relay the group’s findings which generally demonstrated practice falling far from that committed to in the Promise, as well as their solutions to making sibling rights real.

We responded to the Scottish Government’s consultation on the Care and Justice Bill in June, including Care Experienced voice on legal aid, the use of physical restraint, raising the age of referral to the Reporter, the disclosure of criminal records and the use of cross-border placements. We shared case studies from advocacy work supporting young people in secure care and from consultation work done with 17 young people on the use of secure care transport.  The regulations on cross-border placements took into account our response to a policy paper from January 2022 with a proactive offer of advocacy via the CHS contract to all cross-border children and active consideration of how they will be given access to their rights to education and primary and secondary health care.

We are supporting the ‘My Story’ project which builds on work done during the Independent Care Review (ICR) with the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre and partners, to explore co-produced care records that give ownership to and reduce stigma for young people. The project will research and prototype ideas for young people to tell their story in a way that is empowering for them and gives valuable insight to the organisations and services supporting them, using a ‘learn by doing’ approach. 2 WC?S reps sit on the Design and Steering groups and will support 3-4 Care Experienced people to be recruited into the project at the end of 2022/start of 2023. We continue to engage in a cross-sector collaboration designing research looking at improving the experience of accessing records for care experienced people. This research has been delayed but a final draft is now complete and will be launched in the next reporting period.

This work was supported by Aberlour, Staf and Who Cares? Scotland – exploring the idea of Care Leaver Guaranteed Income to provide care leavers with financial security as they move from care placements into independent living. We supported Care Experienced people to connect in a fun session in May, following a letter to the First Minister requesting a meeting to discuss. We ran a preparation session and supported 6 members to attend an influencing session with the First Minister in September to lobby, as part of the Care Leaver Income Advisory Group. The group wrote to the First Minister to ask for a pilot.

The team also shared existing evidence related to this area with the Care Experienced Grant and delivered a presentation to the Minimum Income Guarantee teams at Scottish Government. The Care Leaver Support Team at Scottish Government responded: ‘It’s great to read the WC?S perspectives on this, providing valuable fresh insight and found the point about legal aid particularly interesting. We will take this and all the other points you have raised under consideration as we progress the policy development.’

We continued to be represented on the CLD Standards Council recruitment committee, and prepared and delivered a workshop at the World CLD conference in October alongside 3 NRB members to share learning and experiences around care with 18 community development practitioners from across the world and discuss solutions to improving outcomes for care experienced people.

With Young Scot, in May we supported 10 members from across 7 local authorities to explore the specific needs, wants and experiences of our Care Experienced young people in relation to the Young Person’s Guarantee which aims to connect every 16-24 year old to an opportunity (training/education/employment etc.).