GIRFEC, plainly - the eight words behind how Scotland looks after children

Some Scottish words do a lot of work in a small space. Coorie is one. GIRFEC is another - less lovely to say, but carrying just as much warmth once you unpack it: getting it right for every child.

If you've had a baby in Scotland, GIRFEC is already part of your life, whether or not anyone said the word out loud. It's the thinking behind your health visitor's questions, the reviews in your baby's red book, and the way help is supposed to reach your family before things get hard - not after.

What GIRFEC actually is

GIRFEC is the Scottish Government's national approach to supporting children and families, used across the NHS, nurseries, schools and social services since the mid-2000s and refreshed in 2022. It isn't a programme you enrol in or a form you fill out. It's a shared way of thinking that every service around your child is asked to use: look at the whole child, in the context of their whole family, and act early.

That last part matters most. The old pattern in children's services everywhere was to wait - for a referral, a threshold, a crisis. GIRFEC turns it round: the people already in your life, usually your health visitor in the early years, are meant to notice early, ask early and help early. A wobble handled at six weeks doesn't become a wall at six months.

The eight words

At the centre of GIRFEC are eight plain words for what every child needs - safe, healthy, achieving, nurtured, active, respected, responsible, included. Services call them the wellbeing indicators, or SHANARRI, but they were chosen to be words a parent would actually use.

For a baby, they translate simply. Safe: a clear cot, a smoke-free home, safer sleep every sleep. Healthy: feeds, weight, immunisations - and a parent whose own health counts too. Nurtured: warmth, response, being known. Active, respected, included: floor time and fresh air, a baby treated as a person, a family connected to the people and services around them rather than managing alone.

The point of the list isn't scoring or surveillance - it's a shared language. When you tell a health visitor you're worried, the eight words are how the people around your child make sure nothing about their life gets looked at in isolation.

What it looks like in your first years

In practice, GIRFEC reaches most families through health visiting. In Scotland every family is offered the universal health visiting pathway: eleven home visits between birth and starting school, front-loaded in the first year, plus formal reviews at 13 to 15 months, 27 to 30 months and before school. Not because anything is wrong - because being known by one professional, in your own home, is the whole design.

That's also why the questions can feel surprisingly wide. A health visitor asking how you're sleeping, how you're coping, who's around to help - that's not nosiness, and it isn't a test you can fail. In GIRFEC's terms, your wellbeing is part of your baby's wellbeing. It's the same reason Coorie's assessment ends by asking how you are: a tired baby and a running-on-empty parent are one picture, not two.

One piece of honest history: an earlier plan to give every child a statutory 'named person' was dropped in 2019 after years of debate about information sharing. What remains is the practical version that most families experience anyway - in the early years, your health visitor is your first port of call, and when a family needs extra support, services are expected to plan it together, with you, rather than passing you between waiting lists.

If you're not in Scotland

GIRFEC itself is Scottish, but the ideas travel. Every UK nation runs universal health visiting from birth to five, every red book works the same way, and the underlying principle - whole child, whole family, help early - is how good practice works everywhere. If you're in England, Wales or Northern Ireland, your health visiting service is your version of the same front door.

Wherever you are: if sleep, feeding or your own wellbeing is getting heavy, your health visitor wants to hear about it at the wobble stage, not the crisis stage. Asking early is the system working exactly as designed - and you can always call NHS 111 for same-day advice, or 999 in an emergency.