Children's Health and Wellbeing - Horizon Scanning Review

1. Introduction

Improving the health and wellbeing of children and young people is one of the key commitments of the Scottish Government. This report sets out the predicted societal trends and shifts that will shape the lives of children and young people in Scotland over the next decade. These trends will provide the context in which any policy activity occurs and therefore understanding them is crucial to successful planning policy activity around child health and wellbeing. 

This report discusses relevant findings from the UK horizon scanning literature, focusing on expected trends and shifts in demography, the labour market, economic inclusion, education, technology and social patterns.

1.1 Methods 

This report focuses on areas where expert predictions were made in existing key horizon scanning documents produced by the UK government. Horizon scanning is a technique for detecting early signs of potentially important developments through a systematic examination of potential threats and opportunities, with emphasis on new technology and its effects on the issue at hand. The method calls for determining what is constant, what changes, and what constantly changes. It explores novel and unexpected issues as well as persistent problems and trends, including matters at the margins of current thinking that challenge past assumptions.^[1] From a government perspective, horizon scanning is used to help governments adopt more long term approaches and make policy more resilient to future societal shifts.

Predictions from the UK are presented alongside relevant trend data and projections from other sources, but no attempt is made to review all factors that may influence children and young people’s health and wellbeing. A comprehensive review of the current evidence base on this is available elsewhere.^[2]

1.2 Structure of the report

The topics identified and discussed in this report are demography, the labour market, economic inclusion, education, technology and societal patterns. Each section in this report describes the current trends, sets out future projections and provides a summary of key points.