Journey to the Annual Cabinet Meeting

Project Officer, Alyssa Faulkner, reflects on the process of this year’s Annual Cabinet Meeting with Children and Young People, which has been our most rigorous yet – to ensure we have widespread representation of children in Scotland.


Members of Children's Parliament share with Scotland's First Minister

On the 19th of November 2024, eight Members of Children’s Parliament, alongside young people from the Scottish Youth Parliament, met with First Minister John Swinney and the Scottish Cabinet to share their concerns and ideas on what needs to change for children in Scotland and their specific calls to action.

This was the 7th annual meeting of the Cabinet with children and young people. As far as we are aware this is the only process of its kind where children feed into Cabinet and government decision making at the highest level.  Our ‘Child Human Rights Defenders (CHRD)’ project supports a team of children to participate in democratic processes at local, national and international levels. The path to the annual Cabinet meeting this year took many months of preparation and involved hard work and creativity with hundreds of other children to narrow down the issues that children in Scotland felt needed action now. As part of the process, the Child Human Rights Defenders met with the Scottish Government Executive Team and policy leads to further drive their calls to action.  This work ensured the integrity of the Cabinet process as truly reflective of children’s lived experiences and can be a meaningful mechanism for change in Scotland.

A five-step process was followed:

Desk Research: Understanding the Issues

The journey began long before the meeting with the First Minister and his Cabinet. The Children’s Parliament, in partnership with the Children’s Rights Unit of the Scottish Government, with support from Together and the Commissioner’s Office, embarked on an extensive desk research process at the start of 2024. We reviewed over 30 reports, videos, surveys and other resources from children’s rights organisations, painting a comprehensive picture of the issues affecting children in Scotland today.

This research was crucial in identifying the broad and varied challenges children face, from mental health concerns and educational inequalities to poverty and the climate crisis. But this was only the beginning. The desk research helped to build a long list of these issues, laying the foundation for the next step in the process.

Survey: Listening to the Ideas of Children

The long list of issues identified through desk research was shared with Members of Children’s Parliament (MCPs), children aged 8 to 14 from across Scotland, who have engaged in Children’s Parliament projects. Over 175 MCPs took part in a survey, ranking 10 headline issues in order of what they felt were the most important to address now.

We sent the survey to MCPs as we felt they would have the correct support to engage in an online survey, together with the background knowledge of children’s rights from their work with us to support their decision-making.

Using a survey to rank these issues is a newer process for us and allowed us to gather views from a wider pool of children in Scotland. During the surveying process, we learned that surveys are often inaccessible for younger children and as such, some required support from professionals (such as teachers) to ensure they could understand and fully give their opinions. The survey was successful in allowing us to narrow the issues down further.

Shortlist: Narrowing Down the Issues

With information from both the desk research and the survey, the Child Human Rights Defenders got together and worked on narrowing down the long list of issues to a focused set of priorities. This was a vital step, as it required the Child Human Rights Defender team to consider not only the urgency of the issues in relation to children in Scotland and their rights, but also their potential for impact. This process also considered what was already being done by the Scottish Government to address these concerns.

Children shortlisting calls to action
Class Missions: Gathering More Evidence

The Child Human Rights Defender team didn’t stop at just narrowing down the issues—they needed to ensure they had the most accurate, up-to-date and comprehensive evidence to support their Calls to Action. To do this, they ran class ‘missions’ in schools, engaging an additional 120 children across Scotland. These missions allowed the Child Human Rights Defenders to gather even more evidence from their peers, building a richer understanding of how the issues they had identified were affecting children in different parts of the country. These class missions were not just about collecting data; they were about fostering a sense of collective action. Children’s Parliament doesn’t do participation in isolation – we ultimately seek culture and behavioural change and engage the children’s schools (peers, adults and teachers) and families in the work – so there is widespread understanding of what children’s rights in action look like.

Class missions

By involving other children in the process, the Child Human Rights Defenders ensured that their calls to action truly reflected the real lived experiences of children across Scotland.

Calls to Action: Driving Change

After months of research, surveys, class missions and thoughtful discussion, the Child Human Rights Defenders arrived at their Calls to Action. These were not just abstract demands; they were concrete, actionable proposals designed to address some of the most pressing issues facing children in Scotland:

One

Bullying and Mental Health: Bullying is a big reason for mental health problems in schools. Scottish Government needs to prioritise preventing bullying and supporting children with poor mental health in schools by ensuring dignity and a rights-based approach is at the heart of every school in Scotland.

