The Rayne Foundation believes that providing better career and professional development opportunities will result in better care for those who need it most. In 2024, the Foundation launched a proactive funding programme focused on workforce development: Better Careers for Better Care.
With the 2025 open call, the Foundation wanted to look beyond England to the devolved nations. Over the summer, they made a grant to the University of Stirling in partnership with IMPACT. Building on an IMPACT Demonstrator project that brought together strategic partners across Scotland, the Stirling-based team will now move into an implementation phase. The project aims to shift the narrative at a systems-level. The team is working collaboratively with ADASS, Social Care Future and FrameWorks UK to ensure similar work is aligned across Scotland and England.
The IMPACT Demonstrator
In 2024, we launched a Demonstrator exploring how to change the story we tell about adult social care in Scotland. The project, hosted by Scottish Care, wanted to learn how we can 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.
We 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? Our Demonstrators, Jennifer Wallace and Richard Brunner, were able to learn from the excellent work of Social Care Future, who have been leading the way in England. They 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, they 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, they hosted a workshop in Edinburgh with Scottish groups – a rare moment of collective reflection. Attendees shared insights, challenged assumptions and co-designed better ways of telling the story of social care in Scotland. Building on the evidence, they explored how to explain why social care matters and how to describe what needs to change.
The insights from this first phase are shared in the influencing public perceptions of adult social care in Scotland discussion paper.
Next steps, with the Rayne Foundation
With support from the Rayne Foundation, Richard and Jennifer are now entering a new phase of work. The focus will shift from building shared understanding to testing and applying what they have learned, experimenting with real-world framing challenges, and learning as they go.
In phase two, the project will connect 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. They want to understand what helps messages land, where they encounter resistance, and how we can adapt framing strategies to different audiences and settings.
Close attention will be paid 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, there will be 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.
The project will share resources as they go, including practical tools, insights from testing, and ideas for shifting the story of social care in Scotland.
You can keep up to date with the work on the new reframing microsite: https://reframingcare.stir.ac.uk/