Children’s wellbeing and the Scottish budget

Children in Scotland worked in partnership with Dr Katherine Trebeck (Wellbeing Economy Alliance), the Carnegie Trust UK and early years funder Cattanach to raise awareness of what a robust child wellbeing approach to the Scottish budget would involve.

The project involved desktop research complemented by strategic interviews, with the aims of:

• Exploring the layers of root causes that undermine children’s wellbeing
• Setting out the importance of a government budget that provides for investment rather than tackling symptoms of, for example, deprivation
• Examining the expected benefits of a wellbