Has Sturgeon's 'Promise' to help Scotland's vulnerable kids been kept?

The first thought comes with hope. He and his team are engaged in perhaps the most important work currently under way in Scotland: attempting to change the lives of our most disadvantaged children – the abused, neglected, forgotten, and unloved. Can there be any task more necessary?

Yet the second thought is freighted with despair. For McKinlay to succeed, Scotland needs effectively dismantled and rebuilt. Everything must change: government, Holyrood, councils, courts, police, prisons, NHS, schools, social work. Us. Society itself must change.

In an age of political failure across the West, how is that possible?

McKinlay is chief executive of The Promise Scotland. In a sign of just how much work needs done, McKinlay admits that many haven’t even heard of his organisation. Yet it springs from one of Nicola Sturgeon’s flagship policies.

Here’s some recent history: in February 2020, a review of Scotland’s care system led to the former First Minister making what she called “The Promise”, a pledge to improve the lives of care-experienced children. That “Promise” is now four years old. It’s a laudable, ambitious plan. McKinlay sums up The Promise with the motto: “That all children in Scotland should grow up loved, safe and respected.”

His organisation, The Promise Scotland, was eventually created to ensure the nation makes the leap from what’s been called a system of “punishment to one of love and support”. The goal is for The Promise to be kept by 2030.

Fraser McKinlay, chief executive of The Promise Scotland.  Picture: Gordon Terris 

Death

Changing the care system matters to McKinlay, not simply because he wants Scotland to become a better place for vulnerable youngsters. He also understands the true cost of care first-hand. He knew a young boy who took his own life while in Scottish council care. That young boy’s mother later took her own life as well. “It shouldn’t have happened,” McKinlay says.

These events, and his own sense of the “privileged” lives he and his family lead – like so many of us – “bring personal fire” to his work.

Fraser doesn’t shirk from confronting care’s awful reality. There’s an inability to keep all kids safe. Young people abscond from care homes. Some fall into the hands of older, predatory adults. That risks crime, drink, drugs, and possible grooming. We know that too often the system is unable to keep children safe. But, equally, much of the time it does [keep them safe] and can have positive, transformational effects.”

Nuance is required when it comes to how society views the care system. “What I’m clear about is we need honesty,” he says.

Just last week he was hearing reports of “child sexual exploitation, of kids being sent back to family homes thought unsafe. That these things are happening in 2024 is shameful”.

Recently, he learned of kids who should have been in care “sleeping on overnight buses, just travelling around”.

Let’s be clear: this is the darkest, most upsetting side of Scotland’s care system. Often, good people do good work for children, changing their lives for the better. But no child should fall through the cracks. “It’s been long recognised,” McKinlay says, “that care-experienced people generally have poorer outcomes than their non-care-experienced peers in Scotland.”

A depressing truth pervades care. For far too many children, care becomes a conveyor belt towards addiction, homelessness, prison, and death. It’s not inevitable, nor does that befall everyone. But it unquestionably happens.

Care-experienced children are regularly failed by society. Their education suffers, they’re often separated from siblings, and once they leave care they’re effectively abandoned by the state with little support. Yet we wonder why so many struggle.

The Promise Scotland was created to “hold the system to account”, including the Scottish Government

Dysfunction

FOR the system to change, society must change. That’s McKinlay’s belief. For care-experienced kids, it won’t just “take a village to raise a child”, as the saying goes – it will take a social revolution.

It’s a daunting task, but if anyone is equipped to pull off this miracle, it’s McKinlay.

He was right at the top of Audit Scotland, the independent organisation which monitors our pubic services. It was his job to oversee local government, which is at the heart of the care system. So he knows the dysfunctions.

The Promise Scotland was created to “hold the system to account”, including the Scottish Government. Yes, The Promise Scotland is owned and funded by the Scottish Government but it “operates independently. We’re not part of government”. McKinlay can, he says, criticise ministers without “fear or favour”.

Remarkably, McKinlay has vowed to render himself and his organisation redundant by 2030, the year The Promise is meant to be fulfilled. “We’re committed to our own obsolescence,” he says. McKinlay wears that as a badge of honour. “There’s not many organisations saying ‘we want to work ourselves out of a job’.”

The review of the care system which led to the creation of The Promise spoke to 3,000 care-experienced people. It heard about the separation of siblings, sexual abuse in care, failures by the children’s hearing system, use of restraint as punishment, cold and stigmatising treatment from staff, and an exhausted workforce.

One of the most heartbreaking findings was the sheer lack of love. Some children, the review found, “actively sought restraint as it was the only time they felt human touch”.

Evidently, reducing the number of children in care is foundational to keeping The Promise.

The care system will always exist but it should be only for the most problematic cases. Where possible, keep families together. That’s the intention.

Care is often intergenerational. It’s not unusual that adults who went through care see their own children enter care. “If you’ve grown up exposed to homelessness, the criminal justice system, addiction and poverty, you’re more likely to end up in care. It’s not inevitable, but we must turn that tap off.”

