Children and Young People programme roundup 2025

The programme continues to raise awareness of how Getting It Right For Every Child (GIRFEC) can support children and their families.

Our programme is committed to ensuring disabled children and young people, those with long term conditions, their families, their carers, and the third sector organisations who support them have increased capacity to influence the local implementation of GIRFEC.

This year, we continued to raise awareness of GIRFEC by delivering our CPD-accredited Getting to know GIRFEC training sessions to practitioners and professionals across Scotland. We delivered sessions to staff in statutory services and to third sector partners, reflecting the cross-sector collaborative approach that underpins the framework. Feedback tells us that training continues to provide a welcome protected space to explore how GIRFEC approaches and principles can be applied in practice.

We were delighted to launch our GIRFEC Insights report in the spring, a snapshot of GIRFEC in practice, drawn from learning generated at our Regional Gathering Insights events. GIRFEC Insights highlighted examples of best practice across Scotland and offered recommendations for how we can continue to build on GIRFEC at the local, regional, and national levels, including calls for more joined-up working and increased national resources. Looking to next year, we are keen to continue this momentum with our partners and explore how to translate these recommendations into action.

We continued to share learning generated from delivery of our GIRFEC training sessions and GIRFEC Insights report with the Scottish Government and our GIRFEC Advisory Group, who have provided valuable steer for the Children and Young People programme.

Our Children and Young People Community of Practice grew throughout 2025. We created space for members to connect regularly by launching our Network and Chat series. These informal meetings created consistent opportunities for members to share their work, build networks and discover development opportunities. We hosted sessions on creative arts and their different disciplines as tools to empower children and young people, and on best practice in supporting children and young people on waiting lists to access services. We’ll continue to develop our programme of activity based on feedback from our CoP members and seek creative and engaging ways to bring professionals and volunteers together to add value and enhance practice.

Looking forward to 2026, we’ll seek to engage with new groups and communities to promote that everyone has a role in delivering GIRFEC and explore new opportunities to improve outcomes for children and young people.

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