Throughout 2020 Children’s Parliament listened to the views and experiences of children across Scotland. They told us their ‘Big Ideas’ for what needed to change in 2021 to make Scotland a better place both now and in the future. All of the ‘Big Ideas’ were chosen to help with the ‘Big Problems’ children wanted to fix in 2021 and in the future. The ‘Big Problems’ are:
– Climate Change
– Digital Inequality
– Discrimination
– Poverty
‘The Big Vote’, which ran from 15th-19th January 2021 was a chance for all children aged 8 – 14 from across Scotland to tell us which ‘Big Ideas’ from children they like best!
Throughout 2020 Children’s Parliament listened to the views and experiences of children across Scotland through face-to-face group work sessions (prior to Coronavirus and the associated restrictions), online group work, interviews, surveys, phone calls, activity packs, written journals, school workshops, and postcards.
Over the course of the year we gathered over 11,000 responses from children and, from these, we identified 100 key issues that had been raised by children in 2020. Children’s Parliament then worked with Members of Children’s Parliament aged 10 – 12 to identify the four ‘Big Problems’ facing children in Scotland today. In December 2020 Children’s Parliament designed a workshop to support children to tell us their action-focused ‘Big Ideas’ for how we could solve children’s ‘Big Problems’, making Scotland more prosperous, sustainable, inclusive, and fair both now and in the future.
The work fed into the The Action Project, hosted by the David Hume Institute, which aimed to get children and adults all across Scotland thinking about what we need to do to move faster towards a country that is more ‘prosperous, sustainable, inclusive and fair’. And – very importantly – the project developed ambitious, yet concrete, Big Ideas to do this that can be turned into real action.
Work supported by The David Hume Institute