We also asked our Delivery Partners for feedback through our annual Delivery Partner Feedback Questionnaire. We wanted to know more about what it is like for Delivery Partners to work with Future Pathways, and about the impact of our work together. We received responses from 18 Delivery Partners providing a range of different types of support such as counselling, housing support, and trauma support work. Here are some key findings from the questionnaire.
Most respondents told us that working with Future Pathways is different from working with other services because our support is focused on the person; we communicate effectively with our partners; and we are supportive of the work our Delivery Partners do. Delivery Partners used words such as “responsive” “supportive” and “caring” to describe our approach. But the most used word to describe our approach was “collaborative”. This word cloud shows the words our Delivery Partners used to describe our approach.
One of Future Pathways’ outcomes is to make trauma informed support more accessible to people registered with us. And we can see from the feedback we received that this is a big part of the difference we make for our Delivery Partners.
Feedback from our Delivery Partners has also helped us learn how we can improve. While most of the feedback we received was complementary, we also received some suggestions about how we could improve. For example, considering when we review contracts with our Delivery Partners and looking at how we can best measure progress towards people’s goals.
We look forward to continuing to work alongside our Delivery Partners to develop our service, and enhance the support accessed by people with lived experience in 2025.
Pathways to Change is our latest impact report. Here, we take an in-depth look at the work of Future Pathways from April 2023 to March 2024. This report helps us to gain a deeper insight into how we make a real difference, and where there is scope for improvement.
For many people, winter can be a difficult time. We might feel lonely, stressed or sad. We might see our friends or family finding things hard too. Something we can do that can really help is to give the gift of kindness – to others and to ourselves.
Spotting loneliness
This time of year can be connected to being with friends or family. But when we don’t have people near us, we might feel more alone. If you are feeling lonely, try to reach out to people you trust. They might be feeling lonely too. A phone call, letter or a text might help to make a big difference.
Do things your own way
For some, Christmas, New Year, and other celebrations or traditions that happen over winter, can bring up a lot of difficult feelings, and that is OK. If you do not want to take part in traditions or celebrations, you do not have to. You can let people, including yourself, choose what feels comfortable.
Helping others
Knowing that you are helping others feel good can boost your own wellbeing. It can give you a sense of purpose, community and connection. You could donate or volunteer at your local community hub. You could shop locally to try to help small business. Or you could raise awareness of important causes on social media, like charities you support.
Our latest impact report published this year showed that our support is vitally important to many people registered with us for many reasons. For example, we know that many people we support experience multiple health and social inequalities, such as living in areas where services can be more difficult to access.
Our work focuses on addressing these inequalities so that people with lived experience of in-care abuse and neglect can live full, healthy and independent lives. While each person’s journey at Future Pathways is unique, this snapshot of our work this year shows that our support has, in different ways, helped many people find their own way to a better life.
This data was drawn from January to November 2024.
In 2025, we are looking forward to:
Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to share their experience with us this year. Your feedback helps us understand the impact we make and to keep learning and improving.
Pathways to Change is our latest impact report. Here, we take an in-depth look at the work of Future Pathways from April 2023 to March 2024. This report helps us to gain a deeper insight into how we make a real difference, and where there is scope for improvement.
You can give feedback about Future Pathways at any time by filling in the form on the website: www.future-pathways.co.uk/feedback
If you would like to get a copy of the feedback form by post instead, you can let us know by:
If you fill in a feedback form, the answers you give will be anonymous. This means that you do not have to provide your name or any personal details.
We see how accessing funded support can help people achieve their goals, work towards their outcomes and create change in their lives. We also look at the complexities around accessing funded support, such as the ways negative self-perception or complicated interactions with money can create barriers and prevent equity.
The report draws together learning from previous evaluations, such as how we manage funded support in an accountable and equitable way, and how funded support can make a difference. It was also prompted by reflections from within the Future Pathways team around the challenges that can arise when supporting someone to access funding. For example, discussions around funding can, in some instances, detrimentally effect the relationship between the person and their Support Coordinator.
The context within which people access material support at Future Pathways is nuanced. A person’s financial circumstances and relationship with funded support can be affected by their previous experience of trauma. We must, therefore, be aware of such barriers and how we might achieve equity for people we support. This is particularly important in the context of working with people who may have experienced multiple inequalities in their life, and who may have conflicting feelings about accessing funded support.
Given that relationships are at the core of our support, it is vital that we acknowledge the complexity, nuance and dynamics involved in accessing funded support. We see that prioritising transparency, self-awareness and active listening can help mitigate potentially negative experiences of associated with accessing funded support.
This is especially significant given that we know that funded support can make a real impact in people’s lives. It can support a person in achieving their goals and reaching their intended outcomes, such as improving overall wellbeing, self-worth, self-esteem and confidence, and gaining increased independence and freedom.
We hope that our Delivery Partners and other services that work with people accessing funded support or financial payments may also benefit from our learning. By looking in-depth at how people access funded support, and acknowledging the multiple complexities involved in this, we can work towards ensuring that people can access the support they need, tailor our support to ensure greater impact and help people make the changes they wish to see in their lives.
At Future Pathways, one of our service outcomes is to help make sure that people registered with us can access the right support for them. One of the ways we work towards this is by continuing to learn about our support. This includes what works well, how support can be improved, and the impact we have.
Over time, we have designed a bespoke way of assessing the quality and consistency of our support. We call this our Quality Framework. We use this to look at evidence from across the service so we can see:
Our Quality Framework helps us feel more confident in what we learn through our impact evaluation and, together with our impact evaluation, it helps us make data driven improvements to our service.
Data driven improvement means pulling together different types of data from across the service – such as support plans and Delivery Partner contracts – to find out how we could improve. And it means using our evidence to inform and direct the changes we make at Future Pathways.
When we identify that something needs to be improved, we work together to make changes that will work practically and make a difference to people registered with us. Often, groups comprising team members from across the service pool their expertise to explore options and find the right way forward.
For example, since 2021, we have been working on improving our data system, Carista, to improve the efficiency of our processes. A group of Future Pathways team members have been working together, alongside our partner Rockpool Solutions, on this improvement project. The changes we have made so far have had many positive impacts, such as helping to make it easier for people to register for support, and giving us more confidence in our data.
We also seek input from Voices for a Better Future, our lived experience voice group. For example, last year members of the Voices for a Better Future group worked with us to co-design what peer support could look like at Future Pathways. Now, we are starting put the ideas of the group into action. We will share more about the peer support opportunities we will develop for people registered with us next year.
We have also worked with Voices for a Better Future to improve how we ask people registered with us for feedback and equal opportunities information. With input from people with lived experience and team members across the service, we launched our new approach to feedback and equal opportunities in 2023. Now, people registered with us have more ways to give us anonymous feedback about their experience. And we ask for sensitive equal opportunities information later in support, when people have had the time to build up some trust with their Support Coordinator.
We will continue to leverage our Quality Framework to drive improvement at Future Pathways. For example, our Quality Framework and impact evaluation findings showed that we could improve how we facilitate conversations at the start of support about what matters most to people registered with us. Given that all our support is tailored to each person’s own outcomes, we know that these conversations are important; they help us make sure that people can access the right support for them. So, a group of team members from across the service is working on this now.
It is our hope that by continuing to make positive changes and sharing the improvements we make, people can access the right support for them at Future Pathways and other services.
At Future Pathways, we aim to take a trauma informed approach to every aspect of our work. Our impact evaluation shows that in doing so, we support people to gain a sense of purpose, freedom and independence; and we help make trauma informed support more accessible to people registered with us.
This overview of the year (2023/24) draws on our quarterly quality checks to give a holistic picture of the quality and consistency of our support. The report highlights the significant work of staff in driving improvement and maintaining quality.
Find out more about how our quality framework contributes to our overall evaluation, helping to show the difference we make and how we make that difference.
In this webinar, you can find out more about how we developed a trauma-informed approach to quality and improvement. Members of the Future Pathways team will talk about our integrated approach to impact evaluation, quality measurement and service improvement.
Join Sarah Morton (Director, Matter of Focus) in conversation with Flora Henderson (In Care Survivors Alliance Director), Louise Hall (Impact and Evaluation Lead, Future Pathways), and Carole-Anne Roger (Quality and Improvement Manager, Future Pathways) about our journey and what we’ve learned.
At key stages in our journey, Matter of Focus helped us build our knowledge and understanding by acting as an independent learning partner. In 2023, Matter of Focus helped us review our evidence and learn more about people’s experience of the service through a series of discussions.
Together, Josie and her Support Coordinator explored different types of support.
Josie had been through many life challenges, and she knew that getting the right help was important for her. Future Pathways supported Josie to access counselling support.
