Building on Conference 2026: Our policy priorities

In this blog, Dr Judith Turbyne, CEO of Children in Scotland, reflects on Children in Scotland’s Annual Conference 2026, which focused on 20 years of Getting it Right for Every Child, highlighting the ongoing challenge of translating strong policy into meaningful, consistent practice. She explains why Children in Scotland are trying to steer clear of the ‘new and shiny’ and focus their policy priorities. 

This year our conference celebrated 20 years of Getting it Right for Every Child (GIRFEC), a policy that puts the wellbeing of children and young people and their rights at the heart of decision making. A real strength of the approach is that the set of wellbeing indicators gives us a common language to explore this essential dimension of the lives of children, young people and their families.

But despite GIRFEC, UNCRC incorporation, the Promise, the Child Poverty Act and other strong policies, we know there is so much to do if we are committed to building a better Scotland for our children. It is great that these policies have come about through, in the main, cross-party agreement and cross-sector collaboration. However, there is too big an implementation gap. Now, an implementation gap is a common thing as it is easier to create polices than to implement them. It is also true that the impacts of the twin menaces of COVID and the cost-of-living crisis have meant that making progress on policy implementation could actually look a bit like standing still. Nevertheless, now we have to peer over the crevice into this gap and consider what tools we have to begin to fill it in.

The start of a new parliamentary term is always a good moment to consider our national priorities and the main priority over the next five years must be to work to close that unwelcome implementation gap. But how?

A fundamental truth, I think, is that we all need to do a bit less a lot better. We are living at a time when everyone has fewer resources. So, it can’t just be about finding new money. We are going to need to make choices, to prioritise, to streamline. At that heart of this is creating the conditions for respectful, but constructively challenging collaborations, with the third sector fully integrated into planning and implementation. We have to really be outcome focused, but not at an individual organisational level. The outcomes we need to focus on are those that will have the biggest impact for children. We will have to give some things up and we definitely need to steer clear of creating something shiny and new. We have the policies; we need to concentrate on getting them to work.

In Children in Scotland, we have been having the conversation about how we can prioritise our policy efforts. Many of you will have seen our manifesto for the new government. From that manifesto, we needed prioritise further to decide where we could add most value, and therefore where we could put our proactive efforts. As a membership organisation, we felt we needed to look at where we could best contribute to narrowing that implementation gap.

We have selected three key areas. Public services reform (focusing on ethical commissioning, more streamlined approach to local authority governance, collaborative leadership and fully embedding third sector partners into local authority planning); Whole Family support and Additional Support for Learning. By focusing down, and looking at areas where we have the ability to use our power within the system to change things for the better, we hope that we, with knowledge and support from our membership, the children and young people we work with and in collaboration with the wider network, we can really contribute to positive change.

I want to finish by talking about hope. Many of you might be like me and finding it hard to engage with social media platforms. The general flavour of the interactions seem so difficult to me. It feels like a constant ‘caps locked’ situation, where we have the ability to shout about what we believe, without really having to get into a more nuanced discussion. I think the unintended consequence of the tone of the public debate is a squeezing of hope for those who most need change.

Hope is a strong thing, a real thing, a thing that supports agency. Clearly on its own it can do nothing, but it is a necessary (not sufficient) condition for people to participate in changing their reality. Communities will not engage if they don’t have hope that their actions can have an impact. And I think we have to make sure that we are not only contributing to hope through the services we provide, our work on the ground, but also by ensuring that we are contributing to balanced story telling in our campaigning and influencing work.