Keeping the Promise: Learning from the Leadership Route Map

In preparing the Leadership route map on Plan 24-30, Carly Glover spoke to leaders working in different parts of Scotland’s ‘care system’, on what they felt needed to happen for the promise to be kept, and the role of leadership in doing that. In this blog, Carly reflects on what she heard, and what Scotland can learn.

Commitment and Reality

There is no lack of commitment to the promise in Scotland.

Senior leaders across government, local authorities, professional bodies and the community and voluntary sector deeply hold the moral case - the ambition that children grow up in safe, loving relationships is not contested.

What is less often spoken about is the personal strain of holding that ambition inside systems not yet fully designed to deliver it. In conversation, leaders describe a shared experience: deep commitment alongside structural friction. Agreement on direction, alongside uncertainty about pace. Pride where progress has been made, alongside discomfort in how far there still is to go.

The Status of Fluent Agreement

Scotland has become fluent in the language of reform: prevention, collaboration, whole family support.

Perhaps these are now the comfort words of Scottish public policy. But over-familiarity can be dangerous. These terms risk becoming ‘magic concept words’; reassuring in their familiarity, vague in our shared understanding of what they actually mean in practice. This increasing use of this shared language is both bridge and barrier. It creates alignment. It also creates the illusion of it.

If everyone says they want the same thing, why does real experience still often feel far from safe and loving? Why does collaborative practice remain vulnerable? Why does risk too often default to the needs of our institutions? The uncomfortable truth emerging from this work is that the alignment of the words we use has outpaced alignment of incentives, and accountability measures.

‘Collaboration’ means different things in different rooms. ‘Risk’ carries different meanings for frontline practitioners, auditors and elected members. ‘Prevention’ can sit uneasily within annual budget cycles and short-term funding.

When language is aligned but incentives are not, friction follows. That friction is often experienced personally. It can look like fatigue, frustration, or a quiet recalibration of ambition to what feels achievable in the current working context. This quiet concession contributes to an unspoken erosion of the purpose of the promise.

Scotland’s shared moral commitment to keep the promise ensures forward motion, but there is a risk this takes the form of projects and ‘best endeavours’ against a broader backdrop of managed decline.

If the promise is to move at the pace children require, we must look beyond shared vocabulary to shared operating conditions that enable change.

‘Lived experiences’… of all of us

One of the most consistent themes emerging from this work is the depth of feeling among senior leaders. These include frustration at the pace of change, moral distress at what children continue to experience and weariness at being held accountable to targets which can make it harder to deliver the work we agree is needed to keep the promise.

These emotions are metabolised privately and largely suppressed in professional spaces. But suppressed emotion does not disappear; it calcifies and appears as disengagement, sickness and turnover. Or becomes quiet and resigned acceptance that things simply cannot change.

There is another risk too. In a landscape where professional emotion is hidden, people with lived experience can be the only ones sharing their authentic feelings, expressing the anger and pain that those in the system cannot safely say. This can create what might be called ‘authenticity by proxy’: a moment of honesty in a room too accustomed to not saying the very things which need to be said.

People with experience of care shared the emotional cost of their involvement in transforming the care system. Sometimes this is unbearable.

There was a wide unease about this balance; requiring some people to supress almost all of their feelings, and others to connect with their deepest emotions and experiences. There was a repeated emphasis on ‘really real’ conversations. These are one way we can start to hold our emotions differently; providing a more gentle and receptive space for all our feelings.

Therefore, creating structured spaces for real conversations is key for progress. Ongoing learning ‘in the work about the work’ is not a ‘nice to have.’ It is how to align our relationships, work and collaborations with the central tenet of the promise: to ensure children are loved.

“If you can’t say what you need to say, you won’t do what needs to be done.” - Leader who took part in a discussion with Carly.

There is appetite for this kind of conversation; and a conviction that this must involve all of us, including Government, auditors and regulators. If we defer, delay or de-prioritise these conversations, we decrease our tolerance for discomfort and disagreement and retreat to the clunky familiarity of siloed working. 

From Heroics to Enabling Context

Scotland has examples of strong, courageous leadership delivering meaningful change. These should be recognised, celebrated and their learning shared.

But progress cannot depend on individual stamina. Where improvement relies on leaders stretching beyond formal authority, absorbing risk personally, or navigating around structural barriers, the system itself requires attention.

