Introducing the Child & Youth Well-Being Plan and Outcomes Framework
The Child and Youth Well-Being Action Plan (PDF, 8 MB) and Outcomes Framework (PDF, 3.5 MB) are part of a long-term effort to improve how systems work together across B.C. to support children and families – including how services like health, education, and community supports connect in practice.
This discussion forum is an opportunity to hear directly from people about what’s working, where there are gaps, and where improvements are needed.
On this page
- What are the Action Plan priorities
- Why your feedback matters
- What to expect from this engagement
- Share your thoughts
What are the Action Plan priorities
The Action Plan takes a broad, system-wide view, focusing on key areas where change can make the biggest difference in peoples’ lives – from strengthening families and preventing violence to improving coordination across services and advancing Indigenous self-determination.
Rather than focusing on any one service or program, the goal is to better understand how different parts of the system fit together – and how they are experienced in real life.
To help guide this work, the plan focuses on five priority areas. These areas are deeply connected. In real life, people’s experiences often span across multiple parts of the system at once.
Click below to learn more about each of the areas and the actions government is taking.
Helping families access the basics they need to thrive – like food, housing, income stability, child care, and early supports – so children can grow up safe and supported.
What we are doing:
- Providing school food programs
- Improving access to child care
- Improving access to supports for children with complex needs
- Adding more mental health supports in schools and communities
Preventing violence before it begins and creating safety and support for those impacted by violence.
What we are doing:
- Supporting school programs that teach healthy relationships
- Improving how police, courts, and services work together
- Providing safe housing and counselling
Improving how services work together across systems so that children, youth, and families experience coordinated, connected support – especially during times of crisis.
What we are doing:
- Building tools to connect services across government
- Supporting crisis response groups that act quickly
- Creating teams that work across health, schools, and social services
Supporting Indigenous communities to lead and deliver services grounded in their own knowledge, cultures, and governance.
What we are doing:
- Working with First Nations and partners on funding and agreements
- Supporting Indigenous-led programs and services
- Strengthening cultural connections for children and youth interacting with the child protection system
Ensuring that children and youth who are most at risk – including those in care or involved with multiple systems – are safe, supported, and connected to opportunities.
What we are doing:
- Strengthening resources to support families to keep children and youth safely at home
- Helping youth with housing, school, and jobs
- Improving care and oversight for children in care
Why your feedback matters
We want to better understand how people experience services and supports in real life: what’s working well, where there are challenges, and how things could work together better.
You don’t need to be an expert to take part.
You’re welcome to share:
- Your own experiences
- What you’ve seen in your community or around you
- Ideas about what could make a difference
Even if something hasn’t directly affected you, your perspective still matters. People’s experiences don’t fit neatly into just one area – and that’s helpful. We’re interested in understanding how different needs and supports connect in real life, even if they don’t match one specific topic.
What you share here will help us build a clearer picture of what’s happening across the system. It will help shape future work over time.
What to expect from this engagement
This is just the first step. Over the coming months, we’ll be opening up more focused discussions on different areas of the Action Plan. We’ll also share what we’re learning along the way and check back with you to see if we’ve understood things correctly.
In the next phase, we will:
- Open more discussion forums for each of the plan’s priority areas, so you can share your thoughts on the topics that interest you most
- Launch a survey to better understand what matters most to people across B.C.
- If you’d like to take part in those future discussions, you can sign up for updates to be notified when they start.
Making this engagement accessible
We want this process to be as open and accessible as possible. If you need support to participate or want to share your ideas in a different way, please let us know – we’ll do our best to help.
A note on inclusion
This work recognizes that children, youth, and families across B.C. have different histories, experiences, and priorities – including Indigenous communities, who are leading their own approaches to well-being based on their cultures, knowledge, and governance.
Receiving feedback from a wide range of perspectives is important to building a better understanding of how the system is working, and where it needs to change.
Share your thoughts
To begin, we want to hear your first thoughts about the Plan.
We’re asking a few broad questions:
- What stands out to you about this plan for children, youth, and families – and why?
- Are there areas where small changes in services, supports, or how systems work together might make a meaningful difference, or where more understanding is needed?
- Are there areas where broad scale changes are needed?
You might also want to think about:
- Where things are working well
- Where there are gaps or challenges
- Where different supports or services are working well together
There are no right or wrong answers. People will come to this conversation with different experiences, and we want to hear from as many perspectives as possible.
Please look at our Moderation Policy and Terms of Use before participating.
I am currently a social worker and a person with multi-generational lived experience in care. I offer this feedback from both a professional and deeply personal perspective.
