WIREDGOV

In March 2022 the Scottish Government published its Promise Implementation Plan. Two years on, this update provides a status report on progress so far.

Progress on Commitments

The Scottish Government Promise Implementation Plan identifies a broad range of actions and commitments that span policies and portfolios. This includes immediate actions to improve experiences and outcomes for children, young people, adults and their families who are currently in or on the edge of care; and action over the longer term to improve the level of support for families from birth through to adulthood to significantly reduce the numbers of families coming into the care system.

The Scottish Government Promise Implementation Plan broadly follows the structure of The Promise and sets commitments and activities against key themes of:

• Keeping Families Together Through Whole Family Support And Support for Our Care Experienced Children, Young People and Adults
• A Good Childhood for Our Children and Young People
• Creating The Right Scaffolding
• Building Capacity

Progress on Key Commitments

In 2022 The Promise Implementation Plan identified fifteen overarching key commitments. These were identified as important areas of activity to drive forward the initial change required on our journey to keep The Promise. An update on each of these key commitments is presented below.

• We will invest £500 million over the course of this Parliamentary term, beginning with £50 million in financial year 2022-23, in preventative spend through the Whole Family Wellbeing Fund.

The Whole Family Wellbeing Funding Programme aims to enable and support the system change required at local Children’s Services Planning Partnership (CSPP) level to deliver holistic family support so that families can access the help they need, where and when needed. This is a transition fund, which is focused on delivering the system changes required to shift investment towards early intervention and prevention activities.

Since 2022-23, £50m per annum has been allocated to support activity focused on:

• providing funding direct to CSPPs to build capacity for change and test and scale transformational practice;
• providing national support for local change, including 3 collaborative partnerships with CSPPs to explore learning about what will enable this system change;
• building a co-ordinated cross-portfolio approach to delivering system change.

Going in to 2024-25, we have maintained this commitment to spend, allowing us to continue the programme of activity which has been established across a range of workstreams. In particular, it maintains our multi-year commitment of £32m to Children’s Service's Planning Partnerships to progress transformation plans at local level.

The Year 1 Evaluation was published on 31 January. Further case study examples, including information about projects we have funded as part of a cross Scottish Government approach to system change, are available in our online Whole Family Wellbeing Funding Learning into Action Knowledge Hub.

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