"Far too many of our families struggle to survive from day to day, and far too many of our children are left to fail. In our prosperous and intelligent country, it is unacceptable that over 2,000 children are on child protection registers, over 60,000 cases are referred to Children's Panels annually, over 100,000 children are exposed to domestic abuse, over 11,000 are looked after by the state, and so very many leave school without the confidence, the knowledge, the skills or the ambition to be happy in adulthood. We should not be living in a country where young children suffer violence, neglect or failure because we fail them. Scotland can be better than this."

Jack McConnell's words when elected as Scottish Labour leader reflect not only the Executive's social justice target of "a Scotland where every child matters" but a prioritising of children which seems to be emerging as a theme of his leadership. Cathy Jamieson's appointment as Minister for Education and Children underlines the commitments in a report and action plan entitled "For Scotland's Children", which this Briefing Paper introduces.

The report draws on expertise from local government, NHS and the voluntary sector; it emerged from a series of visits to the range of places where services for children are delivered and consultations with service users and providers. Its key findings are that

• services and assessment of need can be poorly co-ordinated and often exclude vulnerable children;

• some children are effectively ‘invisible’ to services;
• there continue to be problems in sharing information;

• providers do not use their knowledge on the ground to act soon enough or predict the need for interventions.

The expert team found that those involved in providing services for children found problems with (a) fragmentation of services (b) lack of financial and staffing resources (c) policy driven by different funding streams and beset with too many new initiatives and (d) lack of accurate available information to help them plan and target services.

Some service users expressed concern about "an absence among staff of the most basic human courtesies – missed appointments, non-punctuality, poor communication" or "disdain for the service user – perceptions of arrogance, aloofness, hostility"; others drew attention to more structural circumstances, like children being cut off from services through de-registration, school exclusion and eviction, and service thresholds set so high that the most needy are not receiving the services they need. They highlighted major problems in the current service network, eg

• the need to repeat the same information to each agency;
• the absence of mutual awareness among service providers;
• services pulling in different directions.

Those who use children's services often suggested that it would be helpful to have one point of entry to services. "Their main wishes, though, were for services to be responsive to their needs, for service users themselves to be fully involved in discussions, and for responses to be made quickly."

Overall, the team found that "Scottish Executive policy is perceived to be insufficiently integrated, and (in particular) predicated/ hypothecated funding is seen as directing finance and attention into marginal project development rather than improving mainstream services and encouraging an integrated approach."