Over time, I have observed a recurring pattern in ministry initiatives that raises serious concerns for me about how new programs are implemented in practice. For example, education supports such as tuition waivers and other post-secondary funding initiatives were introduced with the intention of improving access for youth in and from care. While these programs are important, eligibility has consistently been tied to specific criteria, such as being in care at the age of majority or meeting minimum “time-in-care” thresholds. In practice, this means that many young people with significant care experience, particularly those who leave care earlier or who are placed in less formal arrangements, still do not qualify for these supports.
Similarly, the expansion of “out-of-care” or kinship arrangements has been framed as a way to keep children connected to family and community, which is fundamentally or most important goal. However, these arrangements are often paired with significantly fewer financial and structural supports for caregivers. The result is that children who would previously have been fully supported within the system may now receive reduced support, while no longer being counted as “in care.”
From both my professional experience and my lived experience, this creates a concerning dynamic. Outcomes can appear improved on paper, such as fewer children in care, while the actual level of support available to those same children and families is diminished. This disconnect is particularly difficult to witness as someone who has lived in the system and now works within it.
As I reviewed the Child & Youth Well-Being Plan, I also noted that it places significant emphasis on the challenges families face in navigating the current system, as well as the existence of long waitlists. These are important and valid issues. However, the plan does not clearly explain how the proposed changes will meaningfully reduce those waitlists in practice.
Much of the proposed solution appears to focus on improving coordination across ministries and creating more integrated approaches to service delivery so that families can more easily navigate the system and experience more connected care. While improved coordination is valuable, it is not clear how this approach will increase the actual availability of services or reduce demand pressures that are driving waitlists.
The concept of supporting families through system navigation, such as through coordinated teams or designated guides is not new, and could be implemented within the current structure through targeted roles. In other words, there is little preventing the ministry from hiring and resourcing system navigators within existing services today. It is unclear why a large-scale structural shift toward a more centralized “mega ministry” model is required to achieve this outcome.
While integrated service models can improve access and reduce barriers in some cases, evidence suggests that they primarily reduce duplication and improve coordination rather than eliminate waitlists altogether, particularly when overall service capacity remains unchanged. Without clear and significant investment in frontline staffing and services, there is a risk that waitlists will persist, even if the system becomes easier to navigate.
With this context, I approach the new Child & Youth Well-Being Plan and Outcomes Framework with caution and I don’t mind admitting a significant amount of skepticism. I am concerned about how it will be implemented, particularly given broader organizational changes currently underway. These include increased reliance on AI in practice, encouragement of retirements, lateral transfers that may reduce staffing stability, and indications that positions may not be refilled.
It remains unclear how the ministry intends to expand into a more integrated, cross-government model while simultaneously reducing its workforce and shifting responsibilities in this way. Without sufficient staffing and meaningful supports, there is a real risk that this framework could repeat familiar patterns, achieving administrative or structural improvements without improving real outcomes for children, youth, and families.
I welcome the Province’s commitment to improving child and youth well-being through prevention, coordination, family support, Indigenous self-determination, and addressing the systemic barriers that affect children and families. The Action Plan reflects an important shift away from crisis-driven responses toward creating the conditions that allow children, youth, and families to thrive.
I encourage government to strengthen this work by explicitly grounding the Child and Youth Well-Being Action Plan and Outcomes Framework in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Children’s rights and child well-being are not separate concepts. Rights provide the ethical, legal, and practical foundation that helps duty bearers understand their responsibilities and remain accountable for outcomes.
Well-being tells us what we hope children experience. Rights clarify what governments, institutions, professionals, communities, and parents are obligated to do to make those experiences possible. Without a rights framework, well-being risks remaining aspirational. Rights transform aspiration into shared responsibility, expectation, and accountability.
Child rights literacy also offers a practical pathway for parents and professionals to understand and enact well-being in everyday practice. It shifts the focus from controlling children’s behaviour toward supporting their development, participation, protection, identity, belonging, and agency. In practice, this means moving from questions of compliance (“How do I get children to behave?”) toward relational questions (“What do children need, and what are we responsible for providing so they can thrive?”).
This shift is deeply aligned with reconciliation.
For too long, systems of childhood in Canada have been shaped by transactional and compliance-based assumptions: that children are recipients of adult decisions, that “good outcomes” are produced through control, and that professional authority sits above lived experience. These assumptions have also shaped colonial systems of child welfare, education, and family support, often disconnecting children from culture, language, identity, and relational belonging.
A rights-based and reconciliation-aligned approach requires a different foundation, relationalism.
Relational childhood recognizes that children are not objects of intervention but participants in relationships, systems, and communities. It affirms that well-being is not produced through compliance or extraction of “desired behaviours,” but through relationships of care, responsibility, reciprocity, and belonging. This aligns directly with Indigenous worldviews that emphasize interdependence, kinship, and the responsibilities that exist between people, land, and community.
Child rights provide the explicit expectations that make this relational shift operational. They clarify that children are rights holders, not passive recipients; that families are knowledge holders and experts in their own lives; and that culture, language, and identity are not peripheral, but central to well-being. This reframes the role of duty bearers from managing behaviour to upholding conditions in which children and families can thrive.
I was encouraged to see the Action Plan recognize that “families are experts in their own lives.” I would encourage government to extend this principle further by explicitly recognizing that children are also experts in their own lives, consistent with Article 12 of the UNCRC, and that their voices must meaningfully shape the systems designed for them.
Finally, I encourage greater attention to children’s lived realities in digital environments, where identity, relationships, participation, learning, and belonging are now continuously formed. A comprehensive child and youth well-being framework must include children’s digital rights as core to modern well-being and clarify the responsibilities of duty bearers in these spaces.
Children’s rights literacy offers a practical and necessary foundation for reconciliation-informed, relational approaches to well-being. It helps shift systems away from transactional models of childhood toward relationships of responsibility, accountability, and care—where well-being is not something done to children, but something created with them.
As both a parent of young children with support needs and a professional working as a social worker, this plan resonates with me in some areas, but also raises significant concerns.
What stands out most is the strong emphasis on coordination, early intervention, and integrating services across systems. In principle, this is positive. We know families benefit when systems communicate and wrap supports around them rather than expecting them to navigate multiple disconnected services. This reflects what many families, including my own, experience day to day.
However, what also stands out is that the plan often builds layers of support around system gaps instead of addressing the root issues. As a parent, I am already navigating multiple professionals for my children (behavioural consultants, interventionists, speech therapy, occupational therapy, daycare supports). The idea of adding further coordination roles is helpful in theory, but in practice, it risks increasing complexity without addressing the underlying barriers families are facing.
From a professional perspective, I am concerned about feasibility. The plan proposes expanding access to professionals such as clinicians, therapists, and specialized service providers. At the same time, we are already experiencing significant workforce shortages across these sectors. Waitlists are long, and recruitment and retention of qualified professionals is an ongoing challenge. Without a clear strategy to address workforce capacity, expanding services may further strain the system, increase wait times, and place additional pressure on families and frontline staff.
There is also a broader system pressure to consider. When services are difficult to access in a timely way, families turn to emergency departments, crisis supports, and other parts of the health care system. This increases demand on already over-burdened services and contributes to longer wait times for everyone. From what I see professionally and personally, delays in accessing early supports often result in escalation, which the plan is trying to avoid, but may unintentionally reinforce if capacity is not addressed.
Another area where more understanding is needed is how the plan will support very young children. For families with children under school age, like my own, access to formal assessments can be limited due to age. Many systems rely on diagnosis, but early childhood often requires support based on observed need rather than formal diagnostic thresholds. More clarity is needed on how young children will be equitably assessed and supported within this framework.
In terms of gaps, there continues to be a disconnect between policy intentions and lived experience. Families are often doing the work of coordinating services themselves, advocating for access, and managing risk in the absence of timely supports. While the plan acknowledges these challenges, it is less clear how it will address system accountability in a meaningful way.
Where things are working well is when supports are already integrated at a local level, such as when daycare, intervention teams, and clinicians collaborate directly. These moments show what is possible when systems genuinely work together.
Broad scale changes are needed in how services are resourced and delivered. This includes:
* Addressing workforce shortages across health and social service sectors
* Ensuring timely access to supports without requiring escalation or crisis
* Reducing reliance on diagnosis alone, particularly for young children
* Improving accountability for service access and delivery across systems
Overall, the plan reflects the right direction in terms of values and intent. However, without addressing capacity, system barriers, and accountability, there is a risk that it will add complexity rather than reduce it for families who are already navigating an overwhelming system.
From both my personal and professional experience, families do not need more layers — they need timely, accessible, and sustainable supports that meet their children’s needs where they are at.
In Protecting and Uplifting the Most Vulnerable, there is mention of keeping kids at home, and improving care and oversight for children in care. Where does kinship care fit into this? It is not mentioned in the action plan or outcomes framework. Kinship needs to be better supported, including for private kinship arrangements made outside the child welfare system. Child in the Home of a Relative program needs to come back to keep kids with family.
There are many positives to the plan with key steps having already been initiated with other programs and initiatives.
One thing that may be helpful would be a family navigator who stays with the family the entire time and are the go to contact for the family who then advocates for services based on their understanding of services. they bridge the gaps.
One caution is the level of division of current services such as CYMH for example. CYMH is already responsible for school supports, health and psychiatry, eating disorders, substance use, Foundry, ICY, and direct services to children and families, children and families in care, and community support and education.
In smaller communities you may have one clinician working alone trying to manage the competing expectations with increased needs and complexity even with early intervention.