What care experience means in Scotland, how the legal definitions work in practice, and what respectful and rights-based work actually requires.
In Scotland, the term care experienced is widely used to describe people who are, or have been, in the care of a local authority at any point in their lives. It is intentionally broader than a legal label because many people continue to live with the effects of care long after a formal status ends.
Care experience can include being looked after at home, foster care, kinship care, residential or secure care, and care before or after adoption. The term is used by many people because it acknowledges experience without reducing a person to a statutory category.
There is no single care journey. Some people have one short period of care. Others move through multiple placements over years. Some care arrangements are barely visible in official systems at all.
Care experience can be short or long, stable or disrupted. Two people in the same system can have entirely different experiences of it.
People may move between home, family care, foster care, residential care, or secure care — sometimes more than once.
ProjectChange does not define care experience for anyone. Identity belongs to the person, not the institution.
Support is provided while a child remains with their family, with the local authority still holding duties and oversight.
Children live with approved foster carers or relatives and close family friends when they cannot live with their parents.
Children may live in residential settings, enter secure care, or move into permanent new families. Their care experience still remains part of their story.
Scottish law uses specific terms that unlock duties, rights, and services. Legal categories decide access to entitlements. Personal identity shapes how someone feels, speaks, and belongs. The two are not the same thing.
A child is looked after by a local authority through specific legal routes, including accommodation under section 25 of the Children (Scotland) Act 1995, compulsory supervision orders, permanence orders, and transferred orders where a Scottish authority has responsibility.
A young person becomes a care leaver if they cease to be looked after on or after their 16th birthday. In Scotland, support extends up to age 26.
Care experienced is not itself a legal term. It is used widely because it is more inclusive and does not switch off at a particular age.
The local authority is legally responsible for care or support, whether the child is living at home or away from home.
If you were in care at 16 or older, support should continue into early adulthood, including advice, assistance, and planning.
It is a broad, person-led term for anyone who has been in care at any time. It is based on lived experience rather than paperwork alone.
These terms appear in: assessments, plans, and reviews · eligibility for continuing care and aftercare · data reporting and performance measures · advocacy, complaints, and legal rights processes.
Law and identity are doing different jobs. Law needs boundaries for duties and entitlements. Identity needs space for personal meaning. Care experience sits at the intersection of both, which is why people can fall through gaps even when the system appears clear on paper.
Leaving care is not the end of the journey. It often intersects with housing, education, health, employment, and relationships much earlier and more abruptly than for peers. That is part of why many people describe care experience as a lifelong identity rather than a temporary status.
Care experience can be a lifelong part of who someone is. It can shape how people understand family, safety, trust, home, and belonging. Some people carry pride and community from that journey. Others do not use the term at all. Both positions deserve respect.
Legal status is how the system allocates support. It draws boundaries around ages, dates, and orders. Those boundaries are necessary for policy, but they rarely capture the full reality of someone's life.
Care experience can be a memory, a system history, a way of understanding belonging, and a relationship with authority that lasts long after formal care ends.
Language can help or harm. Labels can open doors to support, but they can also carry stigma. Many care experienced people develop systems knowledge, adaptability, advocacy, and a sharp sense of how services actually feel from the inside. Those strengths should be recognised, not demanded.
Reducing someone to what happened to them rather than who they are and what they bring.
Making people prove a category before they can access respect or support.
Assuming risk or failure because of care experience instead of seeing potential.
Expecting people to retell painful histories in order to be believed or helped.
They may be talking about two different things: the legal framework, or the lived meaning of care experience. A professional can learn the law quickly. Understanding how it feels takes time, relationships, and trust.
What follows from understanding care experience depends on what you do. These are not abstract commitments. They are the practical differences this knowledge should make.
Budget for meaningful involvement rather than consultation theatre. Require trauma-aware and rights-based practice. Fund relationship-building, not only outputs.
Co-design with care experienced people from the start. Explain decisions and close the feedback loop. Remove rules that make people prove their identity repeatedly.
Ask how someone wants to be described. Make rights visible and easy to access. Do not assume a label explains a life.
If you work in policy, services, education, health, housing, or community roles, your actions shape whether care experienced people feel respected.
Ask how someone wants to be described. Do not use labels as shortcuts or stereotypes. Build enough trust before asking personal questions.
Explain entitlements in plain language. Check people understand what they can access. Do not hide behind policy when policy is producing harm.
Co-design with care experienced people. Pay people for expertise and time. Close the loop on what changed and why.
A 60 to 90 minute team session designed to help people move beyond legal terminology and turn that understanding into better day-to-day practice. Keep the discussion concrete and end with one rule, form, or process to change.
Build shared understanding, separate legal definitions from lived meaning, and identify practical changes the team can make now.
Use this page on screen or in print, plus sticky notes or a digital whiteboard, markers, and a timer.
10 minutes for framing, 40 minutes for activities, and 20 minutes for reflection and commitments.
List legal terms on one side and lived meanings on the other. Discuss where your service focuses and what is missing.
Bring one real form, script, or letter. Highlight words that feel cold, vague, or stigmatising. Rewrite them in plain language.
Pick one current policy or process. Ask where it ignores lived experience and record one change the team can make this month.
A 60 to 90 minute team session for moving beyond legal shorthand and into clearer, more respectful practice.
Neil is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and spent the majority of his career in manufacturing/Supply Chain spending the early part in large FMCG multi-national organisations, latterly working in SME’s in the light industrial sector including the last 17 years with a Malaysian Based Private Equity company.
Neil has been lucky enough to have lived and worked outside Scotland, having spent 10 years in Australia, 2 years in France , 5 years in Malaysia , 3 years in Luxembourg and finally Chicago.
He returned to Scotland in 2017 and is currently a Trustee of Scouts Scotland and Honorary Professor at the University of Dundee’s School of Business.