At school, everyone needs to feel like they exist, they matter, they’re cared for.

Member of Children’s Parliament
Two

Climate Crisis Education: Children are worried about climate change. They don’t learn enough about the environment or have enough opportunities to have a meaningful say on their future. Scottish Government needs to find solutions to these worries and put children at the heart of their climate action.

If adults don’t know about it, how are we meant to!

Member of Children’s Parliament
Three

Vaping: Vaping is often seen by children as a ‘healthy’, ‘cool’ alternative to smoking. Scottish Government need to reduce children’s access to vaping and increase their understanding of its impact.

Packaging on cigarettes is better, they write on it that it can hurt you, but with vaping, they make it look better so kids want to buy it.

Member of Children’s Parliament

These Calls to Action were carefully crafted, with a deep understanding of the issues and a clear vision of the change that needs to happen. The Child Human Rights Defenders also came up with ideas to help with these issues. They went beyond merely identifying problems—they were offering real solutions that would make a difference in the lives of children across Scotland.

Executive Team Meeting

Prior to the Cabinet meeting, a group of Child Human Rights Defenders attended a meeting with the Executive Team at the Scottish Government, ensuring there is a process where there was a programme of review and action on the children’s calls before and after Cabinet. The Child Human Rights Defenders have and will continue to engage with different policy teams within the Scottish Government, as we want this process to be a meaningful dialogue on driving change, rather than a presentation of issues and a response to what is happening on those issues.

Executive Team meeting
A Child-Friendly Process

The culmination of the Child Human Rights Defender’s work was their participation in the annual Cabinet meeting with the First Minister and his Cabinet. This meeting is an important platform for the children to present their concerns to key policymakers. What made this meeting particularly special was the child-friendly, rights-based approach that was put in place, with the support of the Children’s Rights Unit at Scottish Government, to ensure that the children’s views were heard clearly, respectfully and in an environment where they felt comfortable. As Article 12 of UNCRC states, children have a right to be heard. To ensure that children are truly listened to, there is a need to make the whole journey child friendly, including the meeting itself. It often doesn’t work to invite children into adult spaces without altering the environment to allow for meaningful participation of all children in the meeting.  The format of the meeting was therefore changed from a traditional boardroom meeting and instead, the children prepared their own room, filling it with their artwork and decorating the room to look like a garden. This allowed the children to feel ownership over the meeting and worked to equalise any power dynamics felt in what could have been a nerve-wracking experience.

I thought it was a really good time for us to practice and I liked how we changed an adult space into a child’s space with just a few things that we made – it just makes it so much more child friendly.

Member of Children’s Parliament

The thinking behind the garden was that the children’s ideas would plant a seed of change into the minds of the Cabinet. The children also invited the Cabinet to literally plant a flower seed during the meeting, so that when the flower begins to blossom in real life, they will be reminded of the changes that still need to be made. The children used their own artwork in the form of flower props as prompts whilst they presented their calls to action, and following their presentations they invited the Cabinet members to sit on bean bags in three discussion groups to delve deeper into the issues. The process of engagement to ensure a child rights approach to Cabinet is a longer and more complex journey than it may seem from the outside.  Beyond the process described above, it requires relationships to be made and developed with the children, their families and schools.  It requires knowledge and understanding of the issues.  Whilst 10-year-olds cannot be expected to review Government policy, the process requires children to explore their own and other children’s lived experience and compare that to what Government says is, or should be, happening. Investment in fun and creative approaches is essential to engaging younger children. Below you can see how much the Child Human Rights Defender team prepared for the Cabinet meeting, ensuring the process was fully child-friendly

The aim of the Cabinet meeting is to influence policy and practice in areas that children feel are important.  However, the wider goal is to embed rights-based practice and effect true culture change in society, ensuring children’s rights are respected, protected and fulfilled. We invite all adults to be ‘Unfearties’; unfeart (a Scottish word for ‘unafraid’) to stand up for children’s rights and advocate for children. Cabinet isn’t just about the meeting itself; it’s about the hearts and minds that are brought on the journey with us to ensure children’s rights are made real for everyone in Scotland, and the continuation of that journey through the ongoing work on the Calls to Action in the future.

I hope they actually listened to us, take us seriously and do something about [our calls to action]

Member of Children’s Parliament

I really want them to remember and report back to us about what they’re doing

Member of Children’s Parliament

To find out in more detail about the meeting and the children’s calls to action, please follow this link: https://www.childrensparliament.org.uk/our-work/childrens-parliament-meets-the-scottish-cabinet/

Date: 21st January 2025
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