Navigate: one year on.

As part of The Digital Conversation, Enquire’s Robert Doyle reflects on how digital tools, video content and accessible online information are helping strengthen support around care experienced children and young people, and what this means for the future of advice services.

One year ago, Enquire (Scotland’s additional support for learning advice service) launched Navigate – a new online hub to strengthen support for care experienced learners.

Funded through the Keep the Promise Fund, Navigate was created to provide the adults who support care experienced pupils with the tools they need to help them in education.

It is a digital resource designed to present information in bitesize chunks, and in doing so the aim is to make it as easy and accessible as possible for the adults who support care experienced young people to consume. It is our hope that the learning within Navigate helps strengthen the connections and communication between the people providing support with education and ultimately help reinforce the scaffolding around care experienced pupils in Scotland.

As we reflect a year on from launching Navigate there is an opportunity to consider this online resource in the context of Children in Scotland’s Digital Conversations. What does digital mean to people – and what opportunities does this offer in today’s world? In the context of Navigate and Enquire, we can think about how digital evolution shapes the advice we offer, and how people’s expectations and preferences for how they consume information may be shifting as websites and social media converge.

Creating Navigate signalled an exciting new chapter for Enquire, as it was the first time that the service had sought additional external funding. This provided the opportunity for us to try new things and experiment with new approaches to how we provide and present advice and information. The Keep the Promise Fund allowed us to explore digital innovation that had the potential to influence our information provision more widely.

An example of this, and an important element of Navigate, is short-form video content. Created in a studio and presented in a social media style, video clips offer our website users the opportunity to hear directly from experts and people with experience. They allow us to deliver information with new layers and emotional context. Tailored to those who care for, live with, work with, and support care experienced children and young people, this form of advice and information offers a more empathetic and communicative approach.

Developing Navigate also provided the opportunity to design digital tools that put more power in parents’ and carers’ hands, offering something practical to help make the first steps to communicating easier. We developed email templates – a form that a parent or carer can complete to generate a formatted introductory email that can be sent to a child’s school or education provider. This gives parents and carers a launchpad when they don’t know where to begin and can kickstart important conversations about a child’s support at school.

These examples demonstrate that digital advice and information is more than just making content available online. It can change how people experience, understand and use information. Short-form video can provide added layers – bringing expertise and lived experience to life, while digital tools can turn information into an immediate next step.

A year on from Navigate’s launch, the Digital Conversation feels like a valuable reflection for our organisation and services more broadly as we look forward. The digital landscape is always shifting, both through technological advance and policy changes. This can pose real challenges, but also opportunity. As people’s expectations of digital information continue to evolve, so too must the ways we provide advice and support. The aim is not simply to make information available, but to make it easier to find, understand and act on – helping more people access the knowledge and tools they need to support all children and young people to thrive in education.

Click here to find out more about Navigate.