One of the Scottish Youth Parliament’s (SYP) flagship events, the Annual Cabinet Meeting with Children and Young People – known as the Cabinet Takeover – will bring young people face to face with the First Minister and the Cabinet.
Since its launch in 2017, the Cabinet Takeover has taken place in partnership with the Children’s Parliament and the Scottish Government.
The annual meeting gives young people a platform to influence national policy, ensuring their voices are heard loud and clear at the highest level of decision-making in Scotland.
Ahead of this year’s meeting, a group of Members of the Scottish Youth Parliament (MSYPs) took part in a residential in early October to discuss which issues they’d like the Cabinet to focus on. The two-day event generated bold, youth-led ideas on topics that matter most to young people today.
During the residential, MSYPs also travelled to a youth centre in Edinburgh, where they met with young people aged 5 – 14 and played a series of games and activities.
MSYPs took a chance to ask them what they’d change if they were the First Minister for a day – the answers ranged from ‘no school on Mondays’ to ‘everyone has parents’ and ‘free homes for everyone.’
Marcus Flucker, MSYP for Angus South and SYP’s Vice Chair, commented:
Because this Cabinet meeting is part of a two-year cycle, discussions will centre on SYP’s three national projects: youth work, mental health, and gender-based violence. From calling for consistent funding for youth work services to improving access to community-based mental health training and urging for gender-based violence to be recognised as a hate crime, MSYPs will come to the cabinet table with evidence and their lived experience to amplify the voices of young people from across Scotland.
This year’s Takeover will also provide an opportunity to reflect on progress made since previous meetings, including the upgrade of the Mind Yer Time website following an independent evaluation of community-based mental health support led by SYP’s Mental Health Investigation Team.
SYP’s newly launched Dear Scotland’s Future manifesto offers a roadmap on how to achieve many of the ambitions that will be discussed at this year’s Cabinet Takeover. Cabinet Takeover is just one part of SYP’s campaigning and partnership work to make Scotland the best place in the world to grow up.
You can read our full manifesto, including the accessible versions, here.
