Twenty years of Harmony Support & Care: how it started and why it still matters

In July 2005, Harmony Schofield and Iain McGill started a small agency in Edinburgh with a straightforward idea: that people in health and social care deserved better. Better support, better matched workers, and an agency run by people who actually understood the sector — because they had worked in it themselves.
Twenty years later, that idea is still the one that drives us.

Both Harmony and Iain came from direct support work backgrounds. They met while working in a homeless hostel in 2003. They saw, from the inside, what happened when agencies were run by people who thought of care as a staffing problem to be solved rather than a human relationship to be supported. They wanted to do something different.
The agency started small, a handful of workers, a tight-knit group of clients, and a commitment to answering the phone whenever it rang. That last part has never changed. We have been on-call 24 hours a day, every day, since we opened. And we have never missed a call.

Over two decades, Harmony has grown into something none of us quite predicted. We now work with over 100 support workers at any one time, including a permanent team of 22. We support individuals through Self-Directed Support, supply staff to charities, public sector organisations, and private providers across Scotland, and run our own Care Inspectorate registered service: Harmony Care and Support Services.
In 2024, we became an SQA Accredited Training Centre, one of the few care and support providers in Scotland to also deliver the SVQ3 qualification needed for SSSC registration. That was a big moment for us, and one we are proud of.
What has not changed is the way we work. We still make decisions based on what is right for the person being supported and the worker doing the supporting. We still take the time to match people properly. And we still pick up the phone.

• Workers who have been with us for 15 years or more, because they feel genuinely valued and supported
• Clients who have been with us almost from the start, because we built relationships, not just rotas
• A track record with complex cases that other agencies could not support
• A team that genuinely likes each other and shows up for each other

This year, we also introduced a new name: Harmony Support & Care. You may have known us as The Harmony Employment Agency, a name that served us well, but never quite captured what we actually do. We are not primarily a recruitment agency. We are a support and care organisation that also happens to employ great people.
The new name, and the new website you are reading this on, are part of the same story. We are not changing who we are. We are just making it a bit clearer.

We are continuing to grow across Scotland, expanding the areas and communities we serve. We are building out our training offer and developing new services. And we are still taking calls at 3am when we need to.
If you have been with us for any part of these 20 years, as a client, a family member, a support worker, or a partner organisation, thank you. If you are new to Harmony, we hope this gives you a sense of who we are. You can find out more about our services at the links below.