Chamber and committees

All young people need support when returning to communities after periods of being accommodated or sentenced. Young people should have a package of support detailed in their Child’s Plan, delivered in partnership to meet assessed needs and risks, by age appropriate services, in areas such as:

• Accommodation

• Education, training and employment

• Health and substance misuse

• Involvement of families; and

• Financial stability

When a young person enters custody or secure care planning for their transition back to the community should start immediately. Regular reviews should take place with the young person and partners, including parents and carers, to review the Child’s Plan and prepare for their return, with contingency plans put in place if needed. The final review prior to release provides a key opportunity to support a smooth and successful transition back to the community.

Transitions must take account of Corporate Parenting responsibilities, including the extension of rights of previously looked after young people.

Guidance on Reintegration and Transitions was published in 2011. This provides a minimum standard to be achieved and an overview of ‘good practice’ principles for local authorities, community planning partners, the Scottish Prison Service (SPS), the secure estate, and other partners working with young people under 18 years of age.

The Centre for Youth and Criminal Justice, funded by the Scottish Government, publish an annual Guide to Youth Justice in Scotland: Policy Practice and Legislation which includes a chapter focussed on Reintegration and Transitions. This is available at www.cycj.org.uk and was refreshed in June 2017.

Skill Development Scotland (SDS) Leadership and Management teams use a wide range of monitoring and performance information to track the quality and performance of the services and to support staff to improve and develop their practice, as well as sharing good practice around working with care experienced individuals.

Within the SDS national development and delivery team a Senior Executive is focused solely on care experienced individuals. This role is pivotal to progressing the Corporate Parenting Action Plan, managing stakeholder relationships, informing and influencing professional practice, leading on developments in relation to resources and staff learning and our engagement with young people. This role is a key interface internally with our Strategy, Policy and Performance team and Evaluation & Research team, maintaining a consistent focus on how our evidence base supports the continuous improvement of our services for care experienced individuals.

An SDS Community of Practice has been organised with a Corporate Parenting Champion from each local authority who meet to share good practice in working with care experienced young people. This includes identifying training and development needs to support staff to work more effectively with care experienced young people.

SDS’s refreshed school offer identifies care experienced pupils as being entitled to a maximum level of service to develop their career management skills. This intensive support continues beyond school to support care experienced young people to develop their career management skills. This ensures a cohesive approach to supporting care experienced young people to help them achieve and sustain a suitable positive outcome.

The Scottish Government funds CELCIS (almost £5 million in 2017-18), to provide capacity building in the sector to improve the care and support provided to care-experienced young people on the basis of what is known about what works and how improvements can become sustainable in the long run.

We also fund the Realigning Children’s Services programme (approximately £450k per annum). This provides support to community planning partnerships to improve local collaborative decision making, to ensure the total available resource meets the needs of - and improves outcomes for – vulnerable children and families.

As corporate parents, local authorities have duties under the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 to ensure they safeguard and promote the wellbeing of Scotland's looked after children and care leavers. The Scottish Government committed to support these, and other, measures in the 2014 Act.

Scottish Local Government Finance Statistics show that overall gross revenue expenditure on Children and Families Social Work by Local Authorities in 2015-16 was £923 million, an increase of £39 million compared to 2014-15 (3.7 per cent increase after adjusting for inflation).

If a local authority becomes aware that a child or young person who is looked after by them or is in receipt of advice, guidance or assistance from them has died, the local authority must, within 24 hours, notify the Care Inspectorate. The Care Inspectorate, on behalf of Scottish Ministers, receives, reviews and provides feedback to the local authority on a report compiled by them reviewing the circumstances of the child or young person and his/her death.

Once notified, the Care Inspectorate alert Scottish Ministers as soon as reasonably practicable, and information around the name of the child, his or her date of birth, the legal circumstances in which he or she was being looked after and where, and brief details of the cause and circumstances of his or her death, if known are recorded.

The exact (medical) cause of death is not always known. The Care Inspectorate’s principle concern is with the circumstances of the child's life and pathway. It should also be noted that this group of children includes children with life limiting conditions whose deaths are anticipated.

The duty to provide Continuing Care does not apply if the accommodation the person was in immediately before ceasing to be looked after was secure accommodation. Continuing Care placements are intended to entitle eligible care experienced young people to extend their care setting in order to maintain established relationships with trusted, supportive adults. For a number of reasons, secure accommodation is not an appropriate setting for Continuing Care. However, when external factors outwith the young person’s control make a Continuing Care placement unavailable local authorities will be expected to discuss and agree alternative support measures which meet the young person’s needs.

The Scottish Government has paid £4.2 million to Scottish local authorities in 2015-16 to support costs of implementing Continuing Care and this funding commitment rises to £9.3 million by 2019/20.

