Big Brother Scotland

[Sheila Struthers]

Originally Posted by Earthtracer

I think we need to have another word with Kenneth Roy about these developments.

I did send him the link to the mental health/well-being indicators event Earthtracer. IMHO, the Scottish Review coverage delayed things significantly

I would urge anyone who wants to better understand how the Scottish system works to watch the presentations.

Girfec is a very important part of this data-gobbling, number-crunching,outcome-engineering system but this is not just about children and not just of concern to Scots.

Scotland is blazing a trail for the rest of the World in many respects. I just wish I shared or Dear Leader's pride...

This innovation [Scottish Futures Trust] benefits Scotland – which can respond to specific Scottish problems and circumstances. But it also benefits the rest of the UK, and potentially the wider world, by providing a precedent for policies which other countries can then either adopt or not.

An independent Scotland could be a beacon for progressive opinion south of the border and further afield – addressing policy challenges in ways which reflect the universal values of fairness – and are capable of being considered, adapted and implemented according to the specific circumstances and wishes within the other jurisdictions of these islands and beyond.

Alex Salmond last week.

[Earthtracer]

Good on you, Sheila. I read Alex Salmond's Hugo Young speech and then went to look at the mental health link. About 3.5 seconds of Tam the Bam put me right off listening to any more of the speakers; perhaps a mistake? How could this idiot ever have been appointed CC for S? Presumably someone wanted a placeman; he certainly wasn't appointed for his brains and insight!

[Sheila Struthers]

Originally Posted by Earthtracer

Good on you, Sheila. I read Alex Salmond's Hugo Young speech and then went to look at the mental health link. About 3.5 seconds of Tam the Bam put me right off listening to any more of the speakers; perhaps a mistake?

It is worth persevering with as it is the best illustration yet of how our brave new Scottish system of government(an export not many of us are aware of)
depends on vast amounts of data being gathered at household and individual level.

The Girfec presentation is more interesting for what it doesn't mention: eCare.

We started with Highland, looking at how
professionals, how systems needed to change to put the child right at the centre, to
hear their voice, to work out how you streamlined planning processes, to make sure
that the child remained the focus and that outcomes were improved.

And we did that by working with the Highlands’ Community Planning Partnership
effectively, so the Chief Officers’ Group, that brought together health education,
police, the children’s reporter and the third sector.

[SLIDE:
Core components
 Focus on improving outcomes.

 Integral role for children, young people and families.

 Making the most of universal services.

 A common approach to gaining consent and to sharing information where
appropriate.

 A coordinated and unified approach to identifying concerns, actions and
outcomes.

 Streamlined planning processes that lead to efficient provision for children.

 A confident and competent workforce.

 A lead professional to co-ordinate where necessary.

 The capacity to share demographic, assessment, planning and outcome
information.


Scottish Government website - Getting it Right

From that work we developed ten core components, they’re up there on the screen
I’m not going to go through them all, but what we’re looking to see happening on the
ground is people working in a way that delivers on those ten core components and
reflects the values and principles operating and to Getting it Right. Now that’s very
high level and vague so how do we translate that into something that is meaningful in
practice, what are we looking to see?

Whereas the 2010 guide to Girfec says this:

The Getting it right for every child Core Components

1.A focus on improving outcomes for children, young people and their families based on a shared understanding of well-being

2. A common approach to gaining consent and to sharing information where appropriate

3. An integral role for children, young people and families in assessment, planning and intervention

4. A co-ordinated and unified approach to identifying concerns, assessing needs, agreeing actions and outcomes, based on the Well-being Indicators

5.Streamlined planning, assessment and decision-making processes that lead to the right help at the right time

6.Consistent high standards of co-operation, joint working and communication where more than one agency needs to be involved, locally and across Scotland

7.A Lead Professional to co-ordinate and monitor inter-agency activity where necessary

8.Maximising the skilled workforce within universal services to address needs and risks at the earliest possible time

9.A confident and competent workforce across all services for children, young people and their families

10.The capacity to share demographic, assessment, and planning information electronically, within and across agency boundaries, through the national eCare programme where appropriate.

