Cynghrair SCiP

About the Service Children’s Progression (SCiP) Alliance

SSCE Cymru is a member of the SCiP Alliance practice group, and participates in the activities it conducts.

The SCiP Alliance’s vision: Thriving lives for Service children.

The SCiP Alliance’s mission: We bring together practitioners, researchers, policymakers and funders to build a stronger evidence-base, better policy, and enhanced support for Service children’s education and progression, placing their voices at the heart of all we do

The SCiP Alliance pursues this vision and mission by leading collaborative work to develop a robust evidence base, connect and support practitioners and influence the policy environment. Our responses are developed with and through young people with lived experience.

The SCiP Alliance:

Brings people together through a UK-wide community and Hub network, collaborative projects and high-quality conferences. This enables collective resources and expertise to be deployed effectively, improving practitioners’ work with Service children’s education and progression.

Develops easily accessible evidence-based resources and support - helping practitioners to confidently deliver quality support to Service children and each other, by sharing ideas, challenges and action.

Leads rigorous research that addresses Service children’s and their allies priorities - helping us to understand their lives and what works to improve them.
Raises awareness of Service children’s needs and provides evidence-based policy advice and guidance - helping Policymakers remove barriers to progression and target resources and support.

For further information on the SCiP Alliance, visit www.scipalliance.org

Thriving Lives Toolkit

The alliance has also curated the Thriving Lives Toolkit, providing schools with a framework of 7 principles through which to reflect on their practice and a 3-tier set of CPD resources. The resources in this toolkit have been developed in collaboration with a range of partners across the UK, and consist of:

An introductory animation;
A detailed resource introducing the evidence base, what schools can do to support their Service children and who can help and;
School case studies.

SCiP Alliance research

The SCiP Alliance is committed to improving further and higher education outcomes for Service children. It needs to know better before it can do better. That’s why the SCiP Alliance is a research–practice hub.

The SCiP Alliance produces briefings that help to summarise research and provide recommendations for practice and policy. Their subjects include resilience and moving schools. The briefing series can be found here.

More information about research relevant to Service children’s experiences can be found in the SSCE Cymru School Toolkit.

Progression of Service children to further and higher education

"Four out of ten Service children who have the ability to progress into higher education are unlikely to do so."
McCullouch and Hall (2016), Further and Higher Progression for Service Children

Listening to Learn: The Voices of Service Children

A programme of investigation to improve our understanding of how those supporting the children of Armed Forces families and veterans/ex-Service personnel put children’s voices at the heart of all they do.
Hall (2020), Listening to Learn: The Voices of Service Children

Funding for Armed Forces children and young people

The report, produced in association with the Directory of Social Change, aims to provide the first systematic and rigorous account of the landscape of funding for support for Armed Forces children and young people.

Howarth and Doherty (2023), Funding for Armed Forces children and young people

SCiP Alliance – Hwb Cymru

The SCiP Alliance network of regional hubs brings together partnerships that connect stakeholders so that they can:

Enable new and better collaborations
Facilitate communication
Build capacity and capability
Reach out to new stakeholders
Communicate with, contribute to, and draw from the SCiP Alliance Practice Group and Strategy Board
Share and respond collectively to:
- Effective practice
- Challenges
- Ideas
- Priorities
- Questions.

The University of South Wales (USW) and SSCE Cymru run the SCiP Alliance Hub Cymru collaboratively. The first meeting took place in November 2019 and bought together organisations to discussion research, policy and University engagement with Service children and the Armed Forces community in Wales.

Organisations involved in the SCiP Alliance – Hub Cymru include: