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Our latest tackling child poverty progress report against our delivery plan ‘Best Start, Bright Futures’, highlighted £2.9 billion investment targeted at low income households. Actions include our unique Scottish Child Payment which we have increased to £26.70 per week and is now benefitting around 330,000 children, further investment through our No One Left Behind approach to strengthen our employability offer to parents and investment of Whole Family Wellbeing Funding which aims to deliver transformational change to improve holistic whole family support.

'Getting it right for every child' (GIRFEC) is the Scottish Government's commitment to provide all children, young people and their families with the right support at the right time. The GIRFEC approach recognises that children, young people and their families need to know who they can contact when they require support. The named person, or equivalent role, provides a clear point of contact within universal services for information, advice or help.

The Scottish Government is also investing £12 million this year in free income maximisation, welfare and debt advice services, helping to ensure people are aware of their rights and entitlements, tackle problem debt and reduce poverty.

We are also proud that we have the Scottish Welfare Fund providing emergency support and a lifeline to people in need, through Crisis Grants to help meet immediate short-term needs arising from exceptional circumstances and Community Care Grants to help eligible people establish or maintain a home. We have protected investment in the fund of £41 million this year. Statistics show that in 2023-24, 96% of Crisis Grant applications were processed within the target of the end of the next working day.

Scotland is also the first nation in the UK to publish a Plan that works towards ending the need for food banks. The plan includes a £1.8m Cash-First Programme to strengthen urgent access to cash in a crisis and reduce the need for food parcels, delivered collaboratively with advice and support to strengthen people’s incomes and help prevent future hardship.

Support for parents in their children’s development is provided across a range of different resources and programmes covering social and emotional as well as early literacy and speech & language.

In 2021 Scottish Government launched the Wellbeing for Wee Ones Hub on the Parent Club website, supporting parents to gain an understanding of their infant’s emotional and mental wellbeing from an early stage. Solihull Online programmes have also been rolled out across Scotland providing evidence based information on relationships and child development all the way through to 18 years. Additionally, the Psychology of Parenting Programme (PoPP) supports local areas with the implementation of evidence based parenting programmes to support the development of positive relationships and attachment across childhood.

Since 2010 the Scottish Government has funded the Scottish Book Trust’s Bookbug Programme which as well as laying the foundations of early literacy, the programme aims to enhance attachment and promote emotional intelligence as well as good communication and listening skills. In 2024/25, the Scottish Government is providing £1.8 million, to deliver this Programme.

In 2024/25 the Scottish Government is also providing Smart Play Network with £645,000 to deliver the PlayTalkRead programme which promotes the importance of playing, talking and reading with children from birth to four years old to boost their development. The programme includes ‘Pathways Through Play’ which is an activity that supports early speech and language development through play.

Maree Todd: The Scottish Government recognises the import role parents and carers play in supporting the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people. Because of this, we continue to invest in a range of initiatives to give parents and carers the confidence and skills they may require to support their children while looking after their own wellbeing.

The Scottish Government’s Parent Club web resource, and associated marketing campaigns, provide parents and carers with tips, advice and links to further information on how to support their children’s mental health and wellbeing from birth to teenage years. The website also gives information on how parents and carers can support their own mental wellbeing and maintain resilience. https://www.parentclub.scot/topics/mental-health-wellbeing

Parents and cares in Scotland can also access, free, online courses, expertly designed for parents, carers and grandparents on supporting the emotional wellbeing of their children. These courses are provided by NHS Education for Scotland, in partnership with the Solihull Approach. https://inourplace.co.uk/scotland/

In addition, since 2020, we have provided local authorities with over £50 million to develop and deliver Community Mental Health and Wellbeing Supports and Services, for children, young people and their families, with a further £15 million committed for 2024/25. The services are focused on prevention and early intervention and, where appropriate, offer an alternative to CAMHS by providing support in a community setting.

