Delivering the Promise

Fraser McKinlay, Chief Executive of The Promise Scotland, reflects on five years of The Promise and what’s needed to ensure that by 2030, all of Scotland’s children and young people will grow up loved, safe and respected.

2025 is a vital year for the promise. It marks the halfway point between when the promise was made on February 5, 2020, and when it must be kept by 2030.

The promise, that all Scotland’s children and young people will “grow up loved, safe and respected— so that they will realise their full potential”, was made following the conclusion of the Independent Care Review, which set out over 80 calls to action on what must be done to overhaul the ‘care system’.

Once the promise was made, Scotland agreed to change how it cared for its children, young people, families and care-experienced adults. The Promise Scotland was then set up by the Scottish Government to help support those working to make the changes needed to keep the promise. The organisation also helps monitor the change that is happening.

I was delighted to attend the SOLACE conference in September, superbly hosted by Des Murray in North Lanarkshire. It was good to spend time with colleagues reflecting on, and challenging, Scotland’s approaches to public service reform.

And reform is happening. There are loads of brilliant examples of change happening across the country. In recent months, The Promise Scotland has highlighted some of this work in relation to the promise, including the development of family support hubs, schools tackling stigma, local authorities creating networks of ‘promise keepers’, and efforts to keep more siblings together, among others. You can read about these real examples of reform here.

As I listened to the many excellent contributions at the conference, it struck me again that many of the barriers Scotland faces in reform are not new. These include the need to prioritise action over the creation of more strategies; the challenge of collective leadership and accountability; reform being rooted in communities; the importance of collecting and sharing relevant data; using money more flexibly; and supporting the workforce. These issues, and more, have been highlighted at many SOLACE conferences I’ve attended over the last 15 years or so.

Since the promise was made in 2020, five issues have repeatedly emerged as the major bridges and barriers to fulfilling the promise. These are: data, scrutiny, risk, money, and policy/legislation. All are systemic issues that relate more broadly to the wider public sector reform agenda. We call them the ‘meeting in the middle’ and you can read more about them on the Plan 24-30 website.

So, if many of the issues are familiar, what is going to create change? What needs to be different this time?

Well, there are big decisions that need to be made, not least in terms of how money is distributed and spent. It seems unlikely budgets will be getting bigger, so we need honest conversations about how best to spend what there is. For the promise, this must be on what matters most to children, families, care-experienced adults, and the people who work alongside them.

Over time, more resource needs to be directed towards communities. If we are serious about tackling child poverty and the social determinants of ill health (and I believe we are), then we need to start making choices that ensure resources follow the policy and strategic imperatives. The upcoming Strategic Spending Review offers an opportunity to do that.

I don’t underestimate how complex that will be. It will require some difficult conversations with the public about what public services can realistically deliver over the next decade. But if we are to break the cycle of responding to perpetual crisis, then Scotland needs to make some clear choices.

When it comes to the promise, it is clear what must change. The 80+ calls to action from the Independent Care Review have been mapped under five foundations and 25 themes on Plan 24-30. For each theme, it outlines where Scotland was in 2024 and where it needs to be in 2030 for the promise to be kept. How we get there is set out in route maps. Developing these is one of four priorities for The Promise Scotland.

We have committed to working collaboratively with those leading and delivering change to develop each of the 25 route maps by the end of December 2025.  The next stage of this work, in 2026, will be for The Promise Scotland to help taking these national plans and turning them into local activity. Local leadership will be vital in making this a success.

Another of our priorities is telling The Promise Story of Progress. Where route maps show what needs to change, who will do it and when, The Promise Story of Progress is designed to measure the extent to which that change is making the difference it needs to.

This work is being done in collaboration with COSLA and The Scottish Government, and by December we will provide mechanisms and information to answer all three questions that make up The Promise Story of Progress:

• Does the care community feel the impact of the promise being kept?
• How are organisations doing in their work to keep the promise?
• How is Scotland doing in its progress towards keeping the promise?

The third of our priorities is focused on influencing national policy and parliamentary engagement. We are working with Scottish Government and others to ensure the Children (Care, Care Experience and Services Planning) (Scotland) Bill is the best it can be. We are also working hard to ensure that the promise retains cross-party support up to and beyond the May 2026 Scottish Parliamentary elections.

Our final priority is to support the Oversight Board for the promise in their role of reporting on progress, and in supporting Fiona Duncan, the Independent Strategic Advisor, in her role in challenging and advocating for the urgent changes needed to deliver the promise by 2030.

The right type of leadership is key to delivering the changes needed to keep the promise by 2030. Scotland must widen and deepen collaborative leadership across sectors and resist the temptation to revert to a more traditional, top-down approach to change.

A critical part of the picture – reflected in the public service reform strategy – is the importance of accountability and incentives. Our existing systems of accountability and incentives still too often prioritise silos over collaboration, organisations over communities, service delivery over family need. Leaders, at all levels and across public services, must be incentivised to do the right things, in the right way, ensuring they are held to account accordingly.

Leadership is an active pursuit; it is about doing, as well as planning. To pick just one example, there have been calls in the past for the development of an all-encompassing resource plan or budget for keeping the promise by 2030. It is, at first glance, an attractive proposition.

The problem is that such an approach misunderstands the nature of change and complexity. I simply don’t know how such a plan could be made meaningful in any practical sense. It would take months to produce; it would divert resources away from implementation; it would be out of date as soon it was written; and it would either be too narrowly drawn, or so high level, that it would be of little practical benefit. It would, in effect, give the impression of making progress rather than actually making a difference to delivery on the ground.

Instead, why don’t we ensure that every Children’s Services Planning Partnership in the country has a clear picture of the combined resources they have available to deliver their plans for local communities? The Scottish Government’s own assessment of Children’s Services Plans (published February 2025), highlights that only 8 out of 30 Children’s Services Plans fully met the criteria around resources.

So, let’s start by ensuring there is a clear and jointly agreed programme of investment in children’s services in each community across Scotland that will shift the balance of resources decisively towards prevention.

The Strategic Spending review should set out how future budgets are going to deliver the government’s ambition to ensure that at least 5% of community health and social care spend is directed towards holistic whole family support.

The time is right – and it is urgent – to have the difficult discussions around what is genuinely getting in the way of reform, locally and nationally. Are there subjects which, up until now, have simply been too difficult to talk about, at least publicly? What are the elephants in the room?

If any of this resonates with you, then The Promise Scotland wants to hear from you. We want to get people together, and give space for honest conversations to enable bold and courageous leadership.

Get in touch at [email protected].

Related reading

Getting it right for all children in Aberdeenshire – Jim Savege’s insights

Addressing the challenges of child poverty in remote and rural areas