This short report aimed at young people summarises work the Scottish Government did with Demos Helsinki, the Scottish Youth Parliament and the UK Government Office for Science. It presents the ideas of a small group aged 14-19 who participated in a workshop to help shape Scotland’s future.
The Scottish Government is building its foresight programme to anticipate the risks, opportunities and challenges that will shape Scotland’s future over the coming decades. A core part of this is the Scottish Government’s ongoing Horizon Scanning project which aims to identify key trends, risks and opportunities over a 10–20-year period. This can be used to inform policy, strategy and embed this work into policy development processes to improve longer-term planning, resilience and preparedness in the public sector, and with partners in the voluntary and private sectors in Scotland.
Background
To explore how best to integrate young people’s views into Horizon Scanning, the Scottish Government commissioned Demos Helsinki and the Scottish Youth Parliament to run an engagement with young people about Scotland’s future in order to understand their views, perspectives and priorities. The UK Government Office for Science partnered with the Scottish Government and co-funded this project. This offered an opportunity to develop and apply a methodology for engaging young people meaningfully in foresight work. This work aims to set a precedent for youth engagement on futures issues within the Scottish Government, demonstrating to other organisations in Scotland what this engagement can look like and the value of this work. An engagement workshop was held in Edinburgh on 22 February 2025, bringing together a small group of fifteen young people aged 14-19, and three members of the investigation team. This engagement was co-created and co-facilitated with a group of four Members of Scottish Youth Parliament that formed what we called the ‘Investigation Team’. This report documents the methodology and insights from the engagement to feed into current work in government and for further exploration. It concludes with recommendations for strengthening the integration of young people’s views in Scotland’s strategic foresight work.