Chamber and committees

There has been an element of consultation in some places—the parents definitely do not think that it is enough—but in others, schools were told that they did not have to engage with the consultation process, and then found that their buses had been cut, so I agree with Mr Kerr on that point.

It has been suggested by members of the local authority that children and young people should simply use the service buses instead. However, we have had reports of buses not stopping, and of buses that are overly busy. In some places, there is only one bus an hour, and if it is full, children face a long walk or a wait outside school for the next one. North Lanarkshire Council says that it is following Scottish Government guidance, but there seems to be no consistency across local authorities as to how that is being interpreted.

As an MSP from the Scottish Green party, which proudly introduced free bus travel for everyone under 22, I find the suggestion that children as young as four years old should use public transport as an alternative to their school bus to be concerning. Since the scheme was introduced, thousands of young people have benefited, taking more than 50 million bus journeys, and it has saved family members money during a cost of living crisis. However, it should not be used to plug gaps.

Yesterday, I walked one of the proposed walking routes with parents and pupils in Motherwell. I sincerely hope that other members will take up the opportunity to walk the route; I know that some have already been out, and the parents were really pleased by the support. The route is simply not safe. We walked along busy roads and narrow paths, and over broken glass. One of the children told me that they would not be comfortable walking the route without an adult because they did not feel safe.

We, as politicians, try to put across arguments in a compelling way, but it is only fitting that the final words of my speech are from one of the pupils who has been affected. Ella, who is 10 and from Motherwell, sent me a video detailing the challenges as she sees them. She said:

“The people in charge of North Lanarkshire Council have decided to stop our school buses in order to save money. I don’t think this is fair. It’s the wrong decision.

The school bus gets lots of children to school safely and on time. If I didn’t get the school bus, I’d need to walk a really long way in the rain to and from school. Between my house and school, there are big dangerous roads that are especially dangerous for young children like my brother and sister. They’d be tired and cold before we even get to school. 129 children from our school will lose their bus next year. I worry that our school campus will get really busy and dangerous with lots more cars.

This is also bad for climate change. I thought grown-ups were trying to stop as many cars being used on the road. Then why take away our buses? It doesn’t make sense. I want the grown-ups in charge to put our safety first before saving money.”

I share Ella’s concerns. The proposed cuts will put children’s safety at risk by packing in even more cars. For some parents, having to take children to or from school will cause more hassle in the mornings, as they will be trying to get children to both secondary and primary schools because of the cut to the buses.

I thank all members who signed the motion and so enabled this debate to happen. Before I go into detail about the motion, I extend my thanks to the many parents across North Lanarkshire who have contacted me to share their personal experiences of how the proposed cuts will affect their families. They include Laura, Jim, Leonna, Diane, Lorraine and Kerry Anne, who join us in the public gallery today. The determination, commitment and continuous campaigning by those parents has been inspiring and uplifting, and it should be a reminder of the power and importance of local issues.

Some 590 parents have signed the petition to overturn the decision to reduce the number of children’s school buses across North Lanarkshire. The decision is a disaster for children’s safety. I hope that North Lanarkshire Council and the Scottish Government can take immediate action to deliver a workable solution.

For background, for those members who represent other areas of the country, I highlight that in North Lanarkshire, local councillors have implemented cuts to school buses for secondary pupils by increasing the qualifying distance that children have to live from their school from two miles to three miles, and have also proposed a similar approach for primary schools, with the qualifying distance moving from one mile to two miles. That will have a significant impact on a large number of young children, causing them to rely on their parents to drive them to and from school every day. Families and teachers from across the region have already spoken out against the decision.

It is clear that these cuts will put children’s safety at risk by packing more cars on to the already crowded streets around school grounds—areas where children are walking and cycling in large numbers. It will also increase pollution and carbon emissions around schools at a time when we are becoming increasingly aware of the damage that that can cause, and it will add an extra burden on parents and carers, who are already struggling.

It is already having an impact on secondary schools, with some reporting an increase of up to 30 per cent in the number of cars, with pupils leaving the campuses to get to parents’ cars, which are waiting in queues, and pupils having to walk along the grass verges of dual carriageways. How on earth can anyone think that that is safe?

My inbox has been inundated with correspondence from parents, teachers and members of the local community, who are rightly very concerned about children’s welfare. I have had particularly moving conversations with parents of children with additional support needs, who rely heavily on their school buses and the importance of routine that the school bus allows their children. I will share some words from a parent to whom I spoke recently. She said:

“My child doesn’t have social awareness or safety awareness due to his autism. On walking from home to school, he would need to cross two very busy main roads and cross through a park which another high school sits at.

On Hamilton Road there is a gap of roughly half a mile between traffic lights to get safely across the road, and on Airbles road the distance is longer. He wouldn’t be able to process when was best to cross the road between traffic which would lead to a breakdown with anxiety over how to get across.

