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Route map: Leadership

This route map was last updated in December 2025 with information that is known about work underway and still required. It is not yet fully populated and work continues to identify what still needs to happen. Route maps are shared planning tools to support delivery of the promise and as progress is made and the rest of the route becomes clearer, this route map will continue to be updated. 

Where is Scotland now?

Work underway aligns with the Public Service Reform Strategy and Delivering for Scotland, promoting leadership approaches that prioritise trust, relationships and shared responsibility. There is growing recognition of leadership’s role in shaping culture, supporting the workforce and enabling sustainable change. Next steps focus on embedding values-based leadership more consistently, strengthening leadership capability and confidence, and balancing accountability with learning and improvement. Further work will encourage reflective practice, support collaboration across boundaries, and align leadership development with wider workforce and governance priorities. Sustained commitment is essential to deliver lasting cultural change and keep the promise.

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Leadership

Where does Scotland need to be by 2030?

All of the promise's calls to action have been grouped into delivery-focused outcomes that make clear what Scotland must deliver to keep the promise. The route map then identifies who must take responsibility for action by when for each outcome. This means the outcomes are fully aligned to what children, young people, and care experienced adults said must happen and the actions required are in a format that supports delivery, accountability, and monitoring. 

The outcome in Leadership is: 

  • Leadership across Scotland’s 'care system' is values-based, relational and collective, enabling safe and loving relationships for children, young people, families, and care experienced adults through shared power, honest dialogue, ongoing learning, and a broadened understanding of risk. 
Where does Scotland
need to be by 2030?

The route map to get there

Public Service Reform Strategy - 'Delivering for Scotland' - is built on four foundations, including 'Leadership and Cultural Change' and 'Accountability and Incentives.'

In Renfrewshire, professionals and elected members complete a programme of learning, which then recognises them as ‘Promise Keepers’. Similar models exist in other places.

‘Re-design our approach to accountability across Scotland’s public sector to enable collaboration, and the investment of resources and capacity in collectively achieving priority outcomes.’ Public Service Reform Strategy, 2025, p16

'We face significant challenges, fiscal, demographic and socio-economic. More of the same won’t do. We must adopt a more common-sense approach that focuses on what is important: people and communities. To maximise the impact of our combined resources we must work better together.' – Place Principle, 2019

There are many examples of effective local leadership across Scotland, many of which are captured in the report 'Keeping the promise: a local perspective', produced by the Promise Scotland in April 2025

Scottish Leaders Forum offers opportunities for Scotland's senior leaders to 'come together, to connect, to learn and to collaborate... to tackle the critical challenges our communities and our public services are facing'.

The work highlighted in the Public Service Reform Strategy to strengthen Community Planning Partnerships will be progressed.

The Local Government Programme Board for the promise to review innovative work in local areas to consider how this work could be strengthened and its learnings applied nationally.

The Promise Scotland will work alongside SOLACE, COSLA and local partners to explore the ‘promise keeper’ model for its wider applicability, adaptions and dissemination. This includes learning and sharing implementation of the promise at local level.

The Promise Scotland to convene candid dialogues, rooted in the work, between key ‘systems leaders’. Proposed themes include:

  • Why is collaborative, relational practice fragile and how do we strengthen it?
  • What are the barriers to systems actors ceding power and how do we address these?
  • How do we create and sustain the time and space for learning 'in the work'?
  • What are the capacities and skillsets required to drive the necessary change and what are the roles and skills for the future?
  • How do we enable and hold accountable the ‘root work’ required for transformational change, while holding the tension that the status quo is not good enough for ‘our children?
  • How do we enable and hold accountable the ‘root work’ required for transformational change, while holding the tension that the status quo is not good enough for ‘our children'?
  • Congruence in the system: if we all say we want similar things, let us collectively address the gaps between intent and reality.

Via its support offer and collaborative working The Promise Scotland to engage with local authorities and listening to the lived realities of children and families. The Independent Strategic Advisor - the promise, to visit local areas and speak with senior leadership, the workforce, children and families to better understand bridges and barriers to change.

Scottish Government to convene dialogue with all key partners to align the refreshed National Performance Framework with measures which incentivise collaboration, preventative work and holding the first purpose of work with children and families as safe, loving relationships and homes.

Public Services Reform Board, with support from The Promise Scotland, to consider how to use the promise as an exemplar for public service reform and for the wider reform programme to incorporate learning from it.

The Promise Scotland, building on Plan 24-30 route maps and potentially via strategically placed Promise Leads or Delivery Partners and via Leadership forums, to support local authorities to develop clear delivery plans.

There remains a lack of leadership pathways for care experienced young people and adults embarking on their careers. The Promise Scotland will work with relevant partners to support them to develop career pathways for those with lived experience of care, to find ways into other areas of work and life as they mature, avoiding the need to rely on their traumatic experiences for work or to hold positions in professional spaces.

Explore opportunities to work alongside projects or forums that work with people with lived experience of care to develop leadership practice to move beyond tokenism or 'domestication' of people with lived experiences of care, to recognise harm caused, to learn from it and to commit to doing differently.

There are no milestones identified for this year yet. Once progress is made in earlier years, the work required in this year will be clearer and milestones will be added here.

There are no milestones identified for this year yet. Once progress is made in earlier years, the work required in this year will be clearer and milestones will be added here.

There are no milestones identified for this year yet. Once progress is made in earlier years, the work required in this year will be clearer and milestones will be added here.

Who needs to work on this:

Scottish Government, COSLA, Health Boards, Third Sector, Local Authorities, Education

Other route maps this links to:

People Route Maps

Voice Route Maps

Scaffolding Route Maps

To see which calls to action from the promise sit under this outcome, click here.

What matters to children, families, and care experienced adults

The people making big decisions that impact my family care most about what matters to us.

People who support me are all working together to share resources, to jointly make decisions with me, and to own and fix any problems together. 

People who support me aren’t working in ways that are over-complicated and making it harder for everyone to do a good job. 

Find out more about what matters here

Foundations