Getting it right

At RCS, the number of students who declare they are care experienced changes every year. Currently there are 20 self-declared care experienced students, studying at different stages and across a wide range of performing and production arts disciplines.

To help communicate our role as corporate parents, our care experienced learners have worked with us to help get our corporate parenting plan right. Every year, we promise to work together to review and update the plan so that we continue to get it right. If you are care experienced, and you want to get involved in reviewing and improving our corporate parenting at RCS, please contact Jesse Paul, our Fair Access Manager.

We invited our care experienced students to help us put together this list of best practice approaches to being a corporate parent. Here’s what they came up with:

Keeping up to date

Our Corporate Parenting Plan is designed to help RCS make changes to improve the lives of care experienced young people. It is important that we keep it up to date. To help us to do this, we have written an action plan, which you can download and read here:

Download Corporate Parenting Strategic Plan

In line with Government legislation, we will make sure that we review, draft and publish our Corporate Parenting Plan once every three years. We will do this in consultation with care experienced young people and other corporate parents in Scotland. In addition, every year we will reflect on our existing plan and amend it accordingly. The following actions will help us to do this effectively:

• Measure the actions we have put in place and respond in good time to any that need attention
• Work with our care experienced students to review the plan, and recommend any necessary changes
• Work with our care experienced students to prepare and present a short annual report for our Academic Board and Fair Access Committee
• Agree any changes to the plan with the senior management group and our care experienced learners

We will keep up to date with developments in research policy and best practice by:

• Ensuring that RCS staff have access to training materials that help them to understand care experienced journeys. We will do this in collaboration with Who Cares? Scotland and the Young People’s Champion’s Board.
• Developing our understanding of care experienced journeys by engaging with care experienced young people at RCS and with other organisations such as MCR Pathways and the Young People’s Champion’s Board
• Empowering care experienced young people to have a say and shape the way we work with care experienced young people through our regular forums
• Developing a community of practice with other corporate parents such as those connected to Glasgow City Council’s Care Forum. This will help us to understand the way that other corporate parents operate, and update our practice where we are inspired by the work others do
• Providing staff the opportunity to train as mentors for our care experienced learners.