Being completely honest with the counsellor was transformational. Before accessing counselling, Josie had always bottled up her feelings. Counselling helped Josie consider how she thought about herself and to address how her feelings of shame had prevented her from accessing support or opening up to people. Counselling helped Josie see how important it was for her to be truthful with the people in her life.
Future Pathways also supported Josie to complete and publish her book, ‘Finally back to my routes’.
Josie had been writing for years. Through some of the most challenging experiences of her life, writing helped Josie to express herself. Josie never thought anything would come from her writing, but this changed when her daughter was diagnosed with breast cancer. Before passing away, Josie’s daughter encouraged her to finish her book. Josie was determined to finish her book for her children.
Accessing her care records helped Josie stitch together the story of her past. Josie also learned that she had a sibling she had never met before, and she was able to meet her.
Josie would write for hours. Future Pathways supported Josie to finish and publish her book with Book Whisperers, a service that provides writing support.
Josie is now a published author. She celebrated by organising a book signing event with family and friends. Writing ‘Finally back to my routes,’ enabled Josie to be completely truthful about her past with her loved ones. Her friends and family now know her as someone who is always laughing and joking.
Since Future Pathways began, we have worked with upwards of 130 Delivery Partners, some of which we are still working with today.
Since the start of the service in 2016, we have developed and expanded with more staff and more Delivery Partners. As such, our commissioning processes have changed over time as we’ve learnt more about what facilitates effective support.
We’ve learnt that a collaborative and relational approach to commissioning brings trust, choice and flexibility to our outcomes-focused support. It also creates a network of support, knowledge and learning with Delivery Partners which, in turn, helps us navigate complexity and offer holistic support to people accessing Future Pathways.
We’ve also learnt that a collaborative approach to commissioning can, at times, be challenging to navigate for Delivery Partners and staff alike. For example, our collaborative report into impactful partnership working found that:
Our approach has evolved, and we’ve had to adapt our approach over time so that it works in practice for everyone. One of Future Pathways’ aims is to take a trauma informed approach to all that we do, including our work with Delivery Partners. The changes we have made are underpinned by the 6 key principles of trauma informed practice: choice, trustworthiness, safety, empowerment, collaboration and cultural consideration.
CHOICE
At Future Pathways we give the people we support a choice about who they work with, supporting them to select services that align with their desired outcomes. We support potential Delivery Partners to make informed choices about collaborating with us by sharing a new resource we have created about what working with Future Pathways involves.
TRUSTWORTHINESS
We have created more transparency around our commissioning approach and the way we set up support, through the development of our Delivery Partner welcome pack. The information in the welcome pack aligns with our internal guidance, so everyone is working from the same roadmap, promoting consistency.
SAFETY
The safety of our commissioning approach has been reinforced through clearer, more structured contracts and better-defined timelines for reviewing support. This provides more opportunities for the people we support, Delivery Partners, and Support Coordinators to understand progress towards goals, check whether support should be adapted, and to nurture a collaborative, safe relationship.
EMPOWERMENT
Future Pathways strives to empower people we support by helping them identify supports which will help them to progress their own desired outcomes. This is made possible through the flexible, trusting and collaborative nature of the relationships between Future Pathways and our Delivery Partners.
We also empower Delivery Partners to help us shape our collective support by inviting them to participate in focus groups, evaluations and other collaborative projects, such as a recent project to refresh our complaints and resolutions policy.
COLLABORATION
We recognise the value and expertise of our Delivery Partners, and we want to work closely with them to best support people to achieve their goals. For example, our new approach improves the quality of reporting and creates a feedback loop directly with Delivery Partners. It also clarifies how we communicate with Delivery Partners, ensuring that we collaborate closely with our Delivery Partners throughout a person’s support.
CULTURAL CONSIDERATION
When we work with people, we must take into consideration the specific needs of people who have experienced abuse or neglect in Scottish care settings. We have designed our commissioning approach so that it balances structured support with the flexibility people need to engage with services.
As the changes we’ve made to our commissioning approach continue to embed we expect to see support continue to evolve, along with its accompanying impact.
We are always keen to hear from people we support, our Delivery Partners and our providers. You can give us feedback at any time during the year through our Feedback Form.
Our latest impact report, Pathways to Change, gives us greater insight into how we make a real difference, and where there is scope for improvement. View and download our full report, summary report and mini report.
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