It’s the same with trying to access public transport. Most buses are either full or nearing capacity when they reach his stop. The heightened noise on the buses would be over stimulating for him and this could also lead to a stressful and traumatic experience.

I believe there has been a gap in understanding of the needs of all children with Additional Support Needs and not just the ones with mobility issues.”

I, too, thank the minister for holding this hugely important debate. Like others, I reaffirm the Scottish Greens’ commitment to achieving the Promise.

I do not think that anyone could argue with what the Promise is at its heart. The recognition that important structural and societal barriers remain for care-experienced people reminds us of the urgency with which such barriers should be dismantled. What we have done so far and how we have pushed progress forward are really important. If the importance of an issue could be measured purely by the number of briefings and emails that we receive on it, this issue would be a high priority for the chamber.

With regard to steps forward, The Promise Scotland, in its briefing ahead of the debate, highlighted the Children (Care and Justice) (Scotland) Act 2024. My colleague Ross Greer managed to secure amendments to that legislation that sought to improve the way in which secure transport is delivered and scrutinised, because the transport provision for young people in secure care had been a bit of a missing link in the gradual raising of standards, quality and accountability over recent years.

The hope instead of handcuffs campaign raised the profile of the issue, too, highlighting that children in Scotland were being inappropriately restrained when in the care of secure transport providers, with handcuffs, for example, being used in situations in which they simply were not necessary. The use of restraint against children has, rightly, been the subject of significant scrutiny and debate in the Parliament and in council chambers across Scotland, and I am glad to note that progress has been made specifically in relation to schools, with greatly improved guidance being produced.

The availability of secure transport has also been an issue. The Education, Children and Young People Committee heard that, due to the lack of specialist providers in Scotland, transport providers were coming from hundreds of miles away to take young people relatively short distances. That was not good either for young people or for providers themselves. However, as the “Plan 24-30” document says:

“Keeping the promise will never not be urgent. Childhood is short, and precious. ”

That should focus minds on how we continue the pace of change and adapt current plans when issues arise.

Support for families and early intervention have been raised by several organisations. Helping families to thrive, and giving support and guidance before a crisis, are essential to keeping the Promise. The whole family wellbeing fund has been hailed as a positive step forward, but many families are still finding it difficult to navigate systems when they need help.

We must also remain aware of how budgets impact on the financing of third sector and other organisations that provide support and advocacy to families, as well as the effects on funds such as the whole family wellbeing fund. Projects under that fund cannot sustain many third sector organisations on their own. We know that financial positions are difficult, but often it is all too easy to cut funding for some of that vital work in order to plug gaps in statutory services. The reality is that many third sector organisations are either catching people who do not qualify for support, or preventing people in need from accessing statutory services in the first place.

I have attended a few events with organisations such as Who Cares? Scotland at which I have spoken directly to young people who are care experienced and have heard from them what they need from us, and I have found kinship care and relationships with siblings being mentioned often. There is a perception that kinship care is often dismissed as it can be too difficult to establish, or that only immediate family were considered for it. The definition of “kinship care” in the Scottish Government’s guidance is actually pretty broad, but it seems that, in certain cases, it might not be being explored to its full extent. I was going to ask the minister for an update on work in that space, but I am grateful to her for outlining some of the measures that are under way. I am particularly interested in the guidance to the social work sector to support kinship care. If she has any further information, either now or at a later point, I will be hugely grateful to get that detail.

As Roz McCall mentioned, there has been some progress on keeping siblings together, but the briefing from The Promise Scotland once again raises the issue of the lack of contact with siblings for care-experienced people. It is an issue that I have heard repeatedly from children and young people right across the country, and it appears that we are not yet getting it quite right every time. There needs to be a consistency of approach for siblings who have individual plans and orders through the hearings system to ensure that the system that is supposed to support them is not putting in place competing orders with different contact requirements. Not taking wider circumstances and important people in the care-experienced young person’s life into account is not getting it right for that child or young person.

The language that we use around care experience can also carry stigma. In the process of preparing for the debate, I read about some work that Clackmannanshire Council has undertaken to make the language that it uses about care experience more accessible. That could be the language used in reports, or in meetings, and it would ensure that the young people being talked about know what it is that people are saying, so that they can have meaningful input into their care. That very much prompted me to go back through this speech to see whether I had lived up to those accessibility standards.

We are talking about the simple things—things that we know make a lot of what we do more accessible, such as not using jargon or too many abbreviations, and making sure that the child or young person understands what is being said before moving on to the next topic. That might sound patronising, but the entire document is about how those little things encourage children and young people to be equal partners in their own care, to be able to participate and to explain their own view and experience.

I know that I am rapidly running out of time, and there are several more things that I wanted to cover and which I hope to be able to address in closing. In the interests of time, though, I will leave it there for now.

It has been a good debate—it has been a challenging debate for us all, but it has certainly been a good one.

