When people say something is their life’s work, I often wonder what they mean. A life’s work, or their life’s work. I ask because for over 15 years, the care system has been my life. First living in it, then working in it, but always, always, willing to make fun of it. Not the people. The system.
I say that as someone who was in care. And as someone who later co-chaired a workstream of the Independent Care Review — the process that produced The Promise, Scotland’s landmark 2020 commitment to transform the care system by 2030. And as the founder of ProjectChange, a charity built on the principle that care experienced people shouldn’t just be consulted about the system. They should be redesigning it.
I mention all of that not to establish credentials. I mention it because it matters to what comes next.
The Bill
On Thursday the Scottish Parliament will debate the Stage 3 amendments to the Children (Care, Care Experience and Services Planning) Bill.
Yes, catchy.
Stage 3 is the final parliamentary stage before a bill becomes law — the last real opportunity for MSPs to change things before the debate closes and the ink dries. And if we’re not careful, this one will inevitably end up being called the CCCSP Act 2026, which sounds less like legislation and more like the password someone sets on their Wi-Fi router.
The amendments on the table cover aftercare, accommodation, advocacy, continuing care (the legal right for young people to remain in a care placement beyond the age at which they’d otherwise have to leave), and corporate parenting (the shared responsibility of public bodies to act as a good parent to children in their care). Some of them will improve the system. Some will clarify duties. Some will tidy up legislation that frankly should have been tidied up about twenty years ago.
All of that matters.
But none of it answers the bigger question sitting quietly in the corner of this entire debate.
What if the problem isn’t that the rules are unfair?
What if the problem is that the rules themselves are wrong?
We Keep Fixing the Same System
For years, conversations about care reform have focused on fairness. Make the rules fairer. Improve the support. Extend the age limits. Clarify responsibilities.
All good things.
But if the system itself is built on the wrong assumptions, fairness alone doesn’t fix it. You just end up with a slightly kinder version of the same structure.
The care system we have today was largely designed to:
- manage risk
- administer services
- make decisions about children.
It was not designed to:
- sustain lifelong relationships
- support people across adulthood
- centre families rather than services.
That’s not a criticism of the people working in the system. Most of them are doing extraordinary work under very difficult circumstances. It’s a criticism of the design. And systems, once designed, have a habit of continuing to produce exactly the outcomes they were built for.
The Promise Didn’t Call for Tinkering
In 2020, after a three-year national conversation with thousands of care experienced people, the Independent Care Review published The Promise. I was part of that process from having my voice heard to being co-chair. And The Promise did not call for adjustments. It called for change.
Not marginal improvements. Not clearer guidance. Not slightly longer entitlements.
It called for a system redesigned around love, relationships, and the idea that every child in Scotland deserves to grow up feeling safe, loved, and respected. That was the language. Not the language of risk management or service administration. Love.
The Promise asked uncomfortable questions:
- Why does support fall away at arbitrary birthdays?
- Why are relationships often treated as secondary to placements?
- Why does the system respond to crises faster than it supports stability?
Those aren’t technical problems. They are design problems. And design problems don’t disappear just because we tidy up legislation.
What the Bill Actually Does
The bill being debated this week does contain important reforms. Stronger aftercare provisions. Improved advocacy rights. More clarity around support for care experienced people.
Those changes will matter to real people. They will make lives easier. And anyone who says they don’t matter hasn’t spent much time talking to people navigating the system.
But we should still be honest about what this legislation actually does.
It improves the existing system. It does not fundamentally redesign it.
That gap — between improvement and redesign — is not a minor technical quibble. It is the whole question.
This Isn’t About Blame
It’s very easy for discussions about reform to slide into blame. Blame the system. Blame the government. Blame local authorities. Blame social workers.
But the truth is much less dramatic and much more complicated. The people working inside the system often care deeply about the children and families they support. Many are doing remarkable work within structures that make their job harder than it needs to be.
The issue isn’t the people. It’s that the architecture they’re working inside was never designed for the outcomes we now expect from it.
The Next Phase of Reform
Thursday’s debate will pass. The bill will become law. Some good things will happen because of it.
But it won’t finish the job.
Because the real challenge isn’t improving the system we have. It’s imagining — and then building — the system we actually need. One that is:
- designed around relationships rather than services
- one where support doesn’t disappear because someone turns 18, or 21, or 26
- one that assumes families should be strengthened rather than replaced wherever possible
- built from the ground up around the lives people actually live — not the categories legislation finds convenient
A Call to Arms
This is normally the point where someone writing a piece like this pretends they have the answers.
I don’t. And anyone who tells you they do probably hasn’t spent enough time listening to the people who live inside this system.
But I do know this. If we want a different care system, we will have to build it. Not just improve it. Build it.
That means practitioners, carers, policymakers, families and care experienced people coming together to rethink the foundations of the system itself. It means refusing to accept that incremental improvement is the same thing as transformation.
And it means asking, again and again, until the answer changes:
What if the rules aren’t just unfair? What if the rules are wrong?
The debate on Thursday is part of that journey. But it’s not the end of it. Not even close.
* I’d like to thank my coauthors: my childhood trauma, caffeine, and sertraline.
