When the rain is blowing in your face…

Primary 4 children have written a special blog for CYCJ highlighting their takeaway messages from some of the amazing work that is happening at primary school level to help our children develop resilience and improve wellbeing.

As we know, universal services play a hugely important role in preventing offending through promoting improved wellbeing, resilience and inclusion of our most vulnerable children. A recent school concert by these Primary 4’s, where their inclusivity shone through, inspired the cover for Preventing Offending: Improving outcomes for children and young people.

Preventing Offending: Improving outcomes for children and young people was developed as part of the Scottish Government’s youth justice strategy Preventing offending: Getting it right for children and young people. The improvement approach is designed to support service providers, planners and practitioners in embedding preventative practice to assist in reducing offending involving children and young people. It is framed using the eight GIRFEC wellbeing outcomes (Safe, Healthy, Achieving, Nurtured, Active, Responsible, Respected and Included) and provides examples of evidence-based activities likely to contribute to achievement of the outcome, specifically for children and young people who are involved in, or at risk of, offending behaviour.

The improvement approach now also has an online wellbeing tool where individual children, their parents/carers, and their practitioners can record individually their view of the child’s current level of wellbeing across the eight outcomes. This information can be used to aid conversations about strengths, needs and intervention planning and enable outcomes to be compared over time. Whilst this approach is focused on those children involved in, or at risk of offending, at the heart of the approach is wellbeing, resilience and inclusivity.

The blog was created using imagery and direct quotes from the children. View it here.