Taking into account the 2017-18 local government finance settlement, including the extra £160 million announced at Stage 1 of the Budget Bill, plus the other sources of income available to councils through reforms to council tax and funding for Health and Social Care Integration, the overall increase in spending power to support local authority services now amounts to over £383 million (or 3.7%).

The majority of funding to local authorities is provided by means of a block grant. It is the responsibility of each local authority to allocate resources on the basis of local needs and priorities.

Skills Development Scotland (SDS) is committed to ensuring staff are appropriately qualified for the roles that they undertake and receive appropriate training on the needs and rights of young people; including those with care experience. This includes, but is not restricted to, the SDS Academy of learning and development activities for all staff across the organisation. The Academy offers a core set of equality focused modules and learning. Partner organisations are also engaged to deliver staff capacity building and learning where local needs extend beyond what the Academy offer. In 2016 SDS updated standard operating procedures in order to better support care experienced young people to access SDS services and progress into positive outcomes.

SDS has benefitted from the SG-funded training for corporate parents which is delivered by Who Cares? Scotland and involves hearing directly from care experienced young people. SDS recently launched an E-Learning module on Corporate Parenting for all its staff which incorporates video clips of care experienced young people telling their story and talking about the various issues and barriers they faced along the way. This training is accompanied by a series of worksheets to direct team discussions across the business which raise questions about how these young people could have been supported further and also possible ways to improve SDS practice going forward.

The first of the 16 commitments included in the SDS 2015-2018 Corporate Parenting Plan is to ‘Introduce all-staff training on the subject of Corporate Parenting, with additional training opportunities offered where appropriate.’ Towards this SDS has launched a Career Information Advice and Guidance Equalities E-Learning module with a specific focus on Additional Support Needs (ASN), Corporate Parenting and Community Justice, which is compulsory for all Operations staff and is assessed. Operational staff have also recently had training in the delivery of the Next Steps post school service offer which entitles care experienced young people to intensive individual engagement with an SDS Adviser up to their 26th birthday.

SDS has an ASN resource area on its staff intranet, which includes a specific area on working with care experienced young people. This intranet resource contains a range of guidance documents on how colleagues can support care experienced customers with their individual needs. As a final example, an SDS Community of Practice has been established with a representative from each local authority across Scotland. The Community of Practice meets to share effective and interesting practice in working with care experienced young people, which drives continuous improvement across the country. The Community of Practice members have also received additional training from CELCIS (the Centre for Excellence for Looked After Children in Scotland).

It is the responsibility of each local authority to use resources as efficiently as possible and deliver services effectively to ensure taxpayers get the best possible value. How this is done is a matter for each council - councils are autonomous bodies, responsible for managing their own day to day business and answerable to their electorates.

We will expect to obtain credible evidence of actual uptake from local authority returns, which will be collected in 2017-18 and published from 2019 in the annual National Statistics publication Children’s Social Work Statistics. We will consider this, and any other information that we obtain from across local authorities, to monitor numbers and support local authorities to ensure they offer support best suited to each care leaver.

Virtually no children are expelled from Scottish schools.

The Scottish Government recognises the important role of our education system and the need to provide a positive and inclusive learning experience for all school pupils. We have taken a number of steps to reduce the incidences of school exclusions and close the attainment gap to improve the health and wellbeing of our children and young people, and maximise their future opportunities. On 19 June 2017 we published our refreshed guidance on preventing and managing school exclusions. This focuses on the importance of early intervention measures to prevent the need for exclusion and it promotes the importance of positive relationships in schools, recognising that exclusion should only be used as a last resort. The guidance also highlights the importance of schools and education authorities recognising the impact that exclusion can have, particularly on disadvantaged children.

We recognise that excluded and disengaged learners need additional support which is why Education Scotland provides support and advice through a range of national networks and working parties for third sector groups who are working to improve educational outcomes for learners at risk of being excluded.

We have been working with our partners to prevent homelessness amongst care experienced young people in recent years and this will remain a priority as we develop the proposals around Programme for Government.

The Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Action Group will focus on the actions needed to eradicate rough sleeping and transform the use of temporary accommodation. We know that there will be people with experience of the care system amongst those with more complex needs who may be rough sleeping, who will be the focus of immediate action.

An important part of the work of this Group will be ensuring the voice of people with direct, personal experience of homelessness informs its actions, including the voice of care experienced young people.

The national group for homelessness in Scotland in recent years has been the Scottish Government and COSLA’s Homelessness Prevention and Strategy Group and this group will retain an important long term role going forwards in identifying priorities for tackling homelessness amongst young people, including care leavers.