Engaging in the Parliamentary Elections – even when you can’t vote!

The Scottish Parliamentary Elections are only six weeks away – and you will have seen lots of talk from all the political parties in Scotland about what their priorities and promises are for the next Parliamentary session, 2026 -2031. Once you turn 16, you can vote in these Elections and have a direct say in who represents you locally, regionally and nationally! However, it’s really important to remember that voting is only one of many different ways to get involved in the Election and ensure your voice is heard.

SYP has a spate of resources available to help you get out there and talk to your local representatives and decision-makers! Even if you can’t cast a vote right now, you can absolutely still tell decision-makers about the issues that matter to you and how they can work with you to make the local area, and the country, even better for children and young people to grow up in.

You will have heard lots about our SYP 2026-2031 Manifesto, ‘Dear Scotland’s Future’, which we first launched back in September 2025. It has 31 key policies that matter the most to children and young people across Scotland and were formed through consultation with nearly 5,000 young people, aged 12-25. Go check it out and see what issues are in there that interest you the most: Dear Scotland’s Future – Scottish Youth Parliament

To help you get in touch with your decision-maker and support you in advocating for the Manifesto’s 31 issues, we also created a resource pack with lots of ideas and activities including a letter template and advice on how to run a Hustings: Manifesto Campaign Pack for 2026

Organising a Hustings

Speaking of Hustings, MSYPs down in the Scottish Borders recently hosted their own Hustings to engender direct dialogue between Parliamentary candidates and young people. Read below for some top tips from Toby Piper-Lewins MSYP and Emily Tweddle MSYP for Ettrick, Roxburgh and Berwickshire.

1. Prepare in advance! A problem that we encountered was that we did not get the number of schools we would have liked to as we did not announce the Hustings early enough. In the end we had 3 schools. Next time we would give over 3–4 months so the schools can schedule this in. It would be especially great if this could collide with Modern Studies.
2. Hybrid meetings are a great way to allow attendance from schools either further away or that cannot reasonably commute to the Hustings. This is especially apparent in our rural constituency, to get from one side to the other would take nearly the entire school day!
3. We found that holding them in schools was an effective way to ensure participation of young people, although we would like young people from non-formal education initiatives to get involved. This is something we would want to work on for the next elections, potentially through more use of online and hybrid spaces.
4. We also found that the candidates enjoyed having the chance to directly speak to young people, and the school appreciated the depth and understanding it gave to their students. We are going to be doing this for the Scottish Borders Council Election next year and hopefully making this a regular occurrence for future elections. There should be young people’s Hustings for every election, no matter the electoral level. Young people told us they wanted more Hustings, and actually one young person said: “That was great. Thanks for organising it. I now have a clearer idea of who to vote for. We should have more of these.”
5. Review the script earlier. We found that the script did not always work when spoken out in this context, we would have a read through of the script and make changes before the event.
6. Time limits for questions. Some candidates went over reasonable time and especially in our limited time this meant that not all questions could be answered.
7. Hold the Hustings for longer time period. The 30 minutes went extremely quickly and unfortunately not all questions were answered – next time we are considering extending the Hustings to an hour!
   We hope you found these tips useful in the run up to the May Elections! Our jobs as MSYPs are vital during these periods of Elections as we can organise events, such as Hustings, for young people’s benefit to make sure that everyone’s voice is heard.

Meeting with decision-makers

Another MSYP who has been getting out and about and hearing directly from MSPs ahead of the Election is Matthew Gordon MSYP for Glasgow Kelvin. Rather than host a Hustings, Matthew has been busy interviewing his local candidates directly and compling it all together to help other young people understand the different policies. Check out some of Matthew’s advice to help you do the same!

“Democracy is about holding power to account. As we all know too well, the Scottish Parliament election is coming up. As usual, all the media attention and performative politics can make it really hard to tell what’s what. As someone who spends an obsessive amount of time reading about politics, it’s still insanely difficult to figure out what peoples’ policies actually are – so I get the feeling of apathy so many young people have. That’s why I decided to interview every candidate in Glasgow Kelvin and Maryhill, and compile them into a video for young people to understand the state of the campaigns in one place.

I started by emailing every candidate as they were announced. As is a universal experience among MSYPs, I got aired more often than not, so I decided to phone up some of the unresponsive parties to try and secure a date: and it worked! If you’re wanting to do the same, I couldn’t recommend phoning parties enough, even if it can feel really intimidating at first (I had to write myself a script so I could actually speak clearly).

Having secured interviews with a good few of the candidates so far, my priority for the next few weeks is to do every bit of research I possibly can to create factsheets and ensure that everything I post from these interviews is true and disinformation-free – so young people can genuinely make up their own opinion when presented with all the facts, not pseudo-facts biased towards one party or another. That’s my second top tip – create fact sheets and double-check everything that candidates may say to ensure we remain impartial and fully truthful, it will save you in the long run and help to ask important questions.

So far, even though this project is in its infancy, it’s been fantastic to work with candidates from across political divides and build relationships that could prove vital over the next 5 years – for you, and for generations of MSYPs still to come. Even if your social following is low – like mine… – we can still inform so many young people. In my opinion, if we manage to convince one young person, just one, to vote and be informed in doing so, we have won. Because democracy is about holding power to account. All power. If you have the time and resources to speak to your candidates, I couldn’t recommend it enough”.