Vision statement nine: “Young adults for whom Scotland has taken on parenting responsibility must have a right to return to care and have access to services and supportive people to nurture them.
Organisational Progress
What is happening
Organisations are learning that effective support for young people leaving care requires careful attention to transition planning, service accessibility, relational continuity, and housing stability. These areas present both opportunities for positive change and challenges related to systemic gaps and inconsistent practices. Addressing these complexities is central to improving outcomes for young people as they move to adulthood.
Click on the take me to navigation pane and jump to different sections here, including sources. To see what changes Scotland is making and still has to make for the promise to be kept, click on the moving on and lifelong support route map in Plan 24-30. See more about the work of change across Scotland here.
The materials reviewed describe work to widen access to education, skills and employment opportunities for care experienced young people. Work to develop more flexible learning pathways, strengthening targeted employability support and improving access to digital tools is underway. There is also increased focus on relational and trauma-informed approaches within adult learning and employment settings, recognising that young people need adaptable support over time.
Work to support young people moving on from care through transition planning and coordination is being developed, including early and proactive communication, and shared decision-making processes.
Despite work to better meet the needs of care experienced young people, "cliff-edges" continue to exist where young people experience a significant drop in support at moments of change. Work has begun to address this through tiered entry to adult services, ongoing access to support, and the use of adaptive spaces to support change safely and gradually. There continues, however, to be challenges with different thresholds for help and support across adult and children’s services, with the workforce recognising that systemic inflexibility limits their ability to provide tailored, compassionate care.
Work has begun to address challenges to relational support and continuity for young people. These include addressing the impact of workers moving on, feelings of abandonment, lack of continuity of support, and sudden drop-off of support.
Difficulties in securing adequate mental health support for care experienced young people continue, highlighting systemic barriers that prevent young people from accessing timely and appropriate care.
Work is underway to increase access to appropriate housing and supportive intermediate settings.
The materials reviewed describe how the challenges surrounding housing and accommodation evoke a deep sense of concern and responsibility for young people. Workforce members grapple with the knowledge that inadequate housing situations can undermine young people's well-being and jeopardise their transition to independence. The lack of suitable options and the pressure to secure tenancies prematurely create a precarious environment, leaving workforce members feeling anxious about the safety and stability of those they support.
What is being learned about change
Organisations are learning that effective support for young people leaving care requires careful attention to transition planning, service accessibility, relational continuity, and housing stability. These areas present both opportunities for positive change and challenges related to systemic gaps and inconsistent practices. Addressing these complexities is central to improving outcomes for young people as they move to adulthood.
Learning across the materials shows that engagement in education, training and employment is better supported when help is practical, relational and responsive to context. Workforce accounts emphasise the importance of understanding how health, housing instability, financial pressure and digital access affect participation. Flexible and person centred approaches are described as helping sustain progress where standard models have previously been difficult to navigate.
Key Elements of Success
- Flexible and responsive learning pathways.
- Trauma-informed support within education and employment settings.
- Practical help with digital access and skills.
- Recognition of wider life pressures that affect participation.
Examples
- Supporting a young person to return to learning after time away through gradual re engagement and regular relational check ins.
- Ensuring digital equipment and connectivity are in place so learning and employment opportunities are accessible.
- Adjusting learning or work plans when housing, health or financial pressures affect attendance, rather than ending support.
- Offering flexible routes into training or employment that allow progress at a sustainable pace.
- Using relationship-based practice to support confidence and persistence over time.
What to stop and what to change
- Rigid systems that assume linear progress or full-time engagement without considering the realities of adult life.
Effective planning and coordination are crucial for supporting young people moving on from care, requiring proactive communication, shared decision-making, and clear pathways. Systemic challenges such as insufficient clarity, ad hoc processes, and information sharing gaps must be addressed. Designated roles and tools to facilitate smoother changes and more holistic support make a difference.
Key Elements of Success
- Early and proactive communication.
- Having young people and those that are important to them at the heart of collaborative decision making.
- Clear pathways for change.
- Roles dedicated to pathway planning.
- Multi-agency collaboration and information sharing centred on care experienced young people.
Examples
- Joined up working with professionals from a variety of organisations who work with young people at their pace to help prepare them for their next move.
- Enabling approaches for care experienced young people to maintain connections throughout their lives.
- Non-judgemental support when things don’t work out as planned.
What to stop and what to change
- Processes that move at ‘system’ pace, not at the pace of the young person.
- Unclear roles, responsibilities and expectations.
- Information sharing gaps.
- Not including all the people important to young people in planning processes.
Comprehensive and accessible services are essential for supporting young people leaving care, but systemic barriers often hinder access. Learning across the materials shows that services are described as working best when support is accessible, joined up and responsive to need rather than age alone. Service gaps, higher thresholds for adult services, and the ‘cliff-edges’ effect all have detrimental impacts on young people. The importance of tailored approaches, such as tiered entry to adult services, to better meet the diverse needs of young people is highlighted as important.
Materials reviewed highlight that relational support and continuity are vital for the wellbeing of care experienced young people, requiring consistent workers, maintained relationships, and flexible support systems. This, alongside open access to support is helping achieve better outcomes.
Key Elements of Success
- Comprehensive, holistic support services.
- Meeting need, not servicing chronological age.
- Collaborative planning and decision making involving young people and those important to them.
- Consistency of staff.
- Maintaining relationships.
- Flexible and responsive approaches.
- An open-door approach for returning to support when needed.
Examples
- Extending support beyond 18 where needs remain, with clear planning for how support continues.
- Using tiered entry so adult services can respond without young people needing to reach crisis point.
- Maintaining access to support and enabling ongoing connection to people who are important to the young person through change.
- Supporting continuity by maintaining involvement across transitions so relationships do not end abruptly.
- Coordinating support across services to address practical needs, wellbeing and participation together.
What to stop and what to change
- Higher thresholds for adult services that limit access when need remains.
- Ending or reducing support based on age rather than need.
- Cliff edge reductions in support during transitions between children and adult services.
- Barriers to timely and appropriate mental health support.
- Relationship cliff edges, including endings without preparation or continuity.
- Sudden drops in involvement that create gaps in support.
Work to address housing challenges has begun but is challenging. There has been work to support care experienced young people to get and maintain tenancies in appropriate homes, but challenges still remain around levels of available housing, and meeting the needs of particular young people, such as those who have lived in secure care. There is recognition that supportive intermediate settings and tailored housing support to promote independent living and positive outcomes is required.
Key Elements of Success
- Appropriate housing.
- Supportive intermediate settings.
- Ongoing housing related support.
Examples
- Providing access to practical home skills support and basic household equipment so young people can set up and manage a home.
- Offering person led support before, during and after a move to help establish routines, manage bills and sustain a tenancy.
What to stop and what to change
- Lack of appropriate housing options.
- Housing insecurity that disrupts stability and undermines tenancy sustainment.
- Planning that is not joined up or is rushed at points of change.
- Barriers to accessing suitable housing options for care experienced young people.
Sources Referenced
The purpose of the below citations and summaries is to ensure that sources used are clear and accessible. Web links to the sources are provided, where possible.
Document summaries are provided for any document where analysis produced more than ten ‘coded segments’. ‘Coded segments’ refer to portions of a document that analysts identified and labelled as relevant to the key themes for each Vision Statement.
All documents that have informed the development of the Vision Statement, even if they had fewer than 10 coded segments, are cited in the ‘Additional Sources’ box below.
This report, published in October 2025 by the Care Inspectorate, CELCIS, and Clan Childlaw, shares findings from inspections conducted in 2024-25. It aims to show how services for children and young people are supporting their right to continuing care, which means staying with their caregivers for as long as needed. This right is based on the promise, and research shows that young people who leave care too early often face worse outcomes in housing, jobs, and mental health.
The inspections looked at care homes, fostering agencies, and adult placement services. Key findings include that over half of young people over 18 continued to live in their service, and most received good care. While 70% of services had a continuing care policy and ensured placing authorities understood their commitment, nearly half of care homes needed to improve their admissions guidance and placement agreements to clearly state this commitment. Most services were good at making sure local authorities carried out welfare assessments, which are important for planning a young person's future.
The report highlights that young people in continuing care generally have good outcomes, supporting the idea that safe and supportive environments with strong relationships help young people transition positively into adulthood. However, there's still a need for more young people to benefit from continuing care. Services and local authorities must keep following the guidelines to make sure young people can stay in their homes for as long as they wish.
Continuing Care Focus Area Findings Inspection Year 2024-25. Care Inspectorate, 2025. https://www.careinspectorate.com/images/documents/Continuing_care_findings/Continuing_care_focus_area_findings_inspection_year_2024-25.pdf.
This Care Inspectorate report looks at how children and young people are cared for in secure care and what needs to improve to ensure their rights are respected, including whether new rules made by the Scottish Government are helping young people and staff.
Approximately 200 people participated in the study, including young people, family members, professionals and Local Authority representatives. The journeys of 30 young people were also tracked over a one-year period.
The Care Inspectorate found that progress has been made in meeting the aims of the secure care Pathway and Standards, but significant gaps remain across the full journey into, through and out of secure care. The new rules have had the strongest impact for those in secure care, where most young people experienced improved safety, felt listened to, had their rights upheld, and benefited from specialist support and education. Some positive preventative effects were noted—where intensive, relationship-based community support and clear risk-planning processes helped prevent admission.
However, the greatest weaknesses were found after young people leave secure care. Many experienced a sharp drop in support, struggled to access health and wellbeing services, lost educational progress, and faced homelessness or serious safety risks, leading to re-admissions. Ongoing problems included unequal access to community resources, inconsistent understanding of secure care’s therapeutic purpose, lack of stable relationships, and variation in restrictive practices.
Secure Care Pathway Review. Care Inspectorate, 2023. https://www.careinspectorate.com/images/documents/7293/Secure%20care%20pathway%20review%202023.pdf.
This report was published by the Centre for Excellence for Children's Care and Protection (CELCIS), a leading improvement and innovation centre based at the University of Strathclyde.
The Scottish Government asked CELCIS to conduct this research to gather information to help them make decisions about how to best deliver children's services in Scotland. The main goal of the research was to answer: "What is needed to ensure that children, young people and families get the help they need, when they need it?".
This specific report is 'Strand 4' of a larger study and focuses on understanding the opportunities, challenges, and barriers faced by the children's services workforce. It explores their views on local services, how different agencies work together, support for young people moving into adult services, relationships between families and professionals, and the support available to the workforce itself. The report uses surveys, focus groups, and interviews to gather these perspectives.
Dr Alex McTier, Mihaela Manole, Jane Scott, et al. Children’s Services Reform Research: Scotland’s Children’s Services Landscape: The Views and Experiences of the Children’s Services Workforce. CELCIS, 2023. https://www.celcis.org/knowledge-bank/search-bank/childrens-services-reform-research-scotlands-childrens-services-landscape-views-and-experiences-childrens-services-workforce.
Who Cares? Scotland—a national independent membership organisation for care experienced people, dedicated to supporting, empowering and amplifying the voices of Scotland’s care community—provided targeted analysis of their existing evidence for The Promise Story of Progress, sharing material that mapped to the relevant vision statements and contributed insight into how their internal data, participation activity, and qualitative evidence could inform the experiential strand of the Promise Story of Progress.
Their reports reflected advocacy work carried out between 1st January 2020 and 30th June 2025, during which time Who Cares? Scotland advocacy workers supported around 4,800 individuals. Although the report findings do not represent the experience of every care experienced individual in Scotland, they highlight issues that need continued attention as Scotland works to understand what is changing and what still needs to be addressed.
An anonymised and abridged collation of these reports is available at: Who Cares? Scotland. The Promise Story of Progress: Vision Statement advocacy reports by Who Cares? Scotland (abridged). The Promise Scotland, 2025. https://www.plan2430.scot/media/r0jiy2pl/2025-12-17-the-promise-story-of-progress-vision-statement-advocacy-reports-by-who-cares-scotland_abridged.pdf
Allik, Mirjam, Denise Brown, Edit Gedeon, Alastair H Leyland, and Marion Henderson. Children’s Health in Care in Scotland (CHiCS): Main Findings from Population-Wide Research. University of Glasgow, 2022. https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/279347/.
Bettencourt, Michael. CELCIS’s Response to the Scottish Government’s “Prescribing the Minimum Annual Number of Learning Hours: Consultation.” CELCIS, 2023. https://www.celcis.org/knowledge-bank/search-bank/response-celcis-scottish-governments-prescribing-minimum-annual-number-learning-hours-consultation.
Brown, D, E Gedeon, M Henderson, A Leyland, P Wilson, and A Mirjam. “Mortality Outcomes of Children and Young People Who Have Spent Time in Care: Evidence from Children’s Health in Care in Scotland, a Population-Wide Administrative Data Cohort Study.” Pub Med, 2025. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40473467/.
Care Inspectorate. “Children’s Rights, Care Experience and Corporate Parenting.” https://www.careinspectorate.com/index.php/corporate-parenting.
CELCIS Video Transcript - Making Change Happen: Reflections and Impact from the Brights Spots Programme Scottish Pilot. CELCIS, 2023. https://www.celcis.org/Brightspots.
CELCIS Video Transcript - Truly Listening: Learning from the Bright Spots Programme. CELCIS, 2022. https://www.celcis.org/Brightspots.
CELCIS. “The ‘Bright Spots’ Programme Scottish Pilot Commenced in Early 2022 with Three Local Authorities.” https://www.celcis.org/Brightspots.
Continuing Care Focus Area Findings Inspection Year 2024-25. Care Inspectorate, 2025. https://www.careinspectorate.com/images/documents/Continuing_care_findings/Continuing_care_focus_area_findings_inspection_year_2024-25.pdf.
Disabled Children and Young People’s Experiences of Social Work Services: A Thematic Review. Care Inspectorate, 2024. https://www.careinspectorate.com/images/documents/7714/Thematic%20review%20of%20services%20for%20disabled%20CYP.pdf.
Fostering and Adoption Statistical Bulletin 2024-2025. Care Inspectorate, 2025. https://www.careinspectorate.com/images/documents/fostering_and_adoption/Fostering_and_adoption_statistical_bulletin_2024-2025.pdf.
Guinchard, Sydney. “Why Not? Trust Response to ‘Promise Story of Progress: Data Information Form (Care Community).’” The Why Not? Trust, 2025.
Joint Inspections of Services for Children and Young People at Risk of Harm: Review of Findings from the Joint Inspection Programme 2021-2025. Care Inspectorate, 2025. https://www.careinspectorate.com/images/documents/8239/RevFindings_JISCYP_2021-2025.pdf.
McTier, Dr Alex, Mihaela Manole, Jane Scott, et al. Children’s Services Reform Research: Scotland’s Children’s Services Landscape: The Views and Experiences of the Children’s Services Workforce. CELCIS, 2023. https://www.celcis.org/knowledge-bank/search-bank/childrens-services-reform-research-scotlands-childrens-services-landscape-views-and-experiences-childrens-services-workforce.
McTier, Dr Alexander, Carol Ann Anderson, and Emma Young. Births to Care Experienced Teenagers and Women Aged 14-24 in Scotland: An Estimation. CELCIS, 2023. https://www.celcis.org/knowledge-bank/search-bank/births-care experienced-teenagers-and-women-aged-14-24-scotland.
Ottaway, Heather, Alexander McTier, Mihaela Manole, et al. Children’s Services Reform Research: Learning and Implications for Scotland. CELCIS, 2023. https://www.celcis.org/knowledge-bank/search-bank/childrens-services-reform-research-concluding-report.
Public Health Scotland: Corporate Parenting Vision and Plan 2025-2028. Public Health Scotland, 2025.
Reimagining Secure Care - Final Report: A Vision for the Reimagined/Future World. Children and Young People’s Centre for Justice (CYCJ), 2024. https://www.cycj.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Reimagining-Secure-Care-Final-Report.pdf.
Secure Care Pathway Review. Care Inspectorate, 2023. https://www.careinspectorate.com/images/documents/7293/Secure%20care%20pathway%20review%202023.pdf.
Update on Progress: #KeepingThePromise PHS Contribution February 2024. Public Health Scotland, 2024.
Update on Progress: Correspondence to Fiona Duncan- The promise. Police Scotland, 2024.
Update on Progress: Email Response from the Scottish Police Authority. The Scottish Police Authority, 2024.
Update on Progress: Update on the promise Plan. The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, 2024.
Whitelaw, Dr Ruby, and Ross Gibson. Preparing to Keep The promise: A Comparative Study of Secure Care and Young Offender Institutions in Scotland. Children and Young People’s Centre for Justice (CYCJ), 2023. https://www.cycj.org.uk/resource/preparing-to-keep-the-promise-a-comparitive-study-of-secure-care-and-young-offender-instituions-in-scotland/.
Whyte, Dr Emily, and Dr Lisa Craig. Why Not? Trust Thinking Space: A Learning Account. n.d.