The University of Strathclyde is home to CELCIS - the Centre for Excellence for Children’s Care and Protection. CELCIS has a long track record in supporting innovation and improvement in the lives of children who are in, or who have had experience of care.
Voices and experiences of children & young people
At the very heart of CELCIS is a commitment to work which directly involves and is informed by input from children and young people. It is their voices and experiences that can help to make positive improvements in services and systems which support them, including in frontline practice. shining examples of this are the Bright Spots programme and Continuing Care and Your Rights project.
Bright Spots
Really listening to what care-experienced children say about how they’re feeling, then acting on their observations and wishes, is a central tenet of piloting the Bright Spots programme in Scotland. Rolled out in England in 2014 by children’s rights organisation Coram Voice, and used extensively by local authorities ever since, Bright Spots was always designed to be far more than just a survey providing data and research evidence. Originally co-designed with young people, it aims to find out from children in care and care leavers how they feel about how their lives are going and the support they are getting and need. It’s specifically designed to encourage positive change in the here and now by feeding back directly to the people responsible for their care and support, so, crucially, this is a programme that prioritises actively responding to what children and young people have to say.
Key messages
Between 2022-24 CELCIS brought their extensive research expertise to pilot the programme with six Scottish local authority areas. Key messages that came from the children were the importance of having good, stable relationships with friends and trusted adults, and of feeling safe and settled where they live. This exercise in gathering, listening to and acting on what children and young people feel has led to improvements already. Some of these were simple, but important to their wellbeing, things like care professionals helping to avoid the stigma young people can feel by meeting them in places other than social work offices or school; and carers and social workers agreeing with children how they’ll be introduced to others when they’re out and about together. For the local authorities, the insight from the feedback has led to some changes in practice and processes that go beyond that which the children identified. In fact, one Scottish council ripped up their existing organisational plan for supporting children in care and started again.
Continuing Care
This collaborative way that CELCIS works with partners and stakeholders was also demonstrated very powerfully when supporting the rights of children and young people in Scotland being able to stay living with carers until they are 21 under a policy called Continuing Care. CELCIS used participation expertise in the Continuing Care and Your Rights project, an initiative to co-produce creative and interactive digital information resources for care-experienced children to support an understanding of their rights and enable conversations between them, carers and practitioners to exercise these rights. The project worked with the Care Inspectorate and Clan Childlaw from the beginning to ensure that the resources would also be distributed to the people and places that would benefit most.
Starting in 2020, a group of young people aged 17-26 from across Scotland were brought together and, because the project started during the pandemic, met online using a range of digital platforms and techniques designed to maximise their ability to join in and to encourage creative interaction. Importantly, experience-sharing and relationship-building was prioritised ahead of input into creating the end product - feeling comfortable with the process and being confident about being listened to was an essential aspect of the project.
The young people’s skills - everything from the design with a young care experienced designer creating graphics, to helping to shape the storyboarding and right wording for the information resources produced – were integral; with support provided to encourage those who hadn’t contributed to a co-produced project before, and input was sought from partners to make sure that complex law and policy was understood and covered in the information content.
Sharing valuable experiences
The result - postcards, animations and digital resources - are actively being used to help young people who need information about their rights. The young co-producers were able to connect with others and share their valuable experience in a way which will benefit others who are in similar situations in the coming years. That sense of being part of something big, something nationally important, was wonderful for the young people’s feelings of self-esteem and inclusion and has enhanced their skillsets even further.
For CELCIS, these partnership projects are examples of how children and young people are being supported to use their own insight to encourage significant, positive changes in how the people working in the systems and organisations both listen and operate differently. Most importantly, they introduce changes which make things better in the lives and experiences of children and young people. And for young people who have experienced care, what could be better than that?