Care Experienced Young People

The Promise produced by the Independent Care Review in 2020; sets out an overall view of what the new approach to supporting children, young people and families should be.

South Lanarkshire Council’s Keeping the Promise Plan, which is aligned with the Five Foundations of the Promise:

1. Voice – Children must be listened to and meaningfully and appropriately involved in decision making about their care, with all those involved properly listening and responding to what children want and need. There must be a compassionate caring decision-making culture focused on children and those they trust.
2. Family – Where children are safe in their families and feel loved, they must stay- and families must be given the support together to nurture that love and overcome the difficulties that get in the way.
3. People – The children that South Lanarkshire cares for must be actively supported to develop relationships with people in the workforce and wider community, who in turn must be supported to listen and be compassionate in their decision making and care.
4. Care- Where living with their family is not possible, children must stay with their brothers and sisters where safe to do so and belong to a loving home, staying there for as long as is needed.
5. Scaffolding – Children, families and the workforce must be supported by a system that is there when it is needed. The scaffolding- of help, support and accountability must be ready and responsive when it is required.

A Champions Board has been established to listen to the voice of those who are care experienced as well as a Community Planning Partnership Promise Board to drive forward the work of The Promise.

The Promise Progress Framework sets the frame for all questions in The Promise Story of Progress to be answered. At its launch in December 2024, it contains the national indicators required to answer the question 'how is Scotland doing in its progress towards keeping the promise?'

The Promise Progress Framework contains an initial ten vision statements taken directly from the promise, chosen because of the availability of multiple sources of meaningful data.  Each vision statement has an associated set of outcomes that reflect the overall ambition of what keeping the promise will look and feel like.

The national indicator set in The Promise Progress Framework at launch provides organisations with a structure to aid their own reporting on how they are feeding into Scotland’s overall aims. The intention is not to set up new governance and reporting structures where unnecessary, but for organisations to identify alignment or gaps with the work they do, the data they have, and how they use it.   

The separation of the provision of data and information from organisational reporting will help foster broader shared accountability beyond individual organisations. This information is both vital to verify that change is happening across Scotland, and to support the creation of a learning system to understand which activities are having a positive impact and where learning can be drawn.

Download the first iteration of The Promise Progress Framework to ‘Understand how Scotland is doing in its progress towards keeping the promise.