Community supports and services are available in every local authority area, with more than 300 now in place across the country. Local authorities have advised that over 58,000 people used the supports and services in the first half of 2023. This includes parents and carers who have received advice and assistance on supporting their children’s mental health and wellbeing through; mentoring services, digital services, whole-family supports, counselling services and spaces for peer learning and advice.

As set out in the Scottish Government’s second Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan, Best Start, Bright Futures, we remain fully committed to ensuring that all relevant action across government is focused on meeting the needs of the six priority families identified – including lone parent families. This will ensure that support is tailored and ultimately more effective in meeting the needs of families at risk of poverty.

Despite facing the most challenging budget settlement of devolution, we are committing over £3 billion this year to policies which tackle poverty and protect people, including single parents, as far as possible during the ongoing costs crisis. This includes investment in our game-changing Scottish Child Payment, funded early learning and childcare, providing free bus travel for over two million people, and offering free school meals to over 277,000 children.

This investment also includes making £7.8 million available to Local Authorities to mitigate the previous UK Government’s benefit cap as fully as possible through Discretionary Housing Payments. This supports around 2,300 families, of which it is estimated 74% are lone parent families.

Further to this wide ranging support for families, we continue to take action which is specifically targeted to lone parents. Since 2016 the Scottish Government has been providing core funding to One Parent Families Scotland (OPFS) through the Children, Young People and Families Early Intervention and Adult Learning and Empowering Communities Fund. OPFS will receive £371,700 for core funding in 2024-25, supporting their work with and for single parent families, providing support services that enable them to achieve their potential and help create lasting solutions to the poverty and barriers facing many single parents and their children.

We have also allocated £523,966 to One Parent Families Scotland in 2024-25 to support its specialist National Advice and Information Service and debt advice service, which aims to reduce child poverty, provide debt support to single parent households and increase their financial and family wellbeing.

In addition, we have continuously called upon the UK Government to abolish the two-child limit policy, which is estimated to impact almost 1 in 10 children in Scotland. Scottish Government analysis from February 2024 found that removing the two-child limit and reinstating the family element in Universal Credit would lift around 10,000 children in Scotland out of relative poverty in 2024-25.

The Scottish Government will continue to do all we can within our powers and will leave no stone unturned across government as we seek to eradicate child poverty. We remain committed to working with the UK Government to build on the action we have taken to date and to end child poverty once and for all.

The Scottish Government recognises that all parents are entitled to support throughout their parenting journey, and parents with disabilities will have specific needs that should be met.

This support begins in pregnancy and one of the key recommendations in The Best Start, which sets out our vision for maternity care in Scotland is the introduction of continuity of carer. Through this model, women will receive the majority of their care through their primary midwife, supported by the wider team, which helps to build a continuous caring relationship, understanding that such personalised care will be particularly important for disabled women.

Health visitors play a vital role in supporting families from pre-birth to age 5 and where additional needs of the parent are identified, the health visitor can facilitate additional support and referrals to specialised services. In recognition of their unique role, we invested over £40 million over four years to recruit an additional 500 health visitors between 2014-18.

The Scottish Government has overall responsibility for health and social care policy in Scotland, however, it is local authorities and health and social care partnerships who have the responsibility to ensure that the right social care support is available to meet the needs of those who rely on local services. Local and national government have committed to respecting each other’s democratic mandates as part of the Verity House Agreement.

Scotland’s Getting it right for every child (GIRFEC) approach underpins the delivery of high-quality universal and targeted support through a single, coordinated approach to planning across education, social work, and health and social care; and between public services, the third sector and community partners. The Scottish Government published a series of GIRFEC policy and practice guidance Getting it right for every child (GIRFEC) - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) in 2022-23 to provide practitioners and professionals with confidence, clarity and practical support to continue to embed the 'Getting it right for every child' approach across children’s and related services.

