Meet the new Commissioner
Tam Baillie was appointed as Scotland's new Commissioner for Children and Young People in May. Here he explains his aims and objectives for the next five years.
How have the first few months been? Have they matched your expectations?
I've enjoyed every minute of it. I was advised to take a break between my last job and this job to recharge the batteries, as it were, but I didn't, because I was so keen to start!
What do you see as your main priorities?
There are three main areas that I want us to concentrate on.
The first is increasing awareness and understanding of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. I want to do that by drawing attention to cases where we are already satisfying the Convention's articles – for example, every time a parent is providing a loving home environment or an Early Years worker is providing nursery education. If we start to understand that the Convention affirms a lot of the good things that we’re already doing, that will help us get a better understanding of where we need to do better for children and young people.
The second is about capturing the voices, experiences and opinions of young people, and making sure that they influence the work of our office and general policy. In particular, nurseries are a major issue because there’s the challenge of finding age appropriate ways of engagement.
The third area is discrimination. There are a whole group of youngsters for whom we do need to do things better, and we will highlight that through specific areas of work.
How do you view the importance of the Early Years Framework?
I believe it is the most important policy development within Scotland. In my opinion, placing a greater emphasis on Early Years development and our Early Years services is the biggest single chance we have to create a generational change to the future wellbeing and resilience of our children and young people.
The key is to get the right support to parents early on, and for me that means combining our health services with an element of family and parental support. If we are going to achieve some of the changes we're looking for, that's where we'll have to put our time and energy.
What do you think are the strengths of our current system?
I'm very encouraged by the Scottish Government's response to the conclusions of the United Nations Rights of the Child monitoring committee and its decision to publish an action plan. It forms a good basis for the future direction of my office.
We also have international recognition for our Children's Hearing system, and we've scored consistently well in our educational outcomes, so there's lots of things that we can build on. But we mustn't be complacent.
Where would you like to be in five years' time?
I would like us to be where a lot of our policy plans say they want us to be. We've actually got very good and positive aspirations for our children, we have a number of policies and pieces of legislation in place. The issue is about the good and consistent implementation of that.
If there was one thing I could alter, it would be the level of inequality that we have in Scotland. We have an unacceptably high number of children brought up in poverty, so we have to have a renewed and refreshed approach to that.
- Posted on 08 September 2009 under Early Years Matters, children in care, childrens rights, Issue 16, Snapshots.
- Tagged as citizenship, childrens rights.
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