Catriona Stewart: Volunteers are there for one reason only - we want to be

We might receive a child into foster care or place them in a secure unit. We can mandate how often they see their parents - or if they see their parents at all.

These are serious decisions with far-reaching ramifications for their lives. What makes us unique as a legal tribunal is that we are volunteers.

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In fact, children’s hearings are the only entirely volunteer-led legal tribunals in Europe.

Panel members receive intensive training that guides us to always put the child at the heart of our decision-making. Everyone in the room is focused on their best interests.

The ethos is “needs not deeds” - we don’t focus on what a young person has or hasn’t done, we focus on what will make their life better.

Ideally, the panel members should come from that child or young person’s own community - neighbours helping neighbours.

I’ve been a panel member for 15 years and the system has altered in that time. Not radically, but changes such as an increase in solicitors being present in the hearing room have had an impact.

The vast majority of cases concern child protection.

It will never fail to dismay and astonish me, the things some parents will do to their children and what children endure. It will never fail to distress me the way families are let down by systems that should support and protect them.

There is a gross misconception that children in secure care are always there for offence reasons.

I read language in the right-wing press talking about, say, “young thugs” and feel I might commit a bit of thuggery in response.

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Even young people in the system on offence grounds are not thugs. They are the product of chaotic and complex backgrounds and need support and guidance.

Many in secure care are there for their own protection. I have decided to place a young person in a secure unit because they are determined to take their own life and the loss of their liberty is the only way to keep them alive.

Scotland boasts of the system’s uniqueness. Yet no other jurisdiction has copied the model.

I’m a passionate advocate for the children’s hearings system but also freely admit its flaws.

I could list those flaws but the issue at hand is the change in the Children Act that will introduce a paid chair.

My instinct is against this as, when I interviewed him, National Convenor Elliot Jackson knew it would be. He knows this will be the position of many panel members who, like me, have been around for a while.

Being paid isn’t going to change the fundamental fact that not all parents are amenable to taking part, to put it mildly. Some are oppositional, some are furious. One mum once put her fingers in a V-sign right up to my face with the words, “Make a decision on this”.

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As a chair, you have to use your training, personality and common sense to navigate these difficulties. But you can’t pay for rapport and if the family doesn’t like their assigned chair that’s their purview.

It is vital that there is an appeal system that allows families to ask for a new chair.

One argument for a paid chair is that their oversight of the case and background knowledge means the child’s history won’t be raked over at every hearing, nor will be child have to repeat themselves each time.

That shouldn’t be happening in hearing rooms anyway. It’s poor panel management and could be dealt with by training.

Every argument for a paid chair has a counter-argument and Children’s Hearings Scotland will have a job of work to do to persuade current volunteer chairs that they are losing their positions truly for the best interest of the child.

Otherwise, it will be countless hours of training and dedication lost for nothing.

I know that some panel members will feel so strongly about this change they will leave the system, and that is a terrible loss of knowledge and experience.

My red line is that we must resist any move to entirely professionalise the hearings system.

My reason is quite straightforward. There are times I look around a hearing room and every single adult is in that room because they are paid to be so. Foster carer, social worker, teacher, health worker, children’s reporter, advocate, safeguarded.

We are the only adults present for no other reason than we want to be. That means something. It means something critical, fundamental to the system and its independence.

If that ever goes, it will be a loss too great to quantify.