Renfrewshire Council

This Care Experienced Week, we are helping to raise awareness of the important work we are doing to help improve the lives of care experienced children and young people across Renfrewshire and Scotland.

Renfrewshire Council along with our partners are committed to delivering on The Promise to the care experienced community, that Scotland is "the best place in the world to grow up in" so that children are "loved, safe, and respected and realise their full potential".  

The Promise is the outcome of Scotland's three-year Independent Care Review, where more than 5,500 care experienced children and adults took part, to transform the wellbeing of infants, children, young people, and adults. It is one of seven concluding reports published in 2020 and organisations, communities, and groups across the country have all pledged to #KeepThePromise. 

The care-experienced community is made up of anyone who is or has been in care or is from a looked-after background at any stage in their life. That is anyone who is or has been in foster care, adopted, kinship care (looked after by a relative), resident in a children's home or have been looked after at home under a Supervision Order for any length of time. It also includes anyone who is or has been on the edges of care (in contact with social work and the wider care sector) at any point. 

Anyone could be care experienced, so, we can all keep The Promise, no matter what service you work in. We will all connect with a care experienced person at some point, whether it's a client, service user or a colleague. That's why it's everyone's responsibility to look out for and report any concerns about a child and their wellbeing and to help end the stigma by addressing and speaking about these issues in the right way. This includes the language we use and how services are provided. It also means looking at how we provide services and what barriers a care experienced adult or young person might face when trying to access them.  

Work is well underway with the recent appointment of Promise lead officer, Maurice Gilligan, and The Promise Oversight group involving representatives from the council and its partners.  

Maurice will work alongside promise ambassador, Sam Macrae (both pictured above), to ensure The Promise remains at the forefront of our service delivery and design. He will also work closely with the local care-experienced community and their families to ensure we continue to listen and follow up on how we and our partners can better support them.  

Our approach to keeping families and siblings together, where it is safe and possible to do so is one example of the work undertaken so far. Our ground-breaking 'Keeping Brothers and Sisters Together' policy, co-designed by care-experienced young people from the Renfrewshire Champions Board, reduces the separation of siblings entering care unless there is a clear safeguarding reason to do so.  

Work is also underway to bring together a network of council colleagues as Promise Keepers to help inform our approach across all service areas. If this is something you might be interested in or you would like to find out more about The Promise and how you can get involved, you can get in touch with Maurice at maurice.gilligan@renfrewshire.gov.uk, or Sam at samantha.macrae@renfrewshire.gov.uk. 

You can find details about The Promise Scotland on its dedicated website. And for more information about what's happening during Care Experienced Week 2022 and all year round to support care experienced people on the Who Cares Scotland website.

Published on Wednesday 26 October 2022