[Elaine Kirk]

.
And MidLothians run-in with the information commissioner will no doubt go some way to staying the hand of the girfecers .
.
Link from the BBC
.

Midlothian Council has been fined £140,000 for sending sensitive personal data about children and their carers to the wrong people.

It is the first Scottish organisation to be served with such a penalty by the Information Commissioner's Office.

The local authority made errors in sending out data on five occasions.

In one case, personal papers about a child and its mother were read by the woman and not her former partner who they were intended for.

The woman made a complaint to her social worker.

Another incident involved documents relating to the status of a foster carer.

They were sent to seven healthcare professionals, none of whom had any reason to see the information.

'Serious upset'
The breaches happened between January and June last year.

The Information Commissioner's Office said its investigation found that all five breaches could have been avoided if the council had put adequate data protection policies, training and checks in place.

Assistant commissioner for Scotland, Ken Macdonald, said: "Information about children's care, as well as details about their health and wellbeing, is some of the most sensitive information a local authority holds.

"It is of vital importance that this information is protected and that robust policies are followed before it is disclosed.

"The serious upset that these breaches would have caused to the children's families is obvious and it is extremely concerning that this happened five times in as many months."

[Earthtracer]

You beat me to it, Elaine!
Very good to see thgat this has been detected and acted upon. One hopes it might cause others to brass up a bit - no, a lot!
Girfec! Girfec! Girfec!

[Sheila Struthers]

What's the betting they use this to "sell" eCare?

Their last "marketing" (the "expert" group and their privacy principles) ploy fell rather flat following the Scottish Review coverage ....

http://www.scottishreview.net/KRoy69.shtml

On Christmas Eve, probably the best day of the year for burying news, the Scottish government released its long-awaited 'privacy principles'. The verdict in the Sheridan trial swamped everything else – and then the world closed down for a fortnight. Well, it will not surprise you to learn that the privacy principles received no attention.
But the world has re-opened and it is time to impart the good news.
An 'expert group' – whose members included one Jerry Fishenden of Microsoft UK as well as 'prominent lawyers and academics' – has recommended that 'large, centralised databases of people's personal information' should be avoided and that, instead, data should be kept in 'purpose-specific stores' only to be drawn together 'if there is a business need to do so'. What a business need is, or a purpose-specific store for that matter, I am unqualified to say.
And yet – having looked at the good news, the language employed, the assurances given such as they are – SR has come to the reluctant conclusion that the news isn't good after all.

And yes, Ken MacDonald was on the expert group and he is also the chappie who put eCare forward for an EU prize...

[Elaine Kirk]

.
I would have though it would make them cautious about e-care, so easy to access/disperse info without the proper permissions. I just wonder how many peoples details had been dispersed before some savvy folk called a halt as most will not realise that their info cannot be shared around without their permission or that they can refuse permission.

[JaneP]

or remove permission?

Regards
Jane

[Sheila Struthers]

I posted these 2001 articles here before but the links seem to have gone dead so here they are in full...my bold...


At last Holyrood is learning how to think outside the box

Sunday Herald, The, Apr 8, 2001 | by Douglas Fraser


Civil servants have long been the guardians of ideas on how to run the country. Now MSPs are looking beyond them for policy solutions. Political Editor Douglas Fraser reports on the rise and fall of the Scottish think tank

PROGRESS for Scotland's health means five pieces of fresh fruit a day, semi-skimmed milk, less frying and taking the binge out of the nation's drink habit. But progress, if you live in a deprived community, is to have a drive-thru McDonald's built in the neighbourhood. Life must be on the up, or so it seems, if such a mega- multi-national is flattering you with a place on its globalised map.

This is one of the challenges facing Scotland's leading think tank, the Scottish Council Foundation. Graham Leicester, its director, reckons you can spend two hours on the internet and find plenty of good ideas. The problem is figuring out which are appropriate to the problem you've identified, then finding a way to implement them. What looks good to the do-gooders does not always cut it with those whose lives are to be affected.

Leicester inhabits the world of the policy wonk, the person who provides the meat of politics, while staying out of the soap opera of characters which dominate the way politics is often perceived through the media. His is a rare species in Scotland, partly because the nation's blethering classes blethered so long about home rule that they omitted to think through what policies a Scottish parliament should implement.

