Experience

The voices and lived experiences of children, young people, families and care experienced adults provide stories that numbers cannot capture. It centres people’s experiences as essential to understanding progress, by showing how change feels and grounding other evidence in reality. Experiential data cannot measure progress on its own, but it reveals meaning, highlights gaps, and ensures the care community’s perspective shapes how progress is judged and understood. 

Collecting and using experiential data is not about measuring performance but understanding and improving practice. When people’s experiences are gathered and used in ways that genuinely value what they say, the process drives learning and reflection rather than compliance. This means rethinking the purpose of collecting and reporting information so that it supports change as well as accountability. 

Experiences are best understood at the point children, families and care experienced adults receive support, when trusting relationships make open, honest conversations possible. For this to happen, the workforce needs time and space to build and sustain those relationships and to prioritise the kind of listening that gives real insight into what matters. Doing so deepens understanding, improves support, and shows why data is an important lever for keeping the promise: the data that is asked for shapes how support is approached and how people’s experiences are recognised and responded to. 

The first phase of this work focused on testing an initial method, or way, of answering the question, “does the care community feel the impact of the promise being kept”, using existing qualitative data from across Scotland, collected since 2020. This involved working with organisations who held existing data, such as real stories from children, young people and families, independent evaluations, advocacy reports, academic research and inspection findings.  

Starting with existing data meant The Promise Scotland did not need to re ask the care community to repeat what they have already shared. All evidence was analysed using the ten vision statements taken directly from the promise, providing a shared structure that helps us identify where change is being felt, where it is not and where further action is needed. 

Experiential data and insights were used to understand practice and support improvement, not to measure performance. When people’s experiences are valued and used well, they drive learning, strengthen reflection, and help ensure change is genuinely felt by children, families and care experienced adults. 

Developing this work alongside partners allowed us to explore what was possible with existing evidence and reinforced why the Promise Story of Progress must remain a way of understanding progress rather than a performance system. 

This work is being developed in a way that enables it to grow and develop over time, reflecting both the required shift for data to better reflect what matters to children, families and care experienced adults, and the need to build approaches that are not held by The Promise Scotland.   

Insights from collaborative events will shape the next steps of this work, and as more organisations share experiential material, the method will continue to grow in a clear and ethical way that honours the voice of lived experience. 

Following the update in December 2025, all feedback received will inform the delivery of next steps for this work in 2026 and beyond. Please contact plan2430@thepromise.scot with 'Promise Story of Progress' in the subject line.

The Promise Scotland, working with partners, carried out a purposeful search of materials published since 2020 in Scotland. This included reports and outputs from advocacy bodies, third sector organisations, inspectorates, research centres and public agencies. 

Materials were included if they contained lived experience, participatory testimony, qualitative findings or reflective accounts that spoke directly to any of the ten Vision Statements, which are mapped across Plan 24-30, making clear the change that is required by 2030.

This involved over 100 documents, aggregated and anonymised evidence from Who Cares? Scotland advocacy records plus the Why Not Trust and surfaced key themes showing:

• What children, young people and care experienced adults were talking about 
• What their experiences felt like

The Promise Scotland team analysed all of this information to develop this content. Looking at current experiences across the entirety of the Independent Care Review’s 80+ calls to action will help understand the real lives that underpin statutory data sources, and numbers. 

Currently this work reflects what has been gathered through the approach at this time, and will continue to develop into 2026 and beyond.

The partners developing this work have considered the ethical and methodological choices behind this work, and you can read more about these, and how they shape the next steps, in here 

All data and information used in this process has gone through the appropriate ethical governance and data protection processes of the organisations who provided it. Data is only used that has been gathered, shared and used ethically and with clear purpose. 

Most importantly the purpose is for learning, using data and insights to understand what life feels like for children, families and care experienced adults, and to guide improvement rather than assess performance. 

The experiential part of the Promise Story of Progress does not:

• Assess performance
• Measure progress over time
• Claim to represent the full population; or
• Infer causality between experience and system-level trends.

Its purpose is to ground understanding in the human reality of the ‘care system’ and the conditions that help or hinder children and young people to grow up loved, safe and respected, so they can realise their full potential.

The first phase of this work focused on testing an initial method, or way, of answering the question, “does the care community feel the impact of the promise being kept”, using existing qualitative data from across Scotland, collected since 2020. This involved working with organisations who held existing data, such as real stories from children, young people and families, independent evaluations, advocacy reports, academic research and inspection findings.  Starting with existing data meant The Promise Scotland did not need to ask the care community to repeat what they have already shared. 

The experiential analysis offers valuable insight, but it also reveals important gaps. Some vision statements are well supported by lived experiences that have been captured, while others statements represent fewer experiences, and some certain voices remain under-represented. These gaps largely reflect the uneven availability of existing research and participation work rather than a lack of experiences.

Addressing this does not mean creating new burdensome data collection exercises. Instead, the next phase will focus on improving this work by: strengthening partnerships with organisations who already hold trusted relationships, improving how experiential insight is documented and shared, and creating a sustainable approach that enables existing evidence to be brought together more consistently across Scotland. 

How change is being felt by the care experience community must sit at the heart of how we understand and measure success. 

Achieving this at a national level across the ten vision statements requires an approach that balances the need to collect insights that guide what needs to happen next, while limiting asking the same questions of the same people over again.  

Using what children, families and care experienced adults have said, shows how Scotland’s progress is being experienced by the care community. It helps us see whether the promise is being felt, where it is working well, and where improvements are still needed.

The insights gathered from the experience question, 'does the care community feel the promise is being kept', shows what life feels like for children, families and care experienced adults. When organisations set these insights alongside the What Matters questions, it becomes a practical tool for reflection.  

It can help practitioners, leaders and organisations check whether their current practice is making a difference, understand what is working well, and see where change is still needed. It supports learning rather than performance management and keep the focus on what matters to children, families and care experienced adults 

The Promise Story of Progress has three essential parts, the national picture (also known as the Promise Progress Framework) the organisational picture and the experience of the care community. Each part gives a different view, and only by bringing them together through the lens of what matters to children, families and care experienced adults, can Scotland understand whether the promise is being kept. 

Each part offers a different kind of insight: 

• At a national level, the data shows what is progressing 

• At an organisational level, information shows how those organisations are doing in their work 
• The experience lens shows whether those changes are having an impact 

On their own, they provide one part of the story. Seen together, they help us understand what is happening, how it is happening and most importantly how its being felt by the care community. 

The What Matters questions sit alongside the three parts of the Promise Story of Progress. They are a useful tool for learning and improvement, helping us move beyond numbers, exploring what ‘good’ looks and feels like from the perspective of children, families and care experienced adults, not what ‘good’ looks like to the ‘system’.