At Enquire, we’re always looking for ways to make our information and advice more accessible, practical, and impactful. Over the past year, we’ve been on an exciting journey to create something new.
Navigate is a hub of practical tools, information and advice for the adults who support care experienced children and young people. It’s about removing barriers, building trust, and helping everyone to work together.
Funding a new chapter
Our Navigate journey began when we applied to the Keep the Promise Fund. For the first time, we sought external funding to develop resources beyond our existing advice service. Our vision was to create a toolkit that would help to improve support and access to education for care experienced children, young people, and those on the edges of care.
This aligns directly with Enquire’s core mission: to provide advice and information on additional support for learning and children’s rights. With this funding, we could create tailored resources for those who care for, live with, work with, and support care experienced children and young people.
Identifying where help is needed
Across Children in Scotland Services, we’ve built up a deep understanding of Scotland’s additional support for learning landscape. Informed by years of engagement with families, educators and professionals, we identified three key areas where support could make a real difference:
- Attendance
- Exclusions
- Co-ordinated support plans (CSPs)
These became the pillars around which Navigate was built. Much of the resources we have created focus on the importance of relationships when it comes to making improvements in these areas – with care experienced children and young people themselves and between the adults who support them.
Built in collaboration
From the start, we wanted Navigate to be shaped by the people it was designed for. As well as tapping into our existing awareness and day-to-day interactions with families and professionals, we met with care experienced school pupils, carried out surveys, and spoke with partner organisations to make sure the Navigate reflects people’s real experiences and real needs.
Based on those interactions, we decided to organise the tools into three easy-to-use categories:
- Understanding rights – clear, accessible information and guidance
- Real-life stories – case studies and examples from lived experience
- What can I do? – practical, ready-to-use tools
Our inspiration and motivation behind Navigate is to help foster positive relationships and to connect the people and services that form the scaffolding in a young person’s life. It is hub of resources that are designed not just to inform, but to help the adults who support care experienced children and young people to work better together.
Practical and accessible
Navigate will live on the Enquire website, making it easy for people to access and use. Creating Navigate has also given us the opportunity to explore new ways of presenting our advice and information. The Navigate tools are not only more practical, but also short-form and bitesize, helping people find and digest the right information quickly.
The Navigate logo and branding are also designed to reflect its purpose. The location pin symbol represents the idea of navigating care experience + education and finding your way. Additionally, the subtle heart shape in the location pin’s shadow pays tribute to The Promise logo.
A shared commitment
We know that removing barriers to learning takes more than one service or one organisation’s efforts. That’s why Navigate is rooted in a whole-community approach, highlighting existing resources and working alongside partner organisations. As well as meeting with different stakeholders during the development process, we have created multiple video tools that feature different partners who share their insights, experiences and expertise.
By making practical, accurate advice more accessible – and tailoring it to the context of supporting care-experienced children and young people – we hope to help everyone in a supporting role to uphold The Promise.
Robert Doyle
Digital Content Officer
About RobertAs Digital Content Officer Robert develops empowering messages and digital resources to champion children’s rights to additional support for learning. Before joining Enquire in 2020, Robert’s background was in is in community development working on a range of social justice projects. Robert is also a Participation and Engagement Associate at Children in Scotland and My Rights, My Say supporting children to have a say in the decisions about their education and support.