This page is for social workers and legal professionals to learn more about how to get involved in CELCIS's research on voluntary care arrangements in Scotland. Thank you for your interest!
About this research
We are interested in finding out more about voluntary care arrangements, created using Section 25 (s.25) of the Children (Scotland) Act 1995. Section 25 allows an arrangement in which parents agree to the local authority accommodating and caring for their child away from the family home. An initial exploration of voluntary care arrangements in Scotland by CELCIS in 2020 indicated that there is a lot of variation on how they are used across Scotland.
We are interested in speaking with social workers and legal professionals who have been involved in voluntary care arrangements. This includes:
- Children and families social workers
- Social work managers
- Legal professionals
Everything that we learn from the study will be used by CELCIS and others to help ensure children and families receive the best care possible.
If you have experience of a voluntary care arrangement as a social worker or legal professional, we'd like to invite you to take part
We are inviting children and families social workers to take part in a focus group, and social work managers and legal professionals to take part in one-to-one interviews with us.
The focus groups will take place in-person and will last approximately 90 minutes to allow for group discussion. One-to-one interviews will take place either in-person or online and will last approximately 45 minutes.
Supporting children and young people to make their voices heard
We would like all professionals to support us in making sure that the voices of children and young people can be heard in this project.
If a child aged 8-15 or young person aged 16-25 has told you that they are interested in taking part in the project, you can find more detailed information for children and young people's involvement, and participation information for their carers, on the information sheets below.
If you know a child or young person who has been cared for under a voluntary care arrangement who you think might be interested in talking to us for this project, we would be grateful if you could let them know about it. You can find more detailed information for children and young people's involvement, and participation information for their carers, on the information sheets below.
Download more information for children aged 8-15
Download more information for young people aged 16-25
Download more information for caregivers
Contact us
If you have any questions, or if you’d like to let us know that you want to take part, you can phone or send a text or WhatsApp message to Robert in our team on 07967339359, or you can email Robert and Brandi Lee at: celcis.vca@strath.ac.uk.
Download more information for legal professionals
Download more information for social workers
Your rights in taking part
If you decide to take part it is important to know that:
- It is up to you whether you want to take part.
- If you start talking to us and then you decide not to take part, that’s OK, and this won’t affect anything.
- If you decide to take part in the project, you can stop talking to us any time you want to. If you want to stop in the middle of the conversation, we will ask you if you want us to use what you have already told us or if you want us to get rid of our notes and not use anything you have said.
- If you decide that you don’t want to take part in the project after our conversation, that’s OK. We will listen to you and will not use anything you told us and get rid of the information about you. We can stop using what you told us at any time up until we start writing up what we have found from talking to everybody in the project.
- Your involvement in the study will be kept confidential. We will not share what you say to us with anyone except the researchers. You will have the chance to choose a name to keep in our notes for you, and we will ask you which pronoun (he, she, they, etc) you prefer to use. We will use this chosen name and pronoun if we use something you said in what we write.
- We won’t use anything you’ve shared with us for any reason other than for the project: what we write about it and what we say about it to share with other people what we learned about making things better for children and families.
- What you say will not be attributed to you and will remain anonymous unless something you say indicates that you or someone else are at risk of harm. We will share that information with the relevant authorities.
- You have the right to ask us about and see what information we have about you.
More information about your rights in taking part are available in the information sheet for you.
Need to speak to someone?
Please consider if a listening and helping service might be helpful for talking through how you are feeling and anything that you are find particularly hard in your life at the moment.
Breathing Space, a free, confidential, phone and webchat service is available for anyone in Scotland over the age of 16 to listen, offer advice, and provide information to them. Visit www.breathingspace.scot anytime, or phone 0800 83 85 87 Monday-Thursday 6pm - 2am, and Friday-Monday 6pm - 6am.
