Chamber and committees

Children and young people are right at the heart of co-designing the service. It is really important that their voices are at the table, and we have been doing a lot of work with children and young people in that respect. We have been hearing from a lot of hard-to-reach voices, disability organisations, children’s disability representatives and so on to ensure that those voices are right at the heart of the co-design. That is important, no matter whether children’s services are included in the national care service, and the voices of the parents and carers of those children need to be heard, too.

It runs almost counter to some of the arguments that I have heard that we should not be looking at children’s services when we have not decided whether they should be in the national care service, but the fact is that we have to design a national care service that will be able to provide such services for children if that decision is taken, to ensure that they are not an afterthought and that we are not doing things retrospectively. As I have said, their voices must be very much at the table.

There are difficulties with recruitment and retention in adult social care services and, indeed, in children’s services, but those difficulties are not unique to Scotland. There are multifaceted reasons why people leave adult and children’s social care services. Some people have returned home after Brexit. It has been difficult to recruit and retain those staff, but we continue to support social care services to ensure that we have the staff.

I can give some examples of the work that we are doing to support recruitment across social care services—

Mr Stewart has already talked about the phased approach to the NCS, and the approach to children’s services will be similar if they are to be included.

We need to maintain strong links right across all the services that work with children, whether they be within or outwith the national care service. I touched on that a little when, in answer to Mr Greer’s question about education and early learning and childcare, I said that we needed to ensure that such links were built strongly. However, we already have the underpinning of our getting it right for every child policy, which committee members will be familiar with. Everyday working for our health, social care and education staff is well embedded in all those services and gives a good, strong foundation for working across disciplines and services in the best interests of each child.

Our current work will help inform us as we move forward, regardless of whether children’s services form part of the national care service. Included in that work are the research that CELCIS is carrying out and our engagement with children and young people on what they need from a national care service, what they have asked us for, what they have told us is not working well for them and how they would like services to work better for them—which is essentially what this process is about.

We all recognise that improvements have to be made right across children’s services. As with adult services, they experience postcode lotteries, and they also encounter difficulties when they cross local authority boundaries, because one local authority might provide service X while the other does not. We will endeavour to continue our work to improve children’s services; indeed, we have already done a lot of work in that respect. For example, we have introduced the Promise, which Iona Colvin referred to; we have established the whole family wellbeing fund; and, just a short while ago, we launched the new GIRFEC practice guidance.

In short, a lot of work has been done, but we are not standing still, regardless of whether children’s services will be included in the NCS.

If the decision is to move children’s services to the national care service, those services will move, too. If you—

I cannot give you an exact figure just now.

Mr Stewart has given you an answer, but I can give you the overall headcount for children’s social services.

That is a very fair and reasonable question to ask. Every MSP around the table will probably have had experience of constituency cases in which families and children have approached them with similar difficulties, concerns and worries. Those issues were certainly raised during the consultation and in the conversations that Mr Stewart has been having with children and young people, and I absolutely recognise those concerns.

Integration has worked well in some areas and provides some excellent services. I do not want to sound as though I am criticising the staff who work in those services—they have gone above and beyond, particularly in the past couple of years—but I think that this is evidence of why we need national consistency, minimum standards, a charter that sets out the rights that people can claim and those voices at the table when we co-design services. We need to ensure that there are no boundaries to accessing services and that we have consistency so that people who move from one local authority area to another can expect the same level of service.

Unfortunately, the things that those children and young people have experienced are not uncommon; they were certainly a driving force behind the independent review of adult social care, and they have lent a voice to the suggestion that children’s services be included.

I disagree. We are taking a very measured approach to whether children’s services should be included in the national care service. We are looking at the evidence, consulting stakeholders, consulting the people who are using care services at the moment and helping them to co-design what could be the children’s element of a national care service.

We will look not only at what the research tells us but at what stakeholders and the people involved in the service will tell us. It is important that we do not look at things in isolation.

Mr Stewart and I have talked about co-design, and it is vital that we listen to those who use care services and hear their opinions on what the service for children should look like. As I said in response to Ms Maguire, all of this evidence gathering and consultation will not go to waste if it turns out that children’s services are not to be included in the NCS. Instead, it will help us to drive forward change that is needed and wanted and that will best suit the needs of children and their families.

I hope that I answered some of that in my first response. We are ensuring that children and young people are involved in the co-design and that they are at the table.

I do not recognise what Mr Marra has said about young people being dropped into this. If children’s services are covered by the national care service, the services that will be provided will be subject to national standards and, through the charter that is being designed, children will be given rights that they currently do not have. There will be risk either way—there will be risk if we do not bring children’s services into the national care service, and there will be risk if we do. We have recognised that. Indeed, the task in the research that has been commissioned is to reach the best decision about where those services should be placed to best serve those children.

There will be changes, no matter whether children’s services are brought into a national care service, and we need to be prepared for them. The Government has been doing preparatory work for that through our engagement with children and young people and their families through the organisations that represent them, as well as through the research that we have commissioned on an evidence base for the best way to provide the services.

We touched on that at the very beginning of the meeting, when we spoke about why children’s services are being considered as part of the national care service. The independent review of adult social care looked only at social care for adults. When the public consultation on the national care service was concluded, it was clear that there were mixed responses to our questions about the inclusion of children’s services within the NCS, mostly because people felt that there was a lack of evidence in that respect, whereas there had already been a large inquiry into adult social care.

Therefore, as part of an evidence-gathering exercise, we commissioned CELCIS to carry out independent research on how we ensure that children, young people and their families get the help that they need when they need it. There are five strands to that research: first, a rapid evidence review of the published literature; secondly, a deep dive to examine approaches to the integration and delivery of children’s services; thirdly, a national scoping and mapping exercise to explore different models of integrated service delivery and any potential effects on a range of outcomes; fourthly, a national survey of the children’s services workforce and children’s services leaders to build on emerging findings; and fifthly, targeted focus groups and interviews with the workforce. Although the research will not give us a yes/no answer, it will give us an evidence base for where we are, what is working and how the workforce feels.

In parallel with that, we are working with children, young people, their families, organisations that represent them and other groups on what they feel that they need from a national care service. We are not going back to ask them lots of questions for which we already have lots of evidence from the review of care services, but we will look at all that evidence in the round and make a decision in principle on whether children’s services should or should not be in the national care service.

The research, which started in September, will run for a year to next September. The committee might be interested to know that the strands will report as they conclude, and I am more than happy to share those reports with the committee if it is interested in receiving them. Obviously, I am not asking you to make a decision on that today, but the offer is there to see those reports before the research itself is finally written up. The timeline for the research has been developed to ensure that we can make those decisions on the inclusion of children’s services in the NCS, and the two things will run in parallel prior to the operation of the NCS itself.