Each and Every Child aims to tell a compelling story about children and young people in the care system, transforming the current public narrative and mobilising people at all levels in the community to take action to improve their life chances.

We have been working with Frameworks Institute to create an evidence-based training toolkit for organisations to support reframing communications. Over an initial 3-year period from 2021 to 2023, the Each and Every Child initiative are collaborating with organisations within the care experience sector, as well anybody who has an interest in care, to embed the toolkit reframing recommendations across their work. We will also support individuals with care experience to speak about the care system and their experiences to use the reframing techniques to help create long lasting, positive change now, and in the future, for each and every child.

Aims

The main aims of Each and Every Child are to –

• shift public attitudes towards children, young people and their families who are in and around the care system to build improved support for progressive policy and practice implementation
• engage and inform professionals in the sectors working with children, young people and their families around their communications to strengthen their practice and impact
• support and equip care experienced people to be at the heart of efforts to develop more consistent and effective communication (informed by this robust research and experience of reframing techniques) in order to mobilise people in communities to take action to improve the life chances of children and young people

How are we doing this?

The Each and Every Child programme of work is focussed on three elements –

Early Adopters – It is recognised that the most powerful way to communicate the potential of reframing is for people to see it in action. The Each and Every Child team are working intensively with ‘Early Adopter’ organisations to embed reframing and the toolkit across their work, organisations including The Promise Scotland, Who Cares? Scotland & The Scottish Government. This will give us examples of reframing work that we will be able to share on this website to allow organisations and individuals to see how impactful reframing can be and to get an understanding of how this can be used in their own work.

Awareness Raising and Training – A key part of Each and Every Child’s work is to raise awareness of reframing and it’s potential to change the lives of people who have experience of care across Scotland. To do this, we have developed a suite of free reframing training sessions that will support organisations and individuals to understand and embed the reframing toolkit recommendations into their work.

The first session is called ‘An Introduction to Framing and Framing Care Experience’. If you would like to discuss arranging a session for your workplace, please contact us directly on enquiries@eachandeverychild.org.uk.

We have also developed further specialised sessions for teams which have specific roles in communicating about care and care experience. These include sessions for media and communications teams, policy teams and analytical teams. These will be delivered as open sessions and will be advertised on our website. If you are interested, please join our mailing list and we can alert you to upcoming training.

Voices of Experience – It is vital that people with lived experience of care are at the heart of the work to positively change the public narrative around the care system and the children and young people within it. A key priority of the Each and Every Child initiative will be to equip and empower people with lived experience to use the reframing techniques in telling their own stories. We are currently working with our Voices of Experience Reference Group to co-design this stream of work. More information is available on our Voices of Experience page

How We Got Here

Phase 1

In 2017, The Robertson Trust, Life Changes Trust and CELCIS collaborated with the FrameWorks Institute, internationally recognised experts in utilising communications to support social change. This collaboration helped to build an understanding of what the ‘experts’ (people with professional experience and lived experience) believe are the important themes around care experience. This research, Seeing and Shifting the Roots of Opinion (Executive Summary, Full Report), and Slipping Through the Cracks (Full Report), enabled us to better understand where there are communication challenges within wider society for those wishing to campaign and advocate for progressive approaches to supporting care experienced children and young people.   Three key commonly held assumptions within the public were highlighted –

• Care experienced children and young people are seen as “forever damaged” as a result of factors such as trauma and neglect
• The care system itself is viewed as dysfunctional and unable to provide the loving, nurturing care that children and young people need to thrive
• The public considers that children and young people generally end up in care due to poor parenting and bad choices

Phase 2

Phase 2 focused on testing reframing strategies to counteract these communication challenges, resulting in a series of evidence-based recommendations to support care experienced people and their supporters to tell a different story about the care system and the children and young people in it. From this work an easily accessible Toolkit, based around 8 key recommendations, has been produced to help people put the findings into practice