Self-directed Support (SDS) is Scotland’s approach to social care that enables disabled people, people living with long term conditions, and unpaid carers to manage and choose the support they require. The Scottish Government published Social Care (Self-directed Support) (Scotland) Act 2013: statutory guidance - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) in 2014, and reviewed and updated this in November 2022, making it clearer that self-directed support is for everyone in Scotland who needs social care services or support. In June last year we also published our Self-directed support: improvement plan 2023 to 2027 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) which builds on the progress of the previous plan, aiming to set out priorities in a clear and helpful way, and to ensure that there is regular and appropriate reporting, monitoring and evaluation of what is being done.

The Scottish Government continues to work closely with Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) to develop and implement a plan that is informed by the lived experience of disabled people and will deliver actions to help with the significant challenges they are currently facing.

Since 2022 over £110m of Whole Family Wellbeing Funding was invested by the Scottish Government to deliver a transformational change in holistic family support so that families get the right support, in the right way and at the right time. The funding was distributed as follows:

• £96m provided for Children’s Services Planning Partnerships (CSPPs) (Element 1) to build local service capacity for change and to transform family support services.
• £1.6m National Support for Local Delivery (Element 2), includes a package of activity aimed at supporting local transformation. This part of the funding also supports the wider evaluation and research work for WFWF.
• £13.1m for taking a cross Scottish Government approach to system change (Element 3) which is supporting 12 projects across Scottish Government policy areas to help progress the aims of the Programme.

The Scottish Government remains committed to this ambition and has prioritised investment in supporting local areas to develop preventative whole family support measures through the Whole Family Wellbeing Funding, with £50m being allocated for the programme in the 2024-25 budget. The Scottish Government continues to work with partners on how we can most effectively deploy future investment to support the system change required and will shortly publish an investment approach setting out our future approach to the Programme and associated funding.

The Scottish Government is providing £18 million funding in 2024-25 through our Children, Young People, Families Early Intervention and Adult Learning and Empowering Communities (CYPFEI & ALEC) and Children, Young People, Families and Adult Learners (CYPFAL) third sector funds to support children, families and communities.

In addition to this, Children’s Services Planning is Scotland’s legislative approach to collaborative local strategic planning and delivery of services and support, to ensure this is delivered in a way which improves wellbeing outcomes for children, young people and families living in each area. Children’s Services Planning duties are set out in Part 3 of the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014.

Children’s Services Planning Partnerships are key to driving a holistic and whole systems approach in the local area, which embeds Getting it right for every child, delivers holistic whole family support, as well as action to Keep the Promise.

The Scottish Government’s Whole Family Wellbeing Funding Programme was established with the purpose of driving the system change required at local level, principally through Children’s Service Planning Partnerships (CSPPs), to deliver holistic family support so that families get the right support, at the right time, for as long as they need. Recognising the varying circumstances in local areas, the Programme does not seek to mandate a specific delivery model – an approach which has been welcomed by delivery partners.

• Delivery of the WFWF Programme involves a variety of collaborative work with CSPPs – of which local authorities are statutory members – including Providing direct funding to Children's Services Planning Partnerships to build local service capacity for change and transform family support services. Each CSPP is responsible deciding how to spend their allocation, based on a local assessment of need. Investing in a package of activity to support the development and sharing of learning across CSPPs and beyond, including the creation of the the Learning into Action Network and Knowledge Hub and dedicated collaborative partnerships with specific CSPP areas.
• Development of the Supporting Families - A National Self-Assessment Toolkit for Change (in collaboration with stakeholders) to support consistent and structured planning discussions about the design and delivery of holistic family support services at the local level.

The Scottish Government has a distinctive way of delivering policy and public services. This has become known as the Scottish Approach and prioritises working in partnership to co-produce policy and shape services. In the development of policies related to care of children, co-production with parents and caregivers is achieved in a variety of ways. These include lived-experience panels, public consultations, citizens assemblies, and ensuring parents and caregiver organisations are involved in key stakeholder groups.