Solving our deepest problems

I attended the child protection summit held in Perth today at which two Cabinet Secretaries spoke as well as the new Minister for Childcare and Early Years Mark McDonald.

The summit had been called some months ago ahead of the trial of the murder of Liam Fee but the horrendous news which had emerged from that trial added focus to the discussions.

The Deputy First Minister - John Swinney - spoke about the need to constantly challenge ourselves to test whether we were doing the right thing. He voiced strong support for the Getting it Right framework principles and encouraged proper implementation alongside the constant need to reaffirm that we were not following processes just because that is always the way it has been done. The voice of the child at the centre; listening to and working with parents; and supporting early intervention and prevention were the key to promoting child wellbeing and ensuring child protection.

Some excellent speakers throughout the day. The Scots actor Paul Brannigan gave a powerful personal description of his childhood experiences and how no one came to offer support when he needed it leading to a period off the rails.

A common theme was a consensus that we now have the right legislative framework in place. We needed the collective leadership and confidence to press ahead and use it. A message resonating with the experience in England around child trafficking and child sexual exploitation.

Another strong message was to foster the equivalent of the airline industry and their Blackbox approach. Things go wrong and tragedies sadly will occur. But the culture in that industry is not one of blame but of learning from what went wrong and striving to prevent similar errors in future.

So much more came out reinforcing the need for services to integrate and, in effect, for communities not to whistleblow but to become good neighbours.

Melissa Van Dyke from CELCIS ended her presentation on improvement methodology with this animated slide of lots of activity, and a quote from Senge in1980: "we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved."

There was a strong sense of the fact that in Scotland we had an overview but still need to work on the key elements to bring about change.