Across Scotland, recent years have delivered powerful advances in policy and law for children and young people. The incorporation of the UNCRC into Scots Law, statutory duties for participation in planning, and commitments to Local Place Plans all point toward a system that recognises children’s rights as both moral imperatives and legal obligations.
Yet, on the ground, progress often stalls. Amid the swirl of political polarisation and the crises that define our age — from climate change to inequality — our systems remain hesitant to fully embed rights-based approaches.
A Place in Childhood (APiC) sees extraordinary good practice happening every day — in schools, communities, and partnerships. But we also see a system locked into cycles of constant “innovation,” often neglecting the power of approaches already proven to work.
Polarisation and the Danger of Losing Focus
We live in an age of polycrisis. Climate change, economic upheaval, mental health crises, and geopolitical instability create overlapping and existential threats. Yet paradoxically, public debate too often becomes consumed by polarising narratives — headlines, culture wars, and ideological divides that push real, lived experiences to the margins.
Children and young people, in particular, rarely get to set their own narrative about what it’s like to be young today. Their views and experiences risk being overshadowed by adult assumptions or reduced to symbols in wider debates. As we have documented across our work, teenagers can be simultaneously framed as both threats and saviours — blamed for social problems while also burdened with expectations to solve global challenges they did not create. Meanwhile, children express sensible and sincere ideas for improving their local community, which fail to happen due to funding gaps or the viewpoints of community members who hold more power than they do.
We consistently find that children and young people are eager to be part of prioritising and implementing solutions to the crises we face. Yet they also become stressed or apathetic when adults place on them the narrative that they alone will save us, or that their solutions cannot be implemented due to bureaucratic systems and procedures they do not understand. Rights-based practice is about balance: empowering young people as partners, not outsourcing adult responsibility.
The Myth of Perpetual Innovation
There’s no question that innovation has a role to play, especially in addressing challenges we don’t yet know how to solve. But the current landscape is crowded with funding calls seeking the “next big idea,” often framed as pilots, trials, or short-term experiments.
This can create an “Innovation Culture” treadmill:
- Reinventing the wheel rather than funding proven methods at scale
- Prioritising novelty over sustainability
- Producing fragmented knowledge rather than systemic change
Relational, creative, and participatory methods — like those we use in place planning — are not radical experiments. They’re robust, repeatable, and highly effective. The innovation lies in their consistent application, their adaptation to new contexts, and the courage to use them not just when we want something “new,” but as everyday infrastructure for children’s rights.
This goes far beyond place planning. Whether in education, health, justice, or community development, the same principle applies: knowledge and solutions already exist among children and young people. What’s missing is the appetite to embed and scale those approaches systematically.
Good Practice is Not Scarce — Appetite Is
We often hear that it’s not clear what good practice would look like in a particular context, or we don’t know enough about what works. However, we routinely see fantastic practice in schools, local authorities, community organisations, and dedicated individuals. The gap is not the knowledge, but communication of that knowledge. There are barely the resources for these groups to share their learnings in the forums where it would make most difference. This is something we are committed to change.
In our projects, from the co-creation of Plans in Shetland, Falkirk, and Edinburgh, to codesign of public and community spaces, we have seen:
- Deep local knowledge from children and young people, identifying practical improvements for safety, inclusivity, and environmental quality
- Strong partnerships between young people, schools, and local authorities, leading to shared ownership of plans
- Young people as solution designers, proposing simple ideas like safer crossings, better lighting, community art, and spaces to simply “hang out” without stigma, to more radical (but achievable!) ideas like an Intergenerational Diner, or community-building photography competition.
These insights reflect the truth we see time and again: children and young people want to participate, and they have the capacity to contribute meaningfully to the issues that affect them. But they’re rarely given the consistent opportunity — or the follow-through — that rights-based commitments demand.
Risk Aversion: The Invisible Barrier
One reason for this hesitation is risk aversion. Despite progressive laws and policies, many government bodies and funders remain wary of fully integrating participation. Concerns often include:
- Fear that engagement processes are unpredictable or will uncover uncomfortable truths
- Worries over reputational risks if public consultation surfaces dissent
- A preference for neat, quantifiable outcomes over the less tangible — but no less real — benefits of children’s voice and agency
Yet this misses the point entirely. Asking people is not the risk. The real risk lies in not asking them — and then acting without their insights, or even acting directly against their interests.
Participation isn’t an inefficiency. It’s a tool for accountability, effectiveness, and legitimacy. It ensures we’re solving the right problems, in ways that are sustainable and just.
Accountability Sinks — and How Participation Helps Counter Them
Dan Davies writes about “accountability sinks” — situations where responsibility dissolves into complex systems, and no one feels answerable for outcomes. Children’s rights and participation can cut through this fog.
When young people co-create plans, challenge assumptions, or articulate needs, they demand clarity:
- Who is responsible for making change happen?
- Why hasn’t progress been made?
- How will children and young people be kept informed about what happens next?
Participation anchors accountability in real experiences and relationships. It forces systems to show how policies translate into action — and how children’s rights become reality rather than rhetoric.
A Balanced Vision: Innovate — and Scale What Works
The future cannot rest on innovation alone. We urgently need to:
- Fund tried-and-tested approaches alongside new experiments. Good methods already exist. They should not be left scrambling for short-term project funding simply because they’re no longer “new.”
- Treat participation as core infrastructure, not an optional extra. Just as we budget for engineers and architects in planning, we must budget for relational and participatory processes across all policy areas.
- Shift the risk narrative. The true risk lies in exclusion, inaction or action that does not account for true need, not in listening to the people most affected.
- Embed feedback loops. Children and young people deserve to see what happens as a result of their contributions — and to hold systems accountable if commitments go unfulfilled.
Conclusion: Rights are Ready for Realisation
Scotland and the wider UK have made significant legal commitments to children’s rights. But rights require action. The methods are here. The good practice exists. The children and young people are ready — and willing — to help shape solutions for the complex challenges of our time.
The question is not whether we have the tools. It’s whether we have the courage to stop circling around novelty, and instead build on what works, scale it, and sustain it.
It’s time to move from policy promise to policy practice — and ensure children’s rights truly fall into place.