Scottish Election 2026 Blogs - CYCJ
Professor Fiona Dyer, Director of CYCJ, sets out the areas they are working on, and what changes are needed from the next Scottish Government.
At CYCJ, we help make Scotland’s approach to children and young people rights-respecting, contributing to safer communities and better outcomes for children, young people and families.
Threaded through our work since 2020 has been keeping the promise. We have done a lot to influence change in the areas outlined in Plan 24-30 under Justice (Scaffolding). But there is still so much more to do.
We were heavily involved in the landmark Children (Care and Justice) (Scotland) Act 2024, which removed all children from Young Offenders Institutions (YOI). We are working on the delivery of other key provisions in the Act, including allowing 16 and 17 year olds access to the Children’s Hearings System and enabling a young person to remain in secure care past their 18th birthday, instead of immediately transferring to a YOI.
We also secured Promise Partnership funding for key areas of work. This included Reimagining Justice, which placed children and young people’s views at the heart of services. To help practitioners, children and young people, and families to co-create safe, appropriate strategies that respond to individual needs and contexts across home, school, and community settings, we have developed the Developmental Wellbeing Approach. This will initially be embedded in ten different local authority areas across Scotland.
We worked with Young Scot to produce the Promise Package. Designed for young people with experience of the care or justice system, it provides a range of supports for navigating key transitions. We also supported young people in HMP YOI Polmont to take a dragon's den approach for the support they would like to receive whilst in custody.
Alternatives to police custody are a current area of our work. Our research shows that police custody can often be the most traumatic part of a child’s journey through the justice system. Instead we believe they should be taken to a place of safety with a supportive, trauma-informed environment, recognising that offending behaviour in children and young people is often rooted in unmet needs, trauma and adversity. We support any necessary legislative change to make this happen and we are working collectively to deliver this on the ground.
In 2024 we published our Reimagining Secure Care Report. This meets the promise’s recommendations that children remain in their communities and, when a child does need to be deprived of their liberty, this should be in a small, trauma informed environment. We will continue to work with partners to make this report a reality.
We are also developing different eLearning resources to support practitioners working with children in the care system, who we know are often criminalised. The resources include supporting young people who are displaying distressed behaviours, reducing unnecessary contact with the police, online harm and exploitation.
There are many other changes we want to see but central to all of this is the Age of Criminal Responsibility (ACR). CYCJ has long been involved in discussions, including through my role on the steering group and chair of the data and research group. The group’s robust and detailed report (December 2024) calls to raise the ACR to at least 14 with greater preparatory work to allow a future rise to 16. This would be pivotal, bringing Scotland’s ACR more in line with the most progressive nations, and creating a far more trauma-informed, rights-respecting system.
Professor Fiona Dyer, Director of CYCJ.
CYCJ are one of 35 organisations to join us in signing a joint letter to Scotland political parties, calling for commitment to the promise to 2030. See the letter here.