In February 2025, the Scottish Youth Parliament was asked by the Scottish Government to work alongside Futures Practitioners from Demos Helsinki to deliver a workshop to explore young people’s vision for the future of Scotland. This workshop was co-designed and facilitated by an Investigation Team – four Members of the Scottish Youth Parliament – to make sure it was interactive, inclusive and accessible. In this blog post, the Investigation Team members, Daniela, Jack, Matthew, and Skye, share their experiences.
Earlier this year, we were invited to join the Horizon Scanning Investigation Team to help shape a Horizon Scanning workshop for young people. Horizon scanning is a practice where we look toward the future to explore emerging trends. When we do horizon scanning, we try to identify key future challenges, risks and opportunities – and to explore which futures are desirable and how we may pursue them. Organisations use this type of data for long-term planning and policy.
Having young people leading projects like this is important because it allows for peer support and to develop a closer bond. As we are similar in age, it can feel easier to communicate, and if the project is about young people then we should be involved at all stages, including the facilitation process. – Skye Morgan MSYP, LGBT Youth Scotland
We started the project by taking part in a training day, where we had training on inclusive facilitation and staying safe. Lily and Joao from Demos Helsinki then joined us to share their experiences of horizon scanning, and to help us to start thinking about what that might look like for young people. After the training day, we met online to shape the different activities we would be doing at the workshop and to help us prepare to facilitate.
Being a member of this team was such a beneficial experience and unique opportunity to develop skills as well as contribute to such an important and interesting project. – Matthew McColm MSYP, Ayr
The workshop took place on Saturday 22nd February 2025, and 15 young people came from a really diverse range of backgrounds. Through the day, we facilitated lots of different activities, including looking at trend cards to think about long-term changes; exploring future states to think about how different choices and polices could lead to different futures; and creating future artefacts to help make abstract trends clearer and feel more real.
The five themes we explored through the day were:
- Climate and environment.
- Economy and jobs.
- Politics and governance.
- Society and community.
- Health and habits.
The Government should definitely replicate this approach for different topics, and involve more young people. Being a member of the Investigation Team was a very insightful experience. It made me aware of different ways to look at and talk about the future. – Daniela Onyewuenyi MSYP, Paisley
Staff from Demos Helsinki and the Scottish Government came for the whole day, which was really valuable because they got to see how important it is for young people to lead workshops like this.
Being in the Investigation team was a really meaningful experience. Having the opportunity to shape and facilitate a session with the Scottish Government showed that young people’s voices were valued. – Jack Anderson MSYP, Dundee City East
After the workshop, we helped to review the findings and share our insights from the day, which were all fed into the report the Scottish Government has published today.
These reports will be used by the Scottish Government alongside the findings from their wider horizon scanning exercise to support decision makers when thinking about long term policy making and the future implications of the decisions they might make.
We would like to thank all of the young people who took part in this project for coming along and sharing their views, and SYP staff, Demos Helsinki, and the Scottish Government for supporting us to co-design and facilitate this exciting project!
