Changing Lives

Changing Lives (main and summary reports), the report of the 21st Century Social Work Review set out a compelling and challenging vision for the future direction of social work services in Scotland.

It delivered three main messages and challenges.

• Social work doesn't have all the answers. So we need to build capacity to deliver personalised services.
• We don't make best use of social work skills. So we need to build the capacity of the workforce.
• Doing more of the same won't work. So we need to build capacity for sustainable change.

In February 2006, Scottish Ministers welcomed the findings outlined in Changing Lives (Executive response), accepted all 13 recommendations and gave a commitment to act upon them.

Implementation Plan

The five change programmes were set up as mechanisms to help drive forward the change agenda. The work of each of the change programmes complements the others, and they form part of a single agenda striving to achieve the aspirations laid out in Changing Lives.

The five change programmes are now focussing on delivering a number of key strategic pieces of work (the ‘core products’) which will be published over the course of 2008. This approach reflects the intention of the change programmes to focus on national and strategic work to help support local delivery.

Click here to see a diagram of the core products.