children

Growing Up in Scotland (GUS) is a major longitudinal study launched in 2005 with the aim of tracking a group of children and their families from the early years, through childhood and beyond. Funded by the Scottish Government its main aim is to provide information to support policy-making, but it is also intended to be a broader resource that can be drawn on by academics, voluntary sector organisations and other interested parties.

Foster children have difficult early lives. Their needs are great, their educational performance can be poor, their childhoods in foster care and out of it are often unstable. In their adult lives they are at greater risk than others of a wide variety of difficulties. These 'facts' have led some to conclude that the state is not an adequate parent.

Briefing paper covering the issues and knowledge base around the subject of deliberate self-harm among children and young people.

Report presenting the findings of a review which was set up to assess whether services were adequately meeting the mental health needs of children and young people in Wales.

In particular, its aim was to discover how comprehensive, accessible and effective services were and whether robust mechanisms were in place for managing service delivery and improvement.

This review examines the available research about both the impact of problem drug use and interventions designed to reduce that impact. It starts by looking at definitions, the extent of problem drug use, and its impact across important aspects of children’s lives. The review is intended for social care workers involved with adults – using or affected by drugs – and their children and young relatives.

The Secretary of State for Scotland requested a review of arrangements for the supervision of sex offenders in the community. A team from Social Work Services Inspectorate (SWSI) carried out the review, with assistance from many organisations and individuals.

A Commitment to Protect is the report of their initial work from April to September 1997. It gives an overview of the arrangements and a broad assessment of their strengths and weaknesses, together with recommendations for improvement.

This is the Children's Hearings website which provides information on the unique system of care and justice for Scotland’s children and young people. The website also contains background information on Children's Panels and users can learn what actually happens in a Hearing.

This resource discusses the benefits of being listened to as a child and how what we learn about ourselves from the adults closest to us depends on the quality of our experience with them. This in turn affects how our self-esteem and sense of identity develops.

The focus of this draft strategy is on identifying training and development activity required to support improvement in services to women and children who are experiencing domestic abuse, and to men who use violence.

It is based on increasing capacity to deliver training and providing national co-ordination of training on domestic abuse. This training strategy is set out in 6 sections: context, aims of the training strategy; requirements of the training strategy; taking the strategy forward; capacity building; and an action plan.

This research project was commissioned by the Scottish Executive to find out how advocacy for children in the Children’s Hearings System compares with arrangements in other UK systems of child welfare and youth justice and those internationally, and what children and young people and the professionals who work with them think about advocacy arrangements in the Children’s Hearings System and how these can be improved.