Together (Scottish Alliance for Children’s Rights) has submitted evidence to the United Nations on Optional Protocol 4 (OP4) to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, focusing on children’s right to free, inclusive, and lifelong education. The submission includes issues raised by the Hub for SUCCESS, ensuring that the experiences of care‑experienced young people are represented internationally.

Over the summer, the Hub for SUCCESS responded to Together’s call for views, highlighting barriers faced by care‑experienced learners—especially during key transitions between school, college, university, and other pathways. These points were directly cited in Together’s final submission:

“For care experienced children and young people, members highlighted the importance of effective support at points of transition… Early planning, joined‑up support, trusted relationships and clear information… can be critical to supporting young people to access and stay in education.”

More information is available via Together Scotland.

The Hub for SUCCESS has responded to the Scottish Funding Council consultation on the Report on Widening Access (RoWA), which seeks views on how Scotland’s national widening access data can be strengthened to better support policy and practice.

Our response draws on insight from across our network, including care-experienced learners, practitioners, and partner organisations. It brings together lived experience and professional expertise, reflecting the Hub’s work supporting care-experienced learners to get in, stay in, and thrive in further and higher education.

The Hub for SUCCESS recognises the value of the RoWA as a national dataset. We highlight its strength in tracking progress over time and providing a broad overview of participation, retention, and outcomes across Scotland. The inclusion of widening access groups—such as care-experienced learners, SIMD20 students, and disabled students—plays an important role in identifying inequalities and monitoring change.

However, our response emphasises that the RoWA must evolve to better support action and decision-making. Feedback from our community highlights that the report can be difficult to navigate, with dense information and limited interpretation. The Hub is calling for improvements to ensure the data is more accessible, meaningful, and usable in practice.

Key recommendations in our response include:

• Improving accessibility and clarity – through clearer structure, better use of visuals, and concise summaries to highlight key findings and trends.
• Strengthening interpretation – ensuring data is accompanied by clearer insight into what it means for policy, practice, and learners.
• Reflecting real learner journeys – including more data on progression, non-linear pathways, interruptions to study, and re-entry into education.
• Increasing visibility of part-time and flexible routes – recognising these as critical pathways for many widening access learners.
• Enhancing data access through interactive tools – including strong support for the development of user-friendly dashboards that allow data to be explored more easily.
• Balancing breadth and depth – ensuring expansion to new widening access groups does not dilute meaningful analysis of existing priority groups, particularly care-experienced learners.

The Hub for SUCCESS supports many of the proposed changes within the consultation, including increased reporting on part-time students, broader coverage of undergraduate study types, and greater disaggregation of deprivation data. There is also strong support for including learners on shorter college courses to better reflect the full range of participation across Scotland’s education system.

At the same time, the Hub highlights the importance of maintaining a coherent, joined-up picture of the learner journey. While proposals such as separate reporting on student journeys could offer deeper insight, they must remain clearly aligned with wider reporting to avoid fragmentation.

A central theme of the Hub’s response is that data must drive action. While the RoWA provides valuable insight into national trends, its impact depends on how effectively it informs change. Strengthening the link between data, lived experience, and practice will be essential to ensuring that widening access efforts translate into improved outcomes for learners.

The Hub for SUCCESS remains committed to working with the Scottish Funding Council and partners across Scotland to ensure widening access data is meaningful, accessible, and responsive—supporting the shared goal of an equitable education system for all.

The Hub for SUCCESS had the amazing opportunity to work alongside a partnership of care experienced researchers, throughcare and aftercare workers, and staff from the Universities of Edinburgh and Stirling, to complete a research project into friendship support for care experienced people.

What is this project about?

This is a research project about friendship and care experience. It involves care experienced people, and throughcare and aftercare workers, being supported by a small team from STAF, the Universities of Edinburgh and Stirling, Aberdeenshire Council, and the Hub for SUCCESS.

The aim is to find better ways of supporting the friendships of people with care experience. We are doing research together, then developing a Framework for Friendship Focused Support and Ideas for Change materials.

The Framework, and the materials we design to go with it, will help everyone in the ‘care system’ better understand the importance of friendship, and give them practical ideas and strategies for the best ways to support friendship.

Why is it important?

Most people value friendship in their lives, and find comfort, support and happiness in these relationships. However, we know from the Independent Care Review in Scotland, we do not always do enough to support the friendships of people with care experience.

As The Promise report (p23) highlights:

“Friendships and relationships with people in the workforce and wider community are important. These relationships may be where children find the love and care they need. Children in care must be actively supported to develop connections and relationships. Relationships must not be prevented by an assumption that children may come to harm and/or face unnecessary risk.”

Thank you to our Hub for SUCCESS associates Daphne McClellan and Robyn Raiker on their extensive work on this project!

Our Hub for SUCCESS associate Claire –  along with others – wrote a journal article, titled

‘Scaffolding of Success: Support, Educational Equity and the Lifelong Reality of Care Experience’

Transitions from care into adulthood are often a shift from dependence to independence. Yet for care-experienced individuals, this process is neither linear nor complete at a predetermined age. Despite progressive Scottish policies—such as The Promise—many still face unequal access to support. This article explores how structural and relational scaffolding can transform outcomes. Drawing on the lived and professional knowledge of three care-experienced authors, it examines how language, relationship-based practice, and support influence definitions of success. Reframing care experience as lifelong challenges systems to provide enduring, person-centered support. While research affirms the importance of responsive scaffolding, few studies center the voices of care-experienced adults in defining what effective support looks like. This article addresses that gap by placing care-experienced authors not as subjects, but as analysts and advocates. The article is based on a collaborative, care-informed reflective process. The authors adapted the Gibbs Reflective Cycle to suit a trauma-aware and relational approach. Their reflections are not anecdotal—they are critically analyzed, thematically structured, and used as evidence to interrogate systems and propose alternatives. Key findings highlight the importance of sustained relational practice, responsive educational support, and recognizing care experience as lifelong.

 Through self-efficacy and perseverance, care-experienced learners cultivate strengths that support meaningful engagement (Schwartz-Tayri et al., 2025). When these personal strengths are matched with external scaffolding—such as advocacy, financial support, and relational networks—the authors argue that, only then, genuine progress becomes possible. Success, then, is not simply a matter of personal effort. It also depends on systems that respond to complex journeys. Education becomes not only a route to qualification, but to healing, recognition, and restored self-confidence and potential—especially when barriers are removed rather than reinforced.