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

Jim Savege, Chief Executive of Aberdeenshire Council, sets out his role in launching The Promise Scotland – a promise to care experienced children and young people that they will grow up loved, safe, and respected – and his hopes for its future.

I still remember the early days in my position as a new Chief Executive back in early 2015. It was terrifying, stimulating and inspiring in equal measure and a time to really dig into the responsibilities that you hold, to understand them and to be clear on the risks, issues, opportunities and ambitions they involve. You get a feel for what things your organisation is good at versus what needs more attention and work, and what areas of your responsibility warrant your individual active leadership.

For context, Aberdeenshire Council is a grand organisation with great staff and a positive culture, and Aberdeenshire as an area is blessed with very capable and active communities. Life is a team effort between all with collective and shared responsibility taken by all for our wellbeing and achievement. Here we simply call it One Aberdeenshire.

Quite early in my role I met up with some amazing young people from our Young People’s Organising and Campaigning Group (YPOC) who work tirelessly to advocate and work with insights as they themselves are care experienced young people. From developing and launching campaigns, making films and guides, helping organise our very first Celebrating Success Awards evening for care-experienced young people, these young people were absolute trailblazers in improving their own lives and those of their families, friends and communities. I can still feel the goosebumps when I think back to the pride, joy and love there was in the room that evening for the awards back in 2018.

These brilliant young people schooled me in how much more can be achieved through bold shared leadership, a loud and powerful voice of unabashed advocacy, and true joint working.

So alongside my institutional public protection and Children’s Services statutory duties and my responsibilities as a corporate parent, I am an absolute advocate for collective leadership to improve the lives of care experienced young people, and working with families to prevent them having to go into care in the first instance. Easy rhetoric to type but this is something I now feel in my bones and my heart.

Fast forward a couple of years and alongside the publication of the findings of the Care Review in 2020, I was asked on behalf of SOLACE Scotland to help in the establishment of The Promise Scotland, to help it engender effective shared leadership and the strongest voice of advocacy across Scotland. Being both a Non-Executive Director for The Promise Scotland and chairing The Promise Programme Board for Scotland’s Local Authorities underlines my absolute, steadfast commitment to keep The Promise both locally and nationally.

I think that The Promise is ambitious and it ought to be. We need to change a huge number of current conventions and working approaches that are deeply embedded. But I do believe that this is possible.

The Promise Plan 2024-30 sets out areas that need continued focus and effort for change and improvement. In broad terms, we need to improve advocacy and participation for young people, including supporting care experienced young people in school attendance. This in turn will mean that young people will more ably achieve the educational ambitions they are capable of. We need to continue to push the emphasis of our work to a preventative and whole family approach, which ought to mean more young people can stay within the support and care of their family and flourish in their day to day lives. We need to work harder to both respect and enable the rights of young people. And to ensure the foundations and capacity are there for sustainable change we need to continue our work on the capacity, culture and working approach of our services that can make such a positive difference to the quality of young people’s lives. To help support progress onthese important areas of work, we have worked to create a national Promise Progress framework, a rich resource to help with the development and progress of local plans and leadership – The Promise Progress Framework : Plan 24-30.

However, the Plan does not dictate, but rather I hope helps encourage active, local and joined-up leadership. It doesn’tprescribe, it simply calls out what needs to be done.

I think the balance here is so important. If we tell people what to do from upon high, it just won’t happen. I am a hugebeliever in subsidiarity – ground-up, local leadership to reflect diversity of context, and to work with and build the licence and capability of local communities and people. I am no fan of central/national dictation. This is about enabling and harnessing plurality of leadership across the country – a team effort. The ambition, progress and achievement need to come from the hearts of many, shouting loud about what we have achieved and are still to achieve. As a result of this approach, we have joined-up local plans in place across all Council areas in Scotland being led by an amazing cohort of Promise leads, who work closely together in sharing, learning and supporting one another.

My hope is that we continue to develop and embed immensely powerful partnerships at a local community level that lead and drive the achievement of The Promise. This will allow very local determination and articulation of what success looks like, as that may well be different across Scotland’s diverse communities. We must build sustainable ambition, capability and capacity through our work, to make permanent change in how we function and think as organisations and communities. I do hope that we make some proper shifts to more meaningful and mainstreamed preventative work rather than continuing to cope and juggle, as we currently so often have to do.

In holding this ambition, I am all too aware of the pressures all public services are navigating in terms of priorities, resources and budgets. It is a daily challenge. Budgetary pressures force us to have to prioritise all of the time. Locallythis means that in the past decade Children’s Services have not had a budget cut, compared to some areas that have had 20-30% cuts, through to some services being stopped completely. Indeed, we have just invested £1.5M in two new Children’s Homes in Aberdeenshire, so that our young people will be able to be closer to their family and friends support networks and so that we can make significant savings when compared to out of authority placements. The service has however had to absorb other budget pressures alongside this investment, it is not always plain sailing, and it is still a challenge to resource current services alongside investing in the wider changes we want to realise.

It’s about making the hard, but right decisions. Alongside this I think it is about investing in our collective capacity, and by that I mean in the capacity of our young people, families and communities. Better/more housing, better employment and job opportunities, strengthening community resilience and capacity.  These are some of the wider outcomes we need to achieve through our commitment to Keep The Promise. A whole family, whole system approach to enabling people to live their best lives.

I am immensely proud of the work we are pushing forward in Aberdeenshire to fulfil the ambitions and commitments we have made to The Promise. I am surrounded by capable, feisty and ambitious staff and young people. My main task is to keep up with them! If I think about a few areas that I would like us to make more progress on locally, it would be to strengthen our kinship care capacity, and to extend our use of Family Group Decision Making (FGDM). I have heard such positive feedback about FGDM from other colleagues about the significant upsides from the approach. These tasks perhaps indicate the granularity of focus needed at times, what’s really going to make the biggest difference for us, complementing what we have underway already.

2030 may feel like some time away, but I think it will be with us fast. No time to waste, we all need to put our shoulder to the wheel in shifting thinking and approaches across Scotland to prevent young people having to go into care, and if they do, to ensure they can still live their best lives.

It’s a team effort, and we can do this.