Scottish Executive Public Consultation – Children’s Hearing Review – 25 May

The Scottish Executive is currently holding a consultation on the Children’s Hearings system. As part of this they have organised a series of regional seminars for the public. Several of our directors have attended these.

Peter Peacock, MSP, Minister for Education and Young People, opened the evening by setting the background to the reasons for the review. The present system was set up 33 years ago. It seeks to deal with children’s needs and deeds – i.e. those children who are in need outwith a Court setting, in a tribunal setting that is child-centred, but with the recognition that these children may also be offending, either at the current time or in the future. He outlined changes that have occurred over the last 40 years since publication of the Kilbrandon Report – mainly in the number of referrals to the Children’s Panel and the changes to care and protection issues generally. Other countries have adopted aspects of the Scottish system but no one has followed our system in its entirety. The system has never been evaluated as a whole and a review is therefore long overdue. Apparently, some areas of Scotland have difficulties in complying with the outcomes from Hearings. He emphasised that there is no intention to abolish or break up the Hearing system. In the recent debate in the Scottish Parliament Ministers had expressed a high regard for the current system but also recognised that it needs to be reviewed. His role at this Consultation was principally to listen to what the audience had to say about the current system. He also urged those present to write to the SE to let their views be known and to hold open meetings either in their organisations or their communities so that the public at large can contribute to this review.


There followed an opportunity for the audience to respond electronically to various questions and issues, and the technology provided immediate feedback and a breakdown of responses.

Boyd McAdam, Head of the Children’s Hearing Branch, Scottish Executive Education Department, then spoke about the Children’s Hearing system. He reminded the audience that the system is there to help children who are vulnerable because they are at risk. For the purposes of this system, a child can be anyone up to age 18. The child and their family /carers sit at the centre of the Hearing. The child must be at the centre of the system and all decisions made have to be in the child’s best interest - a welfare approach. The tribunal is made up of trained volunteers who are members of the public and decisions are made in front of the child, protecting the right of the child to be heard and involved in the Hearing. The most common decision of the hearing is a supervision requirement. This means that the child has to do certain things or people have to do certain things to work with the child. A supervision requirement can have any condition attached, which the Hearing thinks will help the child. The local authority must put the supervision requirement into effect.

He then referred to the Consultation and the various issues arising there from:

• Do we want to change the existing principles and objectives of the system?
• Do we want to keep the single system approach?
• Is there a need for more specialisation within the system?
• Look at outcomes – what is a good outcome?
• Look at the target group – are we getting the right children into the system?
• Should the Hearing have more influence over the child’s parents?
• If so, should child protection procedures and the Hearings system work together?
• Should we move to a system of Family Hearings? Changes in this area would develop the principle of balancing the various interests of the family members, and a wider range of decisions might be needed to meet the needs of each family.
• Should there be more links with the community in the current system?
• Should young people contribute or be involved in the Hearing system?

Following on from this presentation there was an opportunity for the audience to respond electronically to questions based around 2 fictitious examples of case-studies that might come before the Children’s Hearing system.

This was followed by Question Time – an opportunity for the audience to ask questions of the Minister and /or the panel of 4 representatives from Falkirk Children’s Panel, Falkirk Council Housing & Social Work Department, the Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration and Falkirk & Stirling Children’s Panel Advisory Committee.
Questions and matters raised included the following issues:

• The point was made that independent advocacy for young people is critical to the system working well, but no Legal Aid is currently granted to young people or their parents to attend a Hearing. Children’s Panel members stated that they were very happy for other people to come along to the Hearing and support the child, but if Legal Aid was available this might make the system more formal and more adversarial, perhaps to the detriment of the current Hearing system. The Chair of the Falkirk Children’s Panel said that he was making attempts to involve children and their views in the current review, at local meetings, and this would be one of the issues he wanted to ask them about.
• The Minister was asked if, following the review, more resources would be put into the system, both for Social Work departments implementing decisions of the Hearings and into the Hearings system itself. His response was that the purpose of the review is to find out what people want from the system and then the second stage would be to look at what resources might be available in the future.
• One member of the audience spoke about Panel members becoming disheartened because all their volunteering efforts fall on stony ground, so there is a need for Children’s Hearing Panels to be properly resourced and staffed.
• Is there a need for the Children’s Panels to build bridges with their communities, to report back and draw out messages to feed back to the communities? The point was made that there is a pilot exercise taking place in Falkirk at the current time that is feeding out information on the victims of youth crime, but it would be more difficult to feed back information on child protection issues, because of confidentiality.
• There were comments from primary teachers about the need to include them more in the Hearing system, since very often they have more detailed knowledge of a child’s behaviour and problems than other agencies.
• The comment was made that it is more difficult now to involve secondary school Guidance Teachers in the Hearing system, although they should automatically be there where the child attends a secondary school, as a result of the difficulties caused by the McCrone settlement in the area of guidance teachers and the new PT structure.
• One Panel member commented on the provisions of the Antisocial Behaviour etc. (Scotland) Bill and the effect that its provisions will have both on the Children’s Reporter and Children’s Hearings particularly in the area of requests for Parenting Orders. She saw this as an additional burden that is bound to take resources away from focussing solely on the best interests of children.

The evening ended with the audience being asked to respond electronically to further questions on the case-studies. We were then urged to take away the Consultation Pack and to let the review team have responses and views by 21 July 2004