Children and Families National Leadership Group minutes: May 2025

Attendees and apologies

• Caroline Sinclair, Co-Chair, SOLACE
• Laura Caven, CoSLA
• Lynne McNiven, Directors of Public Health
• Tracy Davis, Child Health Commissioners
• Sheena Devlin, ADES
• Alison Gordon, Social Work Scotland
• Laura Lamb, SSSC
• Karen McCormack, Care Inspectorate
• Neil Hunter, Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration
• Elliot Jackson, Children’s Hearings Scotland
• Mhairi Grant, Child Protection Committees Scotland
• Jude Turbyne, Children in Scotland
• Fraser McKinlay, The Promise
• Miriam McKenna, Improvement Service
• Claire Burns, CELCIS
• Andrew Watson, Co-Chair, Scottish Government
• Iona Colvin, Scottish Government 
• Gavin Henderson, Scottish Government 
• Sara Hampson, Scottish Government
• Mairi Macpherson, Scottish Government
• Sarah Bruce, Scottish Government
• Sharon Macdonald, Scottish Government
• Cara Cooper, Scottish Government
• Clare McCrum, Scottish Government
• Peter Donachie, Scottish Government

Items and actions

Introduction

Andrew Watson welcomed members and introduced Caroline Sinclair as the Group’s new Co-Chair on behalf of SOLACE. The Group recorded their thanks and best wishes to Emily Aitchison who is leaving the Group’s Secretariat. No amendments were made to the note of the Group’s meeting on 3 March.

Report from Getting It Right For Every Child (GIRFEC) sub-group

Sharon Macdonald provided an update on the work of the GIRFEC sub-group. The sub-group met on 28 April and agreed its purpose was to facilitate the delivery of a programme of activity designed to further strengthen the understanding and implementation of GIRFEC across children’s services. This would be achieved through the following workstreams:

• building workforce capacity
• refreshed narrative on current context of GIRFEC approach and policy alignment
• creating the necessary conditions for workforce and culture
• review and evaluation processes

The next sub-group meeting will be in June with the focus on developing a workplan with short, medium and long-term priorities. The group’s work will help to ensure the strength and effectiveness of GIRFEC through changing circumstances and as GIRFEC reaches its 20th year in 2026.

Members welcomed the approach being taken and fed back that building workforce capacity will be particularly important, given current pressures, and avoiding creating additional processes, paperwork and other demands upon staff is essential. It was agreed that the leadership group would continue to receive regular reports on the sub-group’s progress.

Programme for government commitment on whole family support

Clare McCrum introduced the discussion session on the commitments on whole family support in the Programme for Government (PfG) published on 6 May. Following on from points made in the previous discussion on GIRFEC, the commitments aim to increase wraparound support for children and families; remove unnecessary bureaucracy and other barriers; and improve funding flexibilities. This should help families to access the support they need, where and when they need it and empower frontline staff. Actions being taken forward by SG include expanding the Fairer Futures Partnerships and delivering a Fairer Funding pilot for Third Sector organisations.

Members made the following points in discussion:

• good collaborative leadership approaches and relationship building across sectors is vital especially given the difficulty of simultaneously reforming services while delivering them. The ongoing challenges in shifting resources from crisis to prevention and early intervention work exemplifies this
• strong collaborative leadership is particularly needed to agree cross-sector priorities; provide shared governance and accountability; and leverage funding and other resources
• the role and sustainability of the Third Sector is vital in delivering whole family support. The Third Sector should be considered as equal partners in a whole system approach 
• there also needs to be strengthened links with Health partners. Universal services such as Health Visitors and Family Nurse Partnerships can play an important role in helping to provide whole family support. Better links with Adult Services, particularly those supporting families with acute needs, particularly drug, alcohol and mental health issues, are also required. Follow-up discussions should therefore take place with Child Health Commissioners and Directors of Public Health
• to be successful in encouraging families to access the support they need as early as possible and help prevent crisis, every effort must be made to avoid families feeling stigmatized. This will help to shift the balance towards prevention and early intervention and ensure a genuine positive difference is made
• a financial framework should be developed for the next 2-3 years incorporating existing and new expenditure at national and local levels. This will help ensure sustainability and increase funding flexibilities within a whole system approach. However, the level of investment and time required to implement change cannot be underestimated
• it is crucial to use existing infrastructure – Community Planning Improvement Board and Children’s Services Planning Partnerships were both suggested – rather than creating new delivery mechanisms. An early action would be to ask the six areas involved in the roll out of flexibilities under Whole Family Support to identify what is working well (including specific examples) and what needs to be improved in how community planning and children’s services planning partnerships are delivering holistic whole family support. Lessons learned and improvements can inform the next cycle of children’s services planning from 2026-2029. However, careful management is needed to ensure that communities and families rather than processes are central to driving forward improvements

The leadership group can play a key role in helping take work forward. As part of this, members or in some cases chief officers of their organisations have been invited by the First Minister to a leadership event on whole family support on 25 June. 

Programme for government – other issues

Mairi Macpherson summarised the PfG commitments on early child development. This includes greater support for preconception; antenatal; and post-natal health and care. There is a specific aim to ensure that, by the end of 2025, babies are breastfed for longer with inequalities decreasing. There is also a commitment to reducing developmental concerns at 27-30 months by a quarter by 2030.

The need to increase connectivity between early child development and broader work on whole family support was highlighted. There is significant scope for improvement in linking early child development with initiatives to improve adult health. Specific examples included better connections to smoking cessation initiatives focusing on vaping and cannabis as well as tobacco.

Gavin Henderson outlined the work taking place on The Promise including responding to the Reimagining Secure Care report by June 2025; publishing a new vision for kinship care by the end of this year; introducing a new care leavers payment from 1 April 2026; and uprating the Scottish Recommended Allowance for eligible foster and kinship carers. The group had previously discussed The Promise Bill. This was progressing as the Children and Young People (Care) (Scotland) Bill and would be introduced to Parliament before the Summer recess. Whole Family Wellbeing Funding is being extended across 2026/27. 

Any other business and date of next meeting

Andrew Watson provided an update on the National Care Service Advisory Board. The advisory board’s first meeting will be on 21 May and will focus on establishing ways of working to ensure an inclusive, collective approach to finding solutions and recommending actions which can drive improvements in social care, social work and community health services. Iona Colvin will be a member of the advisory board and represent this leadership group.

The next meeting will be the group’s in-person meeting on Tuesday 19 August and will focus on workforce.