The Promise remains shameful and a disgrace

Common Weal has consistently pointed to a single policy in the Scottish Government's agenda which has not only failed egregiously and with awful consequences but which is an emblem of why so much policy has failed over the last ten years. It is The Promise, and an Audit Scotland report on it has placed its failure back in the news agenda.

The reason it is failing is the reasons we have been highlighting it – it is a fundamentally wrong-headed approach to a crucial policy which was driven not by an understanding of the problem but by political ego and the vanity of leadership.

We are glad that there is now proper scrutiny of how poorly this policy has been designed and implemented but we remained disappointed that this has not come with more censure on why it was designed and implemented badly. We believe there should be a lot more scrutiny of how this mess was made and not just on the current state of the mess.

A quick recap. In 2016 the then First Minister stood at her party conference and made a speech about children in care. It is important to this story to also recall that a group of care-experienced children were bussed to the venue and invited to stand up and wave red hearts at the First Minister when prompted.

They were then 'promised' by the First Minister that they would be 'loved'. That was the basis of the entire policy. It was a policy that had three main design features. First, it was a PR stunt personalised around a particular First Minister. Second, it was based on a self-help mantra which belonged on a fridge magnet more than in a policy proposal.

And third, no actual policy learning or detail was examined or absorbed prior to the announcement. It was an aspiration stated without an understanding of the policy implications involved. Indeed, it turns out it is an aspiration entirely divorced from the policy implications involved.

This all constitutes one of the worst pieces of policy-making in the devolution era. At the heart of the failure is one thing – the concept of 'love' being the route to good care is policy-illiterate and should have been challenged.

Care, and particularly the care of young people, is a very major global discipline and it has generated decades of rigorous academic study and publication. There are consistent, non-controversial findings in this body of work and they represent an overwhelming consensus among care experts.

There is one consensus (or rather complete absence of one) which is crucial here: good care has nothing to do with 'love'. Love is an intangible quality which cannot be codified or measured. It is entirely possible to love your children and still be a very bad carer, and it is very possible to be a very good carer without any 'love' for the children involved.

Care is not about how you feel about the children you are caring for, it is about how you care for them. The crucial concept in care is not love but attachment. In early years, what enables the successful neurological and emotional development of children is consistent adult presence, adults who are reliably there to help and support and guide children.

The First Minister can demand that all children can be 'loved' in an administrative system all she wants, it can't be achieved, it wouldn't help even if it could and it completely distracts from the key policy goal which actually can deliver good outcomes.

Everything else is a consequent failure of this fundamental hubris. There was no challenge to this wrong-headed approach and so instead an entire top-heavy bureaucracy was created primarily to try and backfill a bad idea with some cogent action. But since the policy was wrong in conception, all that has happened is that more and more effort has gone in to 'painting the roses red'.

It is therefore worth decoding the key phrases in the Audit Scotland report. The structures of the Promise are “complex” – because they were designed to make an incoherent policy sound coherent and have become a bonanza for consultants and officials.

Accountability remains “challenging” – because when you backfill a vacuous policy intent with consultants and managers you get sprawling, self-serving empires of bureaucracy.

And actions taken to address problems are “insufficient” – because in the absence of credible, workable policies these lucrative bureaucratic empires will simply absorb more and more resource in more and more rounds of consultation over a policy which frontline staff do not believe in because it won't work.

This process would be a national disgrace if it applied to potholes or bin collection. Since it applies to the wellbeing of the most vulnerable children in this country it is disgraceful and shameful.

To find out more about the extent of why this policy was destined to fail from the beginning, read our detailed report Empty Promise. And to find out what an early years care system driven by policy experts who know what they're talking about would look like read the major policy proposal Child Care or Caring About Children.