The other reason, according to Leicester, is that if this was the field you worked in, London beckoned. It has the resources and the critical mass of wonkery for an array of think tanks, across policy on economic, social, international and development issues. They came into their own with the Thatcher government, providing the free market hot-houses in which radical ideas could flourish for transplanting into ministerial minds. Margaret Thatcher relied on right-wing wonks to keep renewing the reforming zeal of the Tories when her ministers were beginning to flag - one of those ideas, of course, being the poll tax, courtesy of the Adam Smith Institute.

Labour learned the lesson. Trade unions backed the founding of the Institute of Public Policy Research 12 years ago, and Demos later came along to think outside the box. Both now have a revolving door relationship with Downing Street, as Tony Blair and his policy unit follow Thatcher's lead, by looking outside his party, ministerial ranks and the civil service for ideas to keep government fresh.

But in Scotland, ideas about how to run the country have long been the preserve of civil servants in St Andrew's House. Look at the references at the back of their own publications, and you find civil servants relying on their previous work to inform the latest policy fixes, whereas in Whitehall, there are references to think tanks and research from independent trusts. Scottish universities tended to provide much of the brain power for the analysis, but not the policy solutions.

While Graham Leicester comes from a blue chip background as a Foreign Office official, his research director, James McCormick, has come back to his Scottish roots via the IPPR, with the intention of building a UK think tank based in Scotland. They are not the only ones to do so. The Centre for Scottish Public Policy had a left-wing pedigree as the former John Wheatley Centre, but is now reduced to acting as a conference organiser. The Institute of Contemporary Scotland is the brainchild of publisher and journalist Kenneth Roy to champion dumbed-up cultural thinking, but as detailed in the Sunday Herald, it is showing signs of falling apart before it has even been launched.

The Scotsman's publisher, Andrew Neil, also wants to influence policy from the free-market right wing by setting up The Policy Institute. Launched three years ago with backing from the paper's proprietors, the Barclay brothers, it took until earlier this year to produce its first results: a critique of Scottish business start- ups. Soon it is to publish essays about public finance of the arts, followed by analysis of the euro debate as it affects Scotland. But its one member of staff has parted company, leaving Scotsman journalist Bill Jamieson in charge part-time, while it doesn't even have a website, the first pre-requisite for serious networking.

That leaves the three-year old Scottish Council Foundation as the only significant think tank in Scotland, and it is now getting bigger, with three new recruits bringing it up to nine staff, pushing on the fronts it has developed so far: health, education, social inclusion and innovative governance. In addition, it has persuaded Scotland's leading technology lawyer, Shonaig MacPherson, to give it some edge from outside the policy community, as SCF chairperson. Next step is to recruit a "converter" with the people skills to apply ideas in real communities.

The SCRF operates by means of four networks, bringing in academics and practitioners, one of which has spun off into its own government- funded think tank, the Public Health Institute. The idea of mapping out "The Possible Scot", focusing on how much Scotland's health and diet could be improved, has been taken on with Columbia University in New York, where they are preparing "The Possible American".

Education, although the issue where Leicester takes the policy lead, is the subject on which it has been harder to make an impact, as the blueprint for change is so radical that the wonks now need to find a way of getting from where Scotland's schools are to where they need to be. And that is such a long journey that it needs better planning.

But it is in that area of devolution that the SCF has proved and will continue to be of particular interest to the rest of its international network. Scotland is seen by policy wonks elsewhere as a fascinating experiment in creating new institutions. And many of the problems being wrestled with in Scotland - new technology, a skilled workforce, and private-public partnership - are exactly the same as elsewhere.

Putting Scotland on the map of this internet-fuelled network of policy debate has more potential than is sometimes realised among those struggling to get these new political institutions bedded in. And some of that potential is to be unveiled as a grand, international project later this month. Watch this space.

www.scottish policynet.org.uk




Scottish Enlightenment: the sequel

Sunday Herald, The, Apr 22, 2001 EXCLUSIVE By Douglas Fraser


Graham Leicester, far left, is planning a second age of enlightenment in Scotland - modelled on the ideas achieved by great thinkers such as Adam Smith, above, and David Hume, left - only faster Photograph: Steve Cox It was a "hotbed of genius" which changed society and laid the foundations for the modern world and now a group of leading thinkers from around the globe are planning the Scottish Enlightenment: Part Two.