The question is not simply ‘who is doing this well?’ but ‘what were the enabling and inhibiting conditions?’ What can we learn from this to make place-based, strengths-based, collaborative practice common practice, rather than something running against the grain of our systems, rewards and habits?

Ceding Power

The promise has always recognised that keeping it requires ceding power. In practice, this means examining budgets, commissioning frameworks, accountability, measures, power and permissions.  Examples of people who are working across hierarchies and siloes, to be able to shape the system in a way that really helps people, were often powerful, effective…and fragile.

Place-based decision making is widely supported. Much of our recent policy and legislation makes it central. It is also personally and professionally demanding. It requires pooled funding, shared risk and real-time data. It calls for trust and a ‘window of tolerance’ to do differently. The conditions which sustain this; dialogue, relationship, learning, time and shared purpose are often early casualties of budget cuts.  This work requires the conditions for collaboration to be valued, and funded, as core to the change we all want to see. It needs those at a national level to remain engaged in the work, not positioned above it.

People highlighted the professional knowledge of Community Learning and Development workers as under-used and powerful in building a different power dynamic between communities and the professionals who shape their place. These are people already living and working in communities who have a deep understanding of how power and agency can be reimagined. These skills must be used before they are diluted or lost.  

The Risk of “Itification”

There is understandable pressure to embed the promise in regulation and governance frameworks. It signals seriousness and protects against drift.

Yet there is a parallel risk: that compliance displaces culture and rewards defensibility. This may run counter to one of the promise's central messages; that risk must be considered in terms of the ‘risk of children not having safe, stable loving relationships.’

The promise risks becoming an initiative, where funding, regulatory and professional incentives encourage us to say ‘we are keeping the promise by…’ followed by, sometimes fragile, project work. It is often our shared moral drive which leads to this. We must, and want to, keep the promise, but codification can push us to do so more narrowly. Left to ‘best endeavours’ we can improve some things for some people. To transform our systems and cultures so children knowing love and stability is ‘what we do’ requires the sort of collaboration discussed earlier.

There was broad consensus that ‘really real’ conversations, with all parts of the ‘system’, must be at the core of our professional culture. This is not an add on, a ‘nice to have’ or a ‘when we have time.’ This is the work which will accelerate the pace of the promise.

Learning as Core Work

In order to transform our ‘care system’, learning must move from the margins to the centre. This learning must be embedded ‘in the work’, across hierarchies, with communities and with oversight bodies participating to help drive this forward. This builds shared understanding of risk, allows us to do the deep work of transformation and strengthens trust. 

It also requires time and funding. In pressured systems, dialogue and reflection are often the first casualties. Yet without them, reform slows and people fall back on following the same procedures.

Growing Comfort with Discomfort

To make the transformational changes needed to keep the promise, those working to keep it must be able to accept, and learn to work with in, situations which will feel uncomfortable.

It includes:

• Naming where incentives undermine intention.
• Accepting disagreement is not a sign of failure, but a sign that everyone is taking this seriously.
• Staying in difficult cross-system conversations rather than reverting to portfolio silos.
• Using approaches such as mediation, coaching and restorative practice to repair strain rather than allowing it to persist.

This work requires leaders across government, oversight, delivery and The Promise Scotland working in the grey, gritty spaces together, supported by structures that make honest collaboration sustainable.

Children cannot wait for these features to become comfortable. 

The Missing Lever: Candid Dialogue

Perhaps the most consistent message from stakeholders was this: meaningful, candid dialogue is both the most under-used and most powerful lever available.

Not polished in the form of set-piece events, rather structured, facilitated and regular conversations where senior leaders, including government, auditors, regulators and communities can speak plainly about:

• The barriers to ceding and sharing power
• The fragility of collaborative practice
•  The extent to which incentives, such as funding, regulation and evaluation, support or undermine the work to keep the promise
• The fear and blame cultures that narrow the understanding of risk to favour institutions
• The conditions required to hold safe, loving relationships as the first purpose of the system.

Scotland is, as the Public Service Reform Strategy notes, small enough to get around the table. To accelerate the pace to keep the promise we must stay at the table long enough to address what we find there.

Carly would like to thank all those who had conversations to inform this work. She was struck by the degree of commitment and choice to be open and candid. She extends her sincerest thanks as these qualities will help us all navigate the difficult next steps, holding our nation’s responsibility to provide love and stability for our children in care at the core of our work.  She would also like to thank Professor Donna Hall and Mark Smith for their thoughtful and generous insights and support with this work.