New leadership and key priorities for Scotland’s children’s sector
Our Chief Executive, Dr Judith Turbyne, reflects on the recent meeting of the Children’s Sector Strategic and Policy Forum, in which leaders from across the sector were joined by the new Minister for Children, Young People and the Promise to discuss key priorities over the coming years.
In the June meeting of the Children’s Sector Strategic and Policy Forum, we were delighted to be joined by Siobhian Brown MSP, the new Minister for Children, Young People and the Promise.
It was really positive to get together at such an early point in the Minister’s tenure and look at how we can make the most of the next five years. We started by sharing key priorities of the Forum.
Supporting the positive incorporation of UNCRC and ensuring that combatting child poverty is at the heart of the work (ably led by Together and the Child Poverty Action Group) will continue to be important.
We stressed the importance of working together to really make progress on closing the implementation gap between good policies and some of what we see on the ground.
Making significant progress on public service reform is central to that. We need to do things differently to ensure that public services better meet the needs of our babies, children, young people and families. We touched on ethical commissioning within local and national government, which encourages collaboration, legislating to support more streamlined approaches to local authority governance, collaborative leadership at local and national level and fully embedding third sector partners into local authority planning. The third sector makes a major contribution to this work. We discussed the need to really embed SCVO’s Fair Funding principles into third sector funding to ensure that this contribution is as impactful as possible.
We also talked about the opportunity we now have to deliver on the government’s commitment to Whole Family Support. To get that right, we need a shared national vision and definition for Whole Family Support, ensuring that the third sector is a meaningful partner in design, development and delivery of this. And we agreed that Whole Family Support is critical to the systems change and collaborative working required to provide families living in poverty with the support they need.
The words shared by the Minister clearly illustrated the congruity in what we are all trying to achieve.
In the discussion that followed, that sense of congruity continued. A theme that surfaced several times was the need for enhanced collaboration both between and across sectors. There was a focus on the need for cross-portfolio working within government. The realities facing babies, children, young people and families don’t stop at the edge of portfolios but run across many.
The meeting finished with a lovely reflection on the need to be ‘wilfully optimistic’ in our work. We see on a daily basis the positive things that can come about through the work we all do. We need to focus on how to optimise that, how to collaborate together to get over the barriers that might exist, how to be brave in having sometimes difficult but constructive conversations and how we can really start to accelerate the progress we all want to see.
The tone of the meeting was positive and collaborative. A warm thanks to the Minister for spending so much time and entering into conversation with us, and to the wonderful Forum members who bring such insight and experience. We look forward to working with the Minister in that spirit as we all try to play our part in creating better outcomes for our children and families and we are pleased with the suggestion of regular meetings between the Minister and the Forum as one of the ways of doing that.
