Over the past year, we’ve been exploring how to change the story we tell about adult social care in Scotland.
The starting point was a challenge raised by Scottish Care, who approached IMPACT with a clear question: how can we shift public understanding of care so that it better reflects the reality of the workforce, the people supported, and the vital role care plays in society? This idea quickly found traction. For many of us working across the sector in Scotland, it echoed a deeper frustration that the case for adult social care has not always been heard, even as policy ambitions have grown.
The Feeley Review of Adult Social Care in Scotland and the proposal to create a National Care Service (NCS) in Scotland opened up space for debate and reform. But alongside technical policy discussions, there has been a growing recognition that systems only change when the stories we tell about them change too. If the public sees social care as a ‘broken’ service, or as only applicable to other people, this limits room for investment, innovation or hope. If instead, social care is understood as a shared infrastructure for wellbeing, inclusion and human connection, then the case for change becomes clearer.
In response, IMPACT brought together people from across the social care landscape in Scotland to ask: how do we want to frame social care and how do we best do that? We were able to learn from the excellent work of Social Care Future who have been leading the way in England. We partnered with FrameWorks UK, who specialise in strategic framing – an evidence-based approach to understanding how public thinking can be shifted by changing the way issues are explained. Together, we reviewed the existing research on attitudes to care and identified the mindsets that commonly get in the way such as individualism, fatalism and the idea that care is only for ‘other people’.
In March 2025, we hosted a workshop in Edinburgh with those Scottish groups. This was a rare moment of collective reflection: a space to share insights, challenge assumptions and co-design better ways of telling the story of social care in Scotland. The session began to develop shared language, uncover tensions, and surface areas of potential action. Building on the evidence, we explored how to explain why social care matters and how to describe what needs to change.
Since then, we’ve continued the conversation. We held further meetings with this core group to look at what’s changing in the political and policy landscape, and to continue the work of building practical tools and language to support a better public narrative. Together, we’ve started to explore how narrative can support reform.
The insights from this first phase are shared in our Influencing public perceptions of adult social care in Scotland discussion paper, housed on our IMPACT homepage.
What’s next?
With support from the Rayne Foundation, we are now entering a new phase of work. The focus will shift from building shared understanding to testing and applying what we’ve learned, experimenting with real-world framing challenges, and learning as we go.
In phase two, we’ll work with national and local partners in Scotland to trial different ways of talking about social care, whether through media and communications, in workforce recruitment materials, or in the everyday language used by organisations, practitioners, and users. We want to understand what helps messages land, where they encounter resistance, and how we can adapt framing strategies to different audiences and settings.
We’ll also pay close attention to the current moment. As the debate on the Scottish National Care Service continues, and with the Scottish Parliament election in May 2026, it matters how adult social care is framed in public, political and policy spaces. This phase will explore how to position social care not just as a service, but as part of the infrastructure of a fairer Scotland – a shared responsibility that benefits everyone.
To support this, we’ll be running a new series of action learning sets aimed at those working in social care communications, advocacy, frontline services, workforce support, and policy. These small, peer-based groups will be a space to reflect, experiment and build confidence in using framing approaches to better influence public perceptions of social care.
We’ll also continue to share learning as we go including practical tools, insights from testing, and ideas for shifting the story of social care in Scotland.
Get involved
If you’re interested in joining the next round of action learning sets, or would simply like to find out more, we’d love to hear from you.
Together, we can tell a better story.