I absolutely agree with the minister that we need to ensure that care-experienced people feel that we are committed to change and that, as a Parliament, we are committed to making the system better for all care-experienced people. It is so important that we take a proactive approach to keeping families together, to alleviating poverty and, ultimately, to making those families feel supported and valued.

I echo the minister’s thank you to all those who have given their time and effort to make things better. In my contributions today, I have referred to many stories and personal experiences that people have given me to make things better for those who come after them. The sharing of those stories is selfless. Often, we cannot change that experience, but the people who share those experiences often want to make sure that it will not happen to anyone else.

The definition of care experience is important, but there has to be a balance. It is important that we ensure that it is specific enough to have meaning and to inform, but not so specific that it excludes some people’s experience. I am very glad that it is being developed with people with lived experience, to ensure that that becomes a reality.

I found Oliver Mundell’s contribution very interesting; I often feel that same sense of déjà vu in health debates. I think that that links to Roz McCall’s comments on the pace of change. We can never take comfort in the pace at which we are achieving change for care-experienced people. Martin Whitfield made a point about how long it takes for change to happen and what that time looks like in terms of the lives of young people.

I met the same young people as Willie Rennie met, and I think that the frustration of those young people is absolutely reflective of how long it takes for tangible change to be achieved. Some of the things that we have talked about this afternoon take time, and there is no way around that. Although it is true that we could certainly have gone quicker on some things and achieved more by now, we need to consider whether we are managing expectations and giving timelines to care-experienced children and young people as a whole, so that they can feel in control of the whole journey, too.

Kevin Stewart mentioned the need to listen and the small issues that we can help to resolve. We should never underestimate the extent to which things that we see as relatively simple can become all-consuming for people. At the same time as focusing on the large systemic change that needs to happen, we also need to solve the practical issues.

That is especially true for those young people who are moving on from care. On one of the first occasions on which I met Who Cares? Scotland, young people told me about all the things that they had found challenging on leaving care and moving into their own place, which involved having to deal with being adults long before many of the rest of us would have had to. Advice on the little things that I took for granted, which my parents gave me when I first moved out, was often never given to those young people. That should lead us to always stop and not make assumptions about anyone else’s experience. Crucially, we should listen to those who have already had to navigate that situation alone.

Clare Haughey mentioned the need to track change and progress, and no one will be surprised to hear me say how crucial data is.

It is hugely important, yet Willie Rennie highlighted how patchy data collection is in local authorities. It is simply not good enough that we do not know how, where or why some things happen. How will we know if the initiatives are having the effect that we want without effective data collection? We will not even know if something is a problem without having accurate standardised data from across the country that is collected and challenged at a national level.

Local variability also needs addressing, and tracking what is going on well—or not going well—in certain in areas is vital to ensuring that we keep the Promise everywhere.

Foysol Choudhury’s remarks about those from racial minorities and how people can be multiply disadvantaged are really important. We need to ensure that intersectional issues are taken into account for those young people and that we tackle all the barriers that they face.

Katy Clark talked about the arbitrary limits for support for care-experienced people. Many people do not understand why the age limits have been picked. For many of their peers, support from families does not just end at a certain date or age. We need to look at how we can support people throughout their lives. Giving them that value is hugely important to make them feel loved, as Rona Mackay and others mentioned.

Another issue that has been highlighted with me is health inequalities for care-experienced people. Again, that is about access and structural inequalities, but often stigma and cultural issues can be just as painful. I have previously spoken to care leavers who have become parents. Their perception of judgment and extra monitoring, because of their background of care experience, made difficult what should have been a positive and joyful time. They felt a level of suspicion and monitoring that others did not receive. They felt that people were concerned about how they were looking after their baby and that, as a first-time parent, they were under a huge amount of scrutiny and were concerned that it was implied that they might not know what they were doing.

That illustrates that it cannot be the responsibility of only one minister to ensure that the Promise fulfils its objectives. Many pieces cross into many other portfolios, so we must ensure that everyone is focused on this. We also must ensure that whatever systems we design are accessible for care-experienced people.

Nicola Sturgeon paid tribute to all those who have given their time, experience and lived experience. We would not be at this point without all those who have put their efforts into supporting all of us to be able to deliver on the Promise. We must live up to the expectation that they have so rightly placed on us to achieve the Promise, and the Scottish Greens look forward to continuing our work with the Government on the bill and on the issue going forward.

Good morning to those joining us online. Is the service that is currently set up in Australia, and in Victoria specifically, a specialist service that has been set up to deal with assisted dying, or does it sit within other established healthcare services?

What level of resource was provided to healthcare providers to be able to upskill and train clinicians when voluntary assisted dying first came online?

Yes.

Julian, I come back to what you said a couple of minutes ago about the training that practitioners receive. Could you give us an overview of what that training looks like? Does it vary by state, or is it set out in the legislation that is provided in Australia?

Not at all. That is very useful, thank you.

Professor White, to come back to what you said, was the specialist service established purely due to issues of rurality and the size of the state that must be covered, or were there other considerations?

So, if I am understanding—