Welcome to the June Edition of the Each and Every Child Newsletter!

Framing is all about making choices in how we present information. It is these choices that will change how people interpret the information you are aiming to communicate. Without knowing it, we all frame information we share, and some of this framing is working against what we are aiming to achieve through our work. This, in combination with how care experience is framed within media, culture and wider society, actively creates the stigma and discrimination that impacts on the lives of people with experience of care.

So, what can we do about this? We know from the Each and Every Child research in Scotland that the general public make challenging assumptions on what it means to have experience of care, and what it is actually like to be involved with the ‘care system’. However, we also know that by using the tried and tested framing recommendations, we can help the general public better understand all aspects of care experience – to activate the support across wider society that is needed to create real, sustainable change.

We all have power as communicators, and we are all members of the general public. By signing up to this newsletter, you are committed to being a part of this change, exploring how changing the way that you speak about care experience, can radically alter how the general public think, feel and act. This is not just about individual words that you are using but the fundamentals of how you are framing information.

You may have already attended an Introduction to Framing and Framing Care Experience session with us and have started to use the framing recommendations in your work and in your conversations. Here are some great, recent examples of framing in action –

The Who Cares? Scotland campaign for the Kiltwalks is an example of flexing the ‘Strengthening Community Ties’ frame, which has been tested to help people understand that we have a shared responsibility to make sure that each and every child has the support that they need.

Beth-Anne Logan has also used the Strengthening Community Ties frame in her blog for The Promise ahead of the local elections, as a call to action for local candidates –

In the ‘Tend Our Light’ report, Who Cares? Scotland, use the ‘Each and Every Child’ recommendation to speak about the need for mental health support for people with experience of care. This framing avoids the reader being taken to ‘damage done being damage done’, and draws in the solutions that are needed at the very beginning of the report –

Additional Framing Sessions

• Framing Causation, Statistics and Analysis – this sessions goes deeper into the techniques we can use to fully explain what we are speaking about, and to avoid the pitfalls of assumptions and misinterpretation of our messages.
• Framing Care Experience Creatively and Consistently – this session will explore how we can think about the recommendations in different ways, using images and langauge to shape our communication
• Framing Care Experience in Media and Supporting People to Tell Their Story – this session is targeted at those who are supporting people to tell their stories and those who are working with all aspects of media.