Bairns' Hoose Pathfinder Phase – Research Report

13. Staff support and training

This chapter focuses on the multidisciplinary training and support provided to Bairns’ Hoose staff in order that they can deliver a high-quality and trauma-informed service to CYP. It also covers broader forms of support that participants in the qualitative research described as useful to date, as well as the support they would find useful in the future. This comes under the Bairns’ Hoose Standard 10: Multidisciplinary staff training and support.

Evidence on progress in relation to staff support and training was not covered explicitly in qualitative interviews and is based on StART submissions. At StART1 (February 2024), all partnerships reported delivering trauma-informed training to staff and almost all had supervision and wellbeing arrangements in place to support staff.

Staff supervision and support

Partnerships reported developments in ensuring appropriate supervision and support was in place for staff. Examples of the different types of supervision and support offered across partnerships included:

• external supervision for staff experiencing vicarious trauma/recovery teams
• individual counselling and further staff wellbeing measures

In some partnerships support was still in development at the time of writing.

Workforce

In terms of staffing and workforce, none of the Pathfinders reported having a workforce plan currently in place in the StART2 submissions (August 2025). However, in some cases, staffing levels and workforce plans were intended to be progressed following scoping and data collection exercises. In one partnership, the Child Protection Committee Learning & Development Coordinator was planning to start working with the Bairns’ Hoose coordinator to develop a workforce development plan.

Staff training

Child protection, trauma and supporting families

Across partnerships, staff training had continued to be delivered on a range of topics related to effectively supporting families: child protection, disclosure and children’s rights; trauma informed training; therapeutic support/systemic family therapy/recovery from abuse; working with specific groups of CYP e.g. siblings and those who have been removed from the home.

Communication

One partnership had a focus on communicating with children and had delivered training on the Talking Mats approach to high numbers of staff - almost all school nurses as well as a range of other professionals such as SCIM interviewers, police, social work and third sector staff. There were plans to expand this training further. Another partnership felt that it would benefit from speech and language training to increase understanding of how they could use it in an interview, while another also had plans to deliver speech and language training.

Bairns’ Hoose awareness/multi-agency working

One partnership described training staff from a range of agencies on Bairns’ Hoose awareness as well as building multi-agency relationships through joint events and workshops, while another had delivered training in multi-agency collaboration.

Justice

As described in Chapter 10, two partnerships had plans to undertake webinars on justice involving national partners and justice partners (COPFS, SCRA, and SCTS), and another had plans for staff to undertake in-house training on Court and Hearing processes.

Training needs

Some partnerships had conducted training needs analyses to inform their training plans, while two had also appointed learning and development staff to coordinate training across the Bairns’ Hoose. At this stage, however, Bairns’ Hoose staff across partnerships did not typically have individual training plans in place.

Support for partnerships

Participants in the qualitative research were asked to reflect on the support they had found useful and the support they would appreciate in the future.

Useful support to date

Participants particularly appreciated the opportunity to learn from other areas. This included the role of the Scottish Government National Bairns' Hoose Project Team in sharing learning across areas, for example how other areas had addressed challenges, and events that brought partnerships together to share learnings.

“Things like webinars where you're getting the national picture are really helpful in terms of learning from others [and] how they've overcome [challenges].”

There was a view from among partnerships who were further on in their development that the sharing of learning was perhaps more useful for partnerships who were less established. While they had been happy to share their learning, they would also have appreciated greater support related to their stage of development.

As well as the nationally organised events, peer support was also considered useful. For example, as noted in Chapter 11, health leads across partnerships had set up a specific group and met every couple of months to discuss progress and challenges, and a COPFS network was considered useful for prosecutors.

One partnership also reflected on the StART’s role in supporting progress - while it brought challenges, it also supported reflection and helped maintain focus.

“What has been helpful about [StART], while those processes can always be difficult and challenging at the same time, it's allowed us to really stop, take stock, quality, assure where we're at, think about it and think, ‘Right, okay, well, where are our gaps?’ [...] The Pathfinder as a whole has allowed self-reflection and to take stock on where we're at and move forward proactively.”

Involving the University of Edinburgh to support evaluation at an early stage was also seen as having helped partnerships they were working with.

Future support

Partnerships were keen to stress the importance of sustainable funding. They noted the positive impact of the funding to date and felt that there needed to be long-term commitment to future funding. Partnerships felt that longer term funding at the outset would have helped with procurement of services, recruitment of staff and more formalised multi-agency working, while concerns were raised about the potential withdrawal of funding for a project of this nature.

“Scottish Government need to be mindful of The Promise, the Care Review, all these previous inquiries and investigations and practise development that has informed the need for a Bairns’ Hoose in the first place. You cannot pump money into really valuable resources like this and then reduce the funding.”

“I find it slightly amazing the funding has only been promised for another year.”

In addition to the length of the funding term, one partnership noted that there had been delays in the release of the funding that had added to procurement and staff retention issues. There was a desire for earlier release of any future funding.

Partnerships also offered ideas for the way in which the Scottish Government communicates with them in future. While the support was valued, the amount of information received could feel overwhelming.

Furthermore, staff in one partnership described feeling ‘disconnected’ from the wider Bairns’ Hoose network. They felt that it was important for the National Bairns’ Hoose Implementation Group to remain connected with what is happening on the ground and to have contact with practitioners as well as management staff. Suggestions for this included a direct means of contact such as an email distribution list that highlights events, Continuous Professional Development and other information and goes to all staff involved with Bairns’ Hoose.

Partnerships also suggested specific areas that Scottish Government could support them with. These included practical challenges (e.g. building design), influencing changes to the justice system, a national approach to data sharing, the interagency referral discussion process, and evaluation. One partnership noted the importance of local evaluation to future funding and identified this as an area they would like more support.

“It's very difficult to do a robust evaluation if you don't have someone sort of doing that specifically, and they're not just doing it in an addition [to their day job]. So some support around that would be really helpful, or some tools or some guidance around how to robustly evaluate a new test of change.”