Framing Report Writing Guidance
Framing Report Writing Guidance: Read Here
We recognise that to build strong, vibrant, equitable communities we need to ensure that each and every child is loved, nurtured and supported to thrive. As a workforce we need to take a rights- based, trauma informed approach and recognise that relationships need a foundation of trust and mutual respect to improve the lives of our children, young people and families.
We all understand and recognise that the language that is used throughout the “care journey” plays a crucial role in either enabling relationships or acting as a barrier. This is true for direct one-to-one interactions with children, young people and families as well as the language that is used in written reports, external communications and in meetings.
In our aspirations to #Keep the Promise and ensuring we are Getting it Right for Every Child, there is a desire and motivation to change the way we write, instead of focusing on the struggles of children and families, there is a shift to focus more on families’ strengths, needs and hopes for the future and how these can be supported, nurtured and built on. When we write with a strengths-based focus, working alongside children and families with an emphasis on what all children, young people and families need to thrive, we have clarity in care planning with a tone of possibility, empowerment and achievable outcomes
We know that stigma can impact on children and young people throughout their lives, and this stigma is often reproduced through the language used to describe them and their circumstances as evidenced in The Promise and reflected in the What Matters: Plan 24-30.
Each and Every Child have been sharing research and robustly tested framing recommendations since May 2021, initially as a way to challenge stigma and create a new narrative around care experience and the care system. However as we developed our training with our colleagues with lived and learned experience we became increasingly aware of how the framing recommendations can impact positively on our own practice, in particular how we write about our children, young people and families.
Our colleagues who form our Voices of Experience Reference Group shared their own experiences; the impact of accessing records, the wider experiences they had heard of, their professional experience of hearing language in meetings and reading countless reports. At the same time we were also delivering online and in person sessions sharing the toolkit to the wider workforce including frontline staff. What we were inspired by was, amid exceptionally challenging times, the commitment and motivation to listen, to learn, to share and work together to make change. We heard of the challenges of the practical implementation of changing how we write but also how people were taking on that challenge to explore new ways of writing and, most importantly, working in partnership with children and young people from their own communities inform how reports are written.
This led us to apply for additional funding through the Promise Partnership to explore how we could use our robust research to produce a practical guide to support language work across the country.
We wanted to start by looking at who was already working in this area, and what we could learn from their work. In partnership with Our Hearings, Our Voice, and National Leadership Network, we brought together young people from across the country who were already working on language to take part in our language residential to share their ideas and solutions to improving our “language of care” June 2024 to bring together all the participants from the residential, with the workforce and policy makers to share their ideas and together find ways to make changes.
We also formed a Report Writing Steering Group that consisted of representative from local authorities, third sector, CELCIS, Social Work Scotland, The Care Inspectorate and of course, people who had experience of care, who acted as critical friends through the process of producing the guidance.
The framing recommendations are not just about changing the words we use but also about challenging the way we think, enabling us to understand at a deeper level the challenges facing our children, young people and families, and how we are addressing unmet needs to support their healthy development into the future. They enable us to focus on the child, young person and family to build holistic support – and to show how our care works alongside other aspects of the scaffolding of support that is there to ensure their needs are met. They ensure our children, young people and families are not further stigmatised or discriminated against through the language that is used in reports, records or life story work
Everyone has a right to know their story, to have memories that reflect their whole selves and not just the challenges they have faced. It is how we make sense of the world and our place in it. This will help a person potentially reading their records in the future to understand why certain things may have happened in their life. When people read the information that has been recorded about them and their experiences, they should be able to get a sense of who they were and who they are, an authentic record of their life and personality, not just a professional view of their life full of professional terminology and acronyms
We are working in really challenging times, with the cost of living crisis, the rising tide of poverty and an increasingly stretched workforce impacting on children, young people and families. When we add in the divisive narratives that we are experiencing at a local, national and international level, we can at times feel overwhelmed and powerless. But we are not powerless. We have our shared values, our compassion, our knowledge.
You are not alone, we are a movement for change that continues to listen and walk alongside our families. Each of us has the power of our voice, the power to tell a different story that changes how we think, how we feel and the actions we take. Together, we can write with love, compassion and action, together we can create a “care system” that makes Scotland the best place in the world for our children and young people to grow up.
Framing Report Writing Guidance: Read Here
Each and Every Child never work in isolation but are part of a wider community, where co-production and collaboration are key to all the work we do. We are grateful for the knowledge, expertise, support of our wider peer network and all the organisations and individuals who share their learning and experiences to shape our work.