Academics, policy experts, and strategic and spiritual thinkers are among the 26-strong group which will gather in St Andrews this week to launch an audacious two-year plan for as major a philosophical and economic revolution as took place around the Scottish Enlightenment in the second half of the 18th century.

That period put Scotland's literary, scientific, artistic, philosophical and educational thought at the cutting edge, led by major figures such as Adam Smith and David Hume. The aim is to do the same again - but much faster.

The project is the brainchild of Graham Leicester of the Edinburgh- based Scottish Council Foundation, Scotland's foremost think tank, who believes that the pressure for dramatic change in government, corporations and individual relations is becoming irresistible.

The project has support from others trying to forecast future government and business needs and trends, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the department of trade and industry and Scottish Enterprise. There is financial backing from British Petroleum, whose futures unit believes the changes will be so dramatic that it will probably stop being an oil company in a few decades.

The project, dubbed the International Futures Forum, is intended to find practical ways to develop policies which take account of how:

lThe economy is changing rapidly, with technology subverting the old rules.

lEnvironmental sustainability is becoming one of the most important issues for human survival in the new century.

lGovernment may become unrecognisable within a generation as worldwide it faces twin crises of legitimacy and competence.

lPeople are looking for a more meaningful inner life, questioning - as philosophers did in the past Scottish Enlightenment - even what it is to be human.

"We are in a time of transition in which the old system is failing and new systems are beginning to emerge," says Leicester.

The parallel with the Scottish Enlightenment at the start of the industrial revolution attracted a group from 11 countries including India, Brazil, South Africa and Australia. Scotland is seen internationally as a test-bed for new ideas, currently running a democratic experiment that grows out of the old British state, a mainstay of the old system.

"We're rooting this in the image of the Enlightenment, which was at one level going through that same process from the pre-industrial to the industrial society," said Leicester. "There is a a change of world-view in progress now, so our task is to understand what that change is. There is a sense of urgency as we approach the cliff edge, so we're looking for another way the world could work.

"We think this is a period of dramatic change, and we don't have much time to deal with it."

Leicester, a former Foreign Office official who set up the Scottish Council Foundation three years ago, argues that "in a world where almost anything seems possible, the forces of fragmentation and alienation are at least as strong as those of integration".

He plans not only to have the group think through challenges, but to seek out and experiment with projects that put the new thinking into practice, with Scotland a likely proving ground for some of the ideas.

Although those involved are not household names, they include: Max Boisot, an expert in Chinese business thinking; Roberto Carneiro, a former Portuguese education minister; Mike Hambly, Scotland's leading businessman in digital animation; David Lorimer, a researcher into complementary medicine and near-death studies; Duncan Maclennan, a Glasgow University urban studies professor in the Scottish Executive policy unit; Maureen O'Hara, a psychiatrist studying the effect of change on society; Diane Stone, an expert on globalisation; and Mark Woodhouse, a healer and philosopher in "metaphysics, eastern thought and consciousness studies" at George State University, Atlanta.

The website www.international futuresforum.com goes live tomorrow The Scottish Enlightenment was an extraordinary development in intellectual thought in the second half of the 18th century.

It helped mark out the radical changes in thinking which defined modern economics and influenced democratic thought. This was the start of an entirely new approach to science.

Glasgow and Aberdeen were centres of Enlightenment thought, but the movement centred on Edinburgh, where the publication of Encyclopaedia Britannica was one legacy to the world.

A wee bit more on Graham and his International Futures Forum gang here...


Oh! and just as an aside....IFF have just been joined by Sir John Elvidge, ex Permanent Secretary to the Scottish Government and architect of the new Scottish Model of Government . Cosy...

[Sheila Struthers]

More from Alan Watt on Scotland - from just over halfway in...