By Henry Mathias, Strategic Lead for the Health and Social Care Standards

We recently published My Childminding Experience, a resource exploring and sharing good practice examples from across Scotland of how childminding benefits children and families. This is one of the first Care Inspectorate early years resource to highlight the new Health and Social Care Standards in a practical setting and it marks another milestone in our new direction of travel ahead of these standards being rolled out in April 2018.

The new standards put the focus of care on human rights and wellbeing through a series of person-led statements such as “I am…” or “I experience…”. They will help us ensure that anyone’s experience of care is the best it can be, meeting the needs, rights and choices of the individual.

Celebrating good care

At the heart of these standards are very clear expressions of how people experience care. Following this model, our new resources are translating the theory of good practice into practical examples of real-life experiences. So, instead of issuing any kind of technical guidance on how care should be delivered in the form of prescriptive inputs we are celebrating examples of good care experiences in order to promote innovation and improvement.

To produce My Childminding Experience, we worked alongside Scottish Childminding Association (SCMA) to enable childminding practitioners to tell their own stories focusing more on individual children and involving them and their families directly in narrating their experiences.

The case studies we selected for this resource show how individual children are experiencing good outcomes from attending a childminder with reference to the wellbeing indicators (Safe, Healthy, Achieving, Nurtured, Active, Respected, Responsible and Included) and the new standards.

Each story has been chosen because it primarily illustrates one of the wellbeing indicators. At the same time we recognise the indicators shouldn’t be viewed in isolation and a holistic approach to wellbeing should be developed, so we have shown when more than one indicator is illustrated. We also set out how the wellbeing indicators could generally be met for all children cared for by childminders.

Collaboration

Our collaboration with partners has been essential to source the best practice examples. My Childminding Experience was co-produced with SCMA, which follows similar successful collaborations including our work with Save the Children for Getting Ready to Read and input from Play Scotland for our production of My World Outdoors.

Next month we will publish Our Creative Journey, sharing innovative and inspiring experiences of expressive arts. This resource is being produced collaboratively with Creative Scotland, as well as voluntary organisations including the Care and Learning Alliance and Starcatchers. Although the focus will be on early learning and childcare, we are taking an integrated approach by including examples from services for looked after children and young people, social work and other non-registered care.

We want to share as many individual examples of good care as we can so that we we can promote innovation and improvement.

My Childminding Experience is a live resource and will be regularly updated on the Care Inspectorate’s hub website. Don’t forget, if you have an example of good practice in any care setting please submit your story so we can share the learning.

If you would like to learn more about the new Health and Social Care Standards visit the new Care Standards website.