Message from CHS

Hello I’m Boyd McAdam, the National Convener and Chief Executive of Children’s Hearings Scotland (CHS).

Since April 2015 when the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 was introduced, CHS and the 22 Area Support Teams, who support the national Children’s Panel locally, have been Corporate Parents. I am also a Corporate Parent in my role as National Convener.

As an organisation, CHS doesn’t provide any services directly to children and young people. Although Children’s Panel members have direct contact with children and young people at children’s hearings, they are not Corporate Parents.

We are quite a new organisation, but from the beginning we have tried hard to encourage engagement and participation with children and young people. We have a participation framework which explains how we involve children and young people in our work. We have held lots of workshops with children and young people on a wide range of different subjects, using their feedback to inform policy and decision making. We involve young people in the design and delivery of training for new Children’s Panel members and gradually young people are becoming more involved in our panel member recruitment processes.

As Corporate Parents, we now have to produce a Corporate Parenting Plan. CHS has decided to include our Corporate Parenting activities into our annual Business Plan. We hope that by doing this corporate parenting will become part of the everyday work for all CHS staff. Our Business and Corporate Parenting Plan 2017/18 includes activities based on what children and young people have already told us through previous research and workshops.

To start with we are concentrating on CHS activity, but in the future we will work with the ASTs to help them to include Corporate Parenting duties into their AST plans.

For more information about the work we have already carried out, please see our update produced especially for young people ‘You Said We Did’.