In 2017, the Scottish Government and COSLA jointly launched a Local Governance Review, an attempt to ensure local communities have greater say in decisions that are made locally. As part of this, people across Scotland have been consulted on the future of community decision-making, through the ‘Democracy Matters’ consultation.
You can find further information about this consultation here.
As part of this process, Children’s Parliament was commissioned by the Scottish Government to secure the participation of children in the Local Governance Review, specifically in response to the ‘Democracy Matters’ strand of the review. Children’s Parliament’s consultation with children ran from April – September 2019.
We delivered a series of workshops with children, exploring the ideas of local democracy, decision-making and power. The workshops unpicked what works and doesn’t work for children, and looked at how Scotland might re-imagine the way children can be involved in how decisions are made in the future.
It was important, for this piece of work, that the children involved were able to reflect on their experiences of democratic processes at a local, community level. As most children in Scotland have, unfortunately, had limited or, in some cases, no meaningful local democratic experience, we worked with children from Dunkeld and Birnam who, through previous engagement with Children’s Parliament were involved in local consultations about the dualling of the A9 through Perthshire in 2017.
In response to the consultation, the children created this magazine: