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That is a work in progress that spans much further than the matter that we are discussing. We continue to listen to the voices of people with care experience to find out what they require. We are seeing improvements in CAMHS and other services and we are putting a lot of work into improving those for young people.

You mentioned trauma. I appreciate what you say about the support for young people, but carers also need support to be able to deal with that appropriately. As I said in answer to Ms McCall, we are working to develop a plan to provide trauma training for kinship, foster and adoptive parents.

I am positive about the work that is going on to support care-experienced young people, but there is still more to do: that will continue to be led by the voices of those with care experience.

Good morning. I am very grateful to the committee for inviting me along to give evidence. I welcome the opportunity to discuss the new Scottish recommended allowance for foster and kinship carers and, of course, the wider work that the Scottish Government is undertaking to support kinship carers.

Kinship care has evolved over many decades. During that time, there has come an increased recognition of, and value for, the role that kinship carers play in providing secure, stable and loving homes for children and young people when they are no longer able to live with their birth parents.

At the outset, I put on record my sincere thanks to kinship carers for stepping in to provide children with a home, often at very short notice and within complicated family dynamics. I know that giving that care can be multifaceted, which is why the Scottish Government is committed to providing both financial and practical support for kinship carers, so that they are best equipped to love and nurture the children they look after.

On 30 March last year, we published our implementation plan, setting out the actions that we would take to keep the Promise by 2030. In the plan, we restated our intention to introduce a Scottish recommended allowance for kinship and foster carers in order to end the inequality and ensure consistency across Scotland.

As the committee knows, that has been a Scottish Government commitment since 2018, and I know that the time that it has taken to deliver on that has been a source of frustration to both caregivers and stakeholders. That is why, in August this year, I was really delighted to announce that we had reached agreement with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities about a new national weekly allowance that all local authorities must pay to their foster and kinship carers.

We estimate that the new Scottish recommended allowance will benefit more than 9,000 children. It is being funded by an additional £16 million from the Scottish Government. That funding enables the allowance to be backdated to 1 April this year. It is, of course, up to local authorities to decide how best to do that and to ensure that there are no unintended consequences for families.

We know, from some initial feedback, that some local authorities have already implemented the new allowance and have made the back payments; others are expecting to do so at the end of November or soon afterwards. We will use our existing forums, groups and networks as feedback loops to identify any obstacles to implementation and, importantly, to help local authorities to overcome any obstacles and to share good practice. Once the Scottish recommended allowance has bedded down, we will review it more formally and identify any areas where improvements could be made.

When I announced the new allowance, I committed to maintaining the 2023-24 levels of support for the allowances and to reviewing the funding implications for future years from 2024-25. Like all of you, I am acutely aware of the cost of living pressures on families and I am currently considering what we might do for future years, given our fixed budget and the significant financial challenges that we are facing. I will be able to say more on that after the Scottish budget has been set out in Parliament in December.

We recently had care experience week, which was an opportunity for everyone to celebrate the care experience community. I visited Siblings Reunited, known as STAR, and met staff and a small group of volunteer supporters. STAR provides a safe environment in which to bring together sibling groups who have been separated in care to form positive experiences and relationships. What that visit reiterated to me was that, although funding is important, it is only one part of how we can improve the experiences of those in care and of their carers. That is one of the reasons why, along with partners, we established the kinship care collaborative in 2020.

As you will know from your previous inquiry, the collaborative is working hard to deliver improvements in support for kinship carers, children and professionals working with kinship families across Scotland. Following recommendations in last year’s Social Justice and Social Security Committee report on kinship care, the collaborative established a rewrite group to refresh the existing kinship care guidance for practitioners. The rewrite group has been examining the guidance with a view to updating it so that it reflects updated legislation and growing knowledge and experience of what works in kinship care.

The refreshed guidance will also clarify many of the issues that the committee and stakeholders have told us are open to interpretation. Those include the meaning of “at risk of being looked after” and “placed with the involvement of the local authority”. Our aim is to publish the guidance by the end of the year. Alongside that, a group of practitioners are helping us to develop a new national kinship assessment framework, which will complement the refreshed guidance and help to improve the consistency of approach and practice.

We are also taking action to promote the work of the collaborative—which I know is an issue that the committee raised previously—and to ensure that it is open, transparent and accessible to all stakeholders, kinship care families and others with care experience.

More broadly, there is work across Government to support kinship carers. For example, we are working with partners and caregivers to develop a plan to deliver trauma training for kinship and foster carers as well as for adoptive parents. We have also made it easier for kinship carers to apply for the Scottish social security benefits that they are eligible for, working in consultation with those who have lived experience to expand the definition of kinship carer to make it as inclusive as possible.

I believe that the totality of the work happening across Government, specifically to target kinship carers but also to help families more generally, should help us to achieve our ambition to keep the Promise by 2030.

I welcome the committee’s continued interest in kinship care and the Scottish recommended allowance, and I am happy to answer any questions.

I touched on that in my opening statement because it is obviously really important. We must ensure that kinship carers can access their rights and the support and advice that they are entitled to.

The kinship care collaborative established a communications sub-group, which gave a clear steer that the first step towards that would be to ensure that local authority websites contained up-to-date information about their kinship care policies. The sub-group has written to the office of the chief social worker, requesting assistance in contacting all local authority chief social work officers to highlight the importance of ensuring that that relevant information is published, that it is regularly updated and that it is made available to carers and practitioners, which is a legal requirement under the Kinship Care Assistance (Scotland) Order 2016.