Poverty itself drives children into care. “Children in Scotland’s 10% most deprived areas are 20 times more likely to be [in care] than children from the 10% least deprived.

“Deprivation is the largest contributing factor.”

McKinlay believes that Nicola Sturgeon was – and the current Scottish Government is – committed to keeping The Promise

Poverty

POVERTY has a “pervasive, detrimental impact. That’s an uncomfortable truth we struggle with. One in four children in Scotland live in poverty – that’s shameful. If we don’t tackle that, we aren’t going to keep The Promise.” McKinlay does, though, single out the Scottish Child Payment for praise.

Last year, The Promise Oversight Board made clear that Scotland isn’t on target to “keep The Promise”. Its report said: “There needs to be much faster progress. For the care community … the slow pace of progress causes hurt and anger.”

McKinlay says The Promise will only be kept “if the pace of change increases significantly”. Clearly, Covid slowed down work “but that’s no excuse”.Progress is being made – just not enough. Take the intention to end school exclusions for care-experienced kids by 2024. “That just hasn’t happened. We’re not there yet.”

However, North Lanarkshire worked hard on this. Exclusions fell by around 90%. “It’s a good example of where we see some brilliant work happening in some places which demonstrates that things can be done,” he says.

“The challenge now is ensuring that work happens more consistently, in more places.”

When it comes to ending the separation of siblings, the will exists yet “25% of siblings are still separated”.

The problem? Lack of foster carers able to take multiple children is one issue. The big idea to fix that? Instead of removing children from their home, remove their parents, and send in foster carers.

McKinlay believes that Nicola Sturgeon was – and the current Scottish Government is – committed to keeping The Promise. The giant stumbling block is resources and the political bravery needed to make the radical social changes required.

On resources, there have been some positive political moves. Around £16 million has been set aside for a national minimum allowance for foster and kinship carers. Kinship carers could be grandmothers looking after grandchildren if parents have addiction problems. However, it “took too long to do it – two years longer than they said”.

It’s a drop in the ocean. The care budget is “upwards of £1 billion a year, and on top of that there’s another £875m annually on picking up the pieces”. He means dealing with homelessness, addiction and crime.

However, we can’t just spend more money. The cash isn’t there for starters. So, we need to spend existing funds in radically different ways. “Stop spending money on crisis intervention,” McKinlay says, “and start spending on things that prevent people getting into crisis in the first place.”

This is where McKinlay’s years at Audit Scotland come into play. “People say we don’t have enough money. That’s probably true, but it’s not an excuse for throwing your hands up and saying ‘we can’t do anything’. The trick is to spend better.”

Any future investment must be for professionals at the sharp end – foster carers and social workers. Meanwhile, existing money needs spent more intelligently.

Keeping The Promise means jailing no under-18s.

Prison

SOME of that “smart spending” will be politically difficult. Our prisons are bursting at the seams. Evidently, many prisoners are care-experienced.

Instead, we should spend money at the point where a child’s life might set them on a path to care and prison. That means shifting money towards early support for families “at the point of them having babies, or even beforehand”.

Scotland’s acclaimed Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) is “a great case study” when it comes to this type of thinking. The VRU treated crime as a public health problem. Result? Offending dropped.

Former VRU director Niven Rennie, once one of Scotland’s leading police officers, spoke of “the stupidity of the cost of prison compared to the cost of providing services to prevent crime”. In other words, help people who risk going to prison by improving their lives, and the end result will be less crime and fewer people in jail.

In brutal monetary terms, it’s also more cost-effective in the long run.

So the key to keeping The Promise is “both investment and disinvestment”, McKinlay says.

He adds: “We’re doing work this year helping government figure out where you’d start investing and where, importantly, you’d therefore start disinvesting.”

That idea of removing parents from the family home and bringing in foster carers is a good example.

It needs funding – which must come from some other budget – but it will “also save big chunks of money”.

Fife social workers, for instance, now “get alongside families, helping them with whatever it is they’re struggling with”, rather than as happens in “too many places, dealing with the cliff edge”. In other words, fix addiction problems when they start – don’t wait until drugs tear families apart. But this means shifting resources around.

Keeping The Promise means jailing no under-18s. That could well become politically tricky. Institutions like Polmont Young Offenders Institution “just aren’t places for children”, says McKinlay. However, that change is, he admits, “contentious territory for politicians of different stripes”.

Similarly, ending school exclusions for care-experienced kids might cause a backlash from those who see the issue as “bad kids doing bad things”.

The conversation, however, should be about the fact many care-experienced kids excluded from school, or sent to jail, have evidently suffered “trauma”.

Policies which have been proved to work could also fall foul of media or political anger if widely introduced. During the pandemic, North Lanarkshire social workers experimented with giving marginalised families £500 each to spend on whatever they felt necessary. Nobody wasted money on “fags and booze” as naysayers predicted, but rather items that improved their children’s lives.

Other changes require long-term financial commitment. McKinlay finds it astonishing that society effectively leaves care-experienced children to their own devices once they’re 18. “It’s madness. If we’re serious, this shouldn’t happen. If no scaffolding exists, then what’s holding you up?”

Money

MCKINLAY notes, however, that all of Scotland’s political parties have made a “commitment” to support The Promise. He’ll hold them accountable if they betray that vow.

“We can’t just keep spending money the way we are. Something must change. Alongside all this, we must reform how government and public services work in Scotland. We can’t afford it, and that’s a problem for The Promise. The investment in The Promise has been sound and decent – the bigger issue is what’s happening to local authority budgets.”

Councils trying to “balance the books” means “preventive work gets cut – the stuff actually making a difference”.

He adds: “As someone who audited local government for years, local government needs more investment.”

If that’s true “then we need an honest conversation about where that additional investment comes from”.

However, all public services affect how the care system operates, so the discussion can’t “just be about councils”. The bottom line, McKinlay believes, is that our public sector needs radical, systemic reform.

“Public services should be pooling resources for the benefit of local communities. We’ve just never managed that,” he adds.

The debate must be about “how you ensure the health, council and social security budgets are being properly used to maximum effect”.

He wants public sector leaders both held “accountable and incentivised. We’ve allowed people for too long to make decisions based on what’s best for them and their organisation rather than the community they serve”.

McKinlay makes clear he’s not attacking public sector workers –“they’re good people”. Rather it’s “the system”.

There are 129 public bodies – or quangos – in Scotland. “Instinctively, that feels a lot.” McKinlay says he’s not “advocating a bonfire of the quangos – tried that many times and it’s never worked”. But this “organisational and institutional soup” makes fixing the care system hard.

Policy needs to be joined up. “We’ve policies on alcohol and drugs, policy on poverty, on homelessness, on benefits, mental health. Each has their own governance and people. But there are families sitting at the heart of it all who must navigate these unbelievably complex services. We must flip that on its head.”

There is a “whole hodgepodge of systems and organisations. Since devolution, we’ve just kept adding to it, and the chickens are coming home to roost.

“We’re at the point where Scotland’s public service model isn’t very sustainable, and the care system is both a product of that and dealing with the consequences of that … It’s only by tackling these genuinely systemic issues that we improve care,” says McKinlay.

Currently, there are around 12,600 Scottish kids in care. That’s down from 16,200 in 2012. Between 2021/22, numbers fell by 5%. While that’s positive, says McKinlay, we must beware over-interpreting the figures.

It’s unclear why numbers fell, or “what’s happening to children” now not in care.

“We must be careful”, he says, of simply seeing any fall as “a good thing”. Numbers must come down for The Promise to be kept – but the fall has to be for the right reasons.

The question to ask is: “Are the outcomes for those children who aren’t now being looked after definitely improving? That’s my caveat.”

The named person legislation was labelled a “snooper’s charter” over public sector organisations sharing children’s data.

Success

THE abandoned named person legislation, which faced intense political opposition, would have made a real difference to Scotland’s most vulnerable kids. McKinlay is reluctant to get himself into a political bunfight by calling it a “missed opportunity”, but what he will say is: “It’s an interesting case study in how perfectly reasonable policy ideas become not doable if you lose the narrative.

“The principle of having somebody children can talk to, and help get stuff sorted, seems common sense and reasonable, but the way the debate went got out of control.”

The legislation was labelled a “snooper’s charter” over public sector organisations sharing children’s data. “Of course, you must be careful, but if we’re serious about wrapping public services around families we need to figure that out.

“It was a real shame that important issues got lost in the wider debate and remain unresolved.”

There are fewer children in care in the rest of Britain than Scotland proportionally. But McKinlay says those figures come with a “health warning” as Scotland has the children’s hearing system. Its work means more children who need looked after in care may be entering the system compared to elsewhere.

However, the children’s hearing system needs reformed, he believes. It’s changed little since the 1960s. The volunteer model isn’t “sustainable”. Recruitment is difficult, cases are increasingly complex, children feel they must keep retelling their experiences, and sometimes children are taken out of school for hearings.

“It’s working for the system as opposed to necessarily working for children,” McKinlay adds. “If you’re genuinely designing a system around the needs of the child then doing that with a volunteer model becomes tricky.”

Change might seem hard in Scotland, but overseas the work being done is getting noticed. Australia and Finland recently sent delegations to learn from The Promise.

It’s the “big vision” which impresses. English childcare experts are “envious of the legislative and policy environment” in place. Clearly, though, that doesn’t mean there’s no “implementation gap” in Scotland.

The bottom line for McKinlay is that the Scottish Government must be judged according to Sturgeon’s pledge. However, it’s not just the SNP in the spotlight – Scotland itself must be “held to account for the delivery of The Promise”.

We all have a part to play. For ordinary citizens that means changing attitudes to care which stigmatise vulnerable kids. Despite the mountain still to climb, McKinlay believes The Promise will be kept by 2030, but it won’t be easy. Nor can success simply be judged on the number of kids in care. Success is down to whether care-experienced children live happy lives and become happy adults.

As McKinlay says, children in care “need to experience as much love as my children or your children – the outcomes for them should be as good as any other child can expect”.