Hello and welcome to the CELCIS website
CELCIS, the Centre for Excellence for Children’s Care and Protection, is a leading improvement and innovation centre in Scotland. We improve children’s lives by supporting people and organisations to drive long-lasting change in the services they need, and the practices used by people responsible for their care.
Our vision is that children and young people in need of care and protection are always well supported to be all they hope to be.
The purpose of this website is to support that vision.
What you can find on our website
This section explains who we are, what we do, our history and our governance structure.
This section covers CELCIS's work and where we analyse and generate evidence. This includes work to support 'looked after' children (the legal term for children and young people who are in care), improving care experiences, and protecting children. It is also home for information about our current research projects, and the key areas we work in including permanence, throughcare and aftercare, education, non-recent (historical abuse, and data improvement.
News about CELCIS and other sector announcements can be found in this section.
This section provides resources on child protection and related areas, for those across Scotland, and further afield, who are working to ensure that the lives of babies, children and young people are protected from abuse, harm and neglect. It has sections on legislation and policy, child online safety and supporting refugees and their families. The section also offers information on key topics of concern, from Child Sexual Exploitation to neglect and emotional abuse. The topics section can be found here.
CELCIS produces webinars and online events. Many of these are recorded. Explore what is available here.
This section focuses on many topics affecting the lives of care experienced children, young people and their families – Corporate Parenting, The Children and Young People Act (Scotland), Physical restraint in residential care, Child Sexual Exploitation and Implementing corporate parent duties. You can also find feature stories on programmes, projects and perspectives from lived experience.
The Knowledge Bank holds hundreds of reports, briefings and other published resources about caring for children and young people in Scotland, the UK and around the world.
The CELCIS blog regularly publishes posts from people who are care experienced, who work in the sector, and who have an interest in supporting children and families. They share perspectives and offer diverse and opinions and views. Our blog section can be found here.
The Learn with Us section highlights the learning that we offer through online and in person activities with different ways to equip and inform anyone with an interest in responding to the needs of children, young people, their families and carers.
The COVID-19 health crisis tested the resilience of carers, parents, teachers and children and young people and their families. This section holds relevant information and guidance for those who work to support children and young people, and specific guidance and resources for those in the many professions across Scotland who work together to support and protect Scotland’s children, as well as blog posts and special features.
This annual event moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the webinars and resources since 2020 are available here.
For over twenty years CELCIS has published the SJRCC, which provides a rich forum for debate and dissemination about the topical issues in research, policy and practice about residential child care and all care experience, not only in Scotland, but around the world. All the issues are available on the website here.
How to find what you are looking for on the website
With so many resources, finding what you are looking for may seem a little daunting. The website has two main ways to search for things.
The 'Search the site' option (top right, on mobile the magnifying glass top right) will scan the entire website for content and will return resources that fulfil the whole phrase you have searched for. So, a search for corporate parenting will return dozens of resources from that CELCIS has published over the years. The term corporate parenting could appear in the text of the page, or the page or document could have been tagged: corporate parenting.
The 'Search the bank' option (on the right of the menu bar) refers to the Knowledge Bank and will limit the search to the resources in the Knowledge Bank and allows you to refine your search by author, resource type, year and topic.
Icons
When you look though the Knowledge Bank the resources that are returned will show at least one of these icons, to indicate what sort of resource it is.
Knowing the resource type can be particularly helpful when you are searching in the Knowledge Bank, as it can help you to refine your search.