While we recruit members for the Professional Panel, our Project Officer Mary Campbell outlines how crucial the panel’s work will be for the Scottish workforce.

The coming incorporation of the UNCRC into Scots law is an important opportunity to ensure that we are a nation of children’s rights champions.

Together has just begun an exciting project commissioned by the Scottish Government to explore in depth the skills and knowledge required for different duty-bearers to fully implement children’s rights in Scotland. We will be working jointly with our amazing partners JustRight Scotland, JRS KnowHow, Children’s Parliament and the Observatory on Human Rights of Children in Wales

As part of this work, Together is organising a Professional Panel of service delivery staff and middle managers from all over Scotland, with applications open now, and accessible here. We are hoping to hear from professionals working in lots of different roles – in community planning, policing, the environment, housing, transport, social work or education.

The panel will offer their knowledge and experience about what resources and training materials would be useful to help ensure full realisation of children’s rights in their work. They will then co-design and improve the resources and training materials, which will be available to help all workers in Scotland become children’s rights champions.

The panel is not just for experts on children’s rights – it will include a range of people with different levels of expertise, so that the panel can develop and test the resources for all knowledge levels. It will include professionals who either work directly with children or in roles where their work affects children, recruited from all over Scotland and from many different fields.

The panel’s work will help ensure that professionals working across Scotland better understand the UNCRC and what it means for their profession. By having the panel co-design the tools and resources for implementation, they will help ensure its usefulness for a wide range of roles and individuals.

We know this is a challenging time for the Scottish workforce, and we are hoping to hear from the panel how best to make resources that will be as helpful as possible and unlock the opportunities to link UNCRC incorporation with other ongoing work.

The Skills and Knowledge framework will also be created with input from a Children and Families panel run by the Children’s Parliament, and the Professional Panel will benefit from their knowledge and experience. We know how crucial the lived experience of children and families is to ensuring we are designing the best resources possible.

Although the project will only last a little over a year, The Professional Panel will play a key role in achieving the vision of a Scotland where the rights of all children are respected, protected, and fulfilled by a public authority workforce who are confident in their use of a child rights approach.

Curious to find out further information regarding The Skills and Knowledge framework? Open up this link to our Skills and Knowledge framework page.