Seòmar agus comataidhean

Mr Stewart has given you an answer, but I can give you the overall headcount for children’s social services.

That is a very fair and reasonable question to ask. Every MSP around the table will probably have had experience of constituency cases in which families and children have approached them with similar difficulties, concerns and worries. Those issues were certainly raised during the consultation and in the conversations that Mr Stewart has been having with children and young people, and I absolutely recognise those concerns.

Integration has worked well in some areas and provides some excellent services. I do not want to sound as though I am criticising the staff who work in those services—they have gone above and beyond, particularly in the past couple of years—but I think that this is evidence of why we need national consistency, minimum standards, a charter that sets out the rights that people can claim and those voices at the table when we co-design services. We need to ensure that there are no boundaries to accessing services and that we have consistency so that people who move from one local authority area to another can expect the same level of service.

Unfortunately, the things that those children and young people have experienced are not uncommon; they were certainly a driving force behind the independent review of adult social care, and they have lent a voice to the suggestion that children’s services be included.

I disagree. We are taking a very measured approach to whether children’s services should be included in the national care service. We are looking at the evidence, consulting stakeholders, consulting the people who are using care services at the moment and helping them to co-design what could be the children’s element of a national care service.

We will look not only at what the research tells us but at what stakeholders and the people involved in the service will tell us. It is important that we do not look at things in isolation.

Mr Stewart and I have talked about co-design, and it is vital that we listen to those who use care services and hear their opinions on what the service for children should look like. As I said in response to Ms Maguire, all of this evidence gathering and consultation will not go to waste if it turns out that children’s services are not to be included in the NCS. Instead, it will help us to drive forward change that is needed and wanted and that will best suit the needs of children and their families.

I hope that I answered some of that in my first response. We are ensuring that children and young people are involved in the co-design and that they are at the table.

I do not recognise what Mr Marra has said about young people being dropped into this. If children’s services are covered by the national care service, the services that will be provided will be subject to national standards and, through the charter that is being designed, children will be given rights that they currently do not have. There will be risk either way—there will be risk if we do not bring children’s services into the national care service, and there will be risk if we do. We have recognised that. Indeed, the task in the research that has been commissioned is to reach the best decision about where those services should be placed to best serve those children.

There will be changes, no matter whether children’s services are brought into a national care service, and we need to be prepared for them. The Government has been doing preparatory work for that through our engagement with children and young people and their families through the organisations that represent them, as well as through the research that we have commissioned on an evidence base for the best way to provide the services.

We touched on that at the very beginning of the meeting, when we spoke about why children’s services are being considered as part of the national care service. The independent review of adult social care looked only at social care for adults. When the public consultation on the national care service was concluded, it was clear that there were mixed responses to our questions about the inclusion of children’s services within the NCS, mostly because people felt that there was a lack of evidence in that respect, whereas there had already been a large inquiry into adult social care.

Therefore, as part of an evidence-gathering exercise, we commissioned CELCIS to carry out independent research on how we ensure that children, young people and their families get the help that they need when they need it. There are five strands to that research: first, a rapid evidence review of the published literature; secondly, a deep dive to examine approaches to the integration and delivery of children’s services; thirdly, a national scoping and mapping exercise to explore different models of integrated service delivery and any potential effects on a range of outcomes; fourthly, a national survey of the children’s services workforce and children’s services leaders to build on emerging findings; and fifthly, targeted focus groups and interviews with the workforce. Although the research will not give us a yes/no answer, it will give us an evidence base for where we are, what is working and how the workforce feels.

In parallel with that, we are working with children, young people, their families, organisations that represent them and other groups on what they feel that they need from a national care service. We are not going back to ask them lots of questions for which we already have lots of evidence from the review of care services, but we will look at all that evidence in the round and make a decision in principle on whether children’s services should or should not be in the national care service.

The research, which started in September, will run for a year to next September. The committee might be interested to know that the strands will report as they conclude, and I am more than happy to share those reports with the committee if it is interested in receiving them. Obviously, I am not asking you to make a decision on that today, but the offer is there to see those reports before the research itself is finally written up. The timeline for the research has been developed to ensure that we can make those decisions on the inclusion of children’s services in the NCS, and the two things will run in parallel prior to the operation of the NCS itself.

No, no—that is all right. I will come in to address the second part of Mr Rennie’s question.

In 2021, the overall headcount was 15,300, an increase of 6.7 per cent, and the largest two subsectors in children’s social services were residential care and fieldwork services. The latter accounts for 38 per cent of the total headcount and covers social work services. In 2021, 9,100 of the children’s social services workforce were employed by a public employer. I point out that not all social workers are employed by public employers; 24 per cent are employed by the voluntary sector and 16 per cent by the private sector. Of course, that does not necessarily mean that all those employees are social workers; some will be social care workers.

I assure Mr Marra that we are not waiting for a national care service to address that issue.

Part of the drive for the national care service is to have consistency right across the country, so that there is access to the care that is needed, when it is needed, regardless of the part of the country where someone lives. The services that you are talking about are currently commissioned by IJBs, local authorities or health boards. That commissioning would be done by the national care service.