The letter to the office of the chief social worker also asks that local authority websites provide links to the website of the Kinship Care Advice Service for Scotland, which is funded by the Scottish Government. That website contains a wide range of information that will assist kinship carers, including information about financial support and welfare benefits and about legal orders. The advice service also runs a helpline, which offers a call-back service outside normal operating hours, and provides a range of free training packages.

Work is going on. As I said at the start, we understand that that is extremely important, and I am confident that the on-going work will help to improve matters.

There has been engagement with Social Work Scotland. I will bring in officials to give a bit more clarity on that.

Absolutely. I appreciate that clarity is required. To be clear, there has been no change in legislation. The eligibility of kinship carers for the allowance remains the same, as outlined in the kinship care guidance for practitioners. In essence, kinship carers who hold a kinship care order and receive an allowance under the Kinship Care Assistance (Scotland) Order 2016 remain eligible for the allowance. However, as I mentioned, we are refreshing the guidance on kinship care to make that clearer, and my expectation is that that guidance will be published by the end of the year, because I know that stakeholders and carers are calling for that.

Kinship carers who are looking after children under sections 7 or 25 of the Children (Scotland) Act 1995 or under section 83 of the Children’s Hearings (Scotland) Act 2011 are also eligible for the allowance. I know that the landscape is a bit muddled, so I hope that the refreshed guidance will provide a bit of clarity.

Absolutely. As I mentioned in my opening statement, although financial support is extremely valuable and required, kinship carers might also need other forms of support. Support can be practical and emotional as well as financial. For example, a kinship carer could seek advice and support from their local authority at any point.

The Scottish Government provides funding to Adoption UK in Scotland and to the Association of Fostering, Kinship and Adoption Scotland for the Kinship Care Advice Service for Scotland, with the aim of delivering a wide range of support, advice and information to help kinship care families.

We have also awarded, over the past three years, £989,000 of whole-family wellbeing funding to Adoption UK in Scotland to pilot a new approach to ensure that kinship care families can get the range of holistic support that they need. That focuses on education and community support, including peer support.

On our overall values and aims, good practice and the Promise tell us that the best place for a child to live when they are not able to live with their birth parents is with their wider family. That is absolutely in the best interests of the child, including in relation to safety. No kinship carer should ever feel isolated and unable to approach their local authority for support should they require it, but I have touched on some forms of support that they could access if they felt that way.

On the specific concerns about kinship carers not being able to keep children, the decision to remove a child from their kinship family would be taken only after a full assessment of the situation. Any decision to do so would not be taken lightly. It would be done only if there was evidence to suggest that it would be detrimental to the wellbeing of the child or young person to stay with that family, and efforts would be made to ensure that the family could stay together.

The roll-out of the guidance and the assessment framework that I alluded to will provide a further opportunity to underline the support that might be required for kinship families who have those thoughts or feel that way.

In our journey towards keeping the Promise and in everything that the Scottish Government is working on—its aims and priorities—it is useful to learn from and understand such things and to assess how we can ensure that such situations do not happen or that, as I said in my previous answer, disruption to the child is kept at a minimal level. That involves on-going processes, which we will consider as we go forward.

I appreciate that there has been a slight delay in the publication of the guidance, which was because we wanted to ensure that we engaged widely. As I believe I mentioned in my opening remarks, however, we are on schedule to publish that guidance by the end of the year. The rewrite group is currently refining the document and, once it is content with it, it will be reviewed by members of the reference group, which includes the Child Poverty Action Group, the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman and the Kinship Care Advice Service for Scotland. We intend to engage with kinship carers in the last week in November, and that will be included, too.

It is worth highlighting that the collaborative agreed to form a working group to develop a new national assessment framework for kinship care. That framework reflects the point that the kinship assessment is unique in that it assesses a carer for the needs of a specific child, unlike a foster care assessment. It also considers what extra support might be required within the family. The framework has been developed as a companion to the refreshed guidance, so it will be published at the same time. There are also plans to put in place a programme of awareness raising and training for practitioners, managers and local authorities to support the roll-out and implementation of the guidance and the assessment framework. That is all being done with the aim of improving practice in Scotland.

I touched on that a little in my opening statement. The Scottish Government does not hold information on which local authorities have already backdated the payments, because it is up to local authorities to decide how best to implement that according to their systems.

I am aware that, for some local authorities, implementing the allowance might require changes to their financial systems, as well as calculating those backdated amounts and contacting carers. The time that is needed to undertake that might therefore be different for each local authority. However, we have received the positive feedback that some local authorities have already implemented the new allowance and have made those back payments. Others are expecting to do so by the end of November or soon afterwards.

I want to be clear that there is a legal requirement, set out in the Kinship Care Assistance (Scotland) Order 2016, for local authorities to publish information about kinship care assistance. That includes the rate at which allowances are payable. As part of the grant letter that went out in October, the Scottish Government also asked local authorities to publish their kinship and fostering allowances and to take the necessary actions to ensure that all current kinship and foster carers are aware of the rates.

As I said, we are absolutely positive that it will be carried out in good time, based on how the local authority needs to carry it out. We will also monitor that.