Children's views about Bairns Hoose

To listen in a meaningful way, we designed and facilitated 8 creative workshops across Scotland to explore in the context of a Bairns Hoose what matters to children, young people and their families.

The workshop that we designed and facilitated focused on key rights-based themes:

• Right place and space
• Right people and support
• Right to be heard
• Right information

In the creative workshops, we invited families to share their ideas, views, feedback and wishes on what a Bairns Hoose should look like, feel like, who would work there, and how children’s human rights should be upheld. To do this, at each session we used a 3D cardboard house, which symbolised the Bairns Hoose and on which the children, young people and families could describe their thoughts.

After each session we reflected on the key themes that emerged from the conversations. These were included in a feedback newsletter, which was shared back to the service, families and with the Bairns Hoose leadership team.

You can read the feedback newsletters below.

Sometimes young people are keen to share their story in a structured way to help influence change and improvement. This can also be a supportive and empowering aspect of their recovery journey.

We have recently worked with two young people to help facilitate them to express their experiences and voices in a way that is based on their own strengths and interests.

One young person, supported by our Bairns Hoose children and family recovery support team, wanted to share her experience of the justice system, to inform change and bring awareness of her experience. The young person wanted to put her views into a song, but she wanted someone else to take her core feelings, turn them into lyrics and sing the song. The young person identified the core themes of her story, which were feeling strong, brave, wanting people to listen to her, and wanting to be in a place that was safe and warm and felt like home.

From this point the young person made the decision to step out of the next phase of the song’s development and another young person became involved, who developed the themes into profound and deeply moving lyrics. A third person then became involved, and these two young people formed a duo. They decided to call themselves Fusion, as they felt this reflected the three young people involved being a fusion of talent. Fusion worked hard to develop Sophie’s Song and, thanks to funding from People’s Postcode Lottery, were able to have the song professionally recorded at Chem19 Recording studio.

To celebrate the creativity and empathy towards Sophie’s experience of the justice system, Fusion was nominated for the Arts Award at the 2022 Young Scot Awards, which they went on to win. Read more about Fusion’s award.

We have been working alongside another young person who also wanted to raise awareness of her experiences of the justice process. She has been identifying which parts of her story she would like to share to illustrate the importance of change for children and young people. She has written a poem to share her experience of the Joint Investigative Interview process and awaiting court. The young person hopes that her poem will be shared with police officers, social workers, and court officials, to highlight the struggles and challenges that she faced at this time. You can listen to a recording of her poem below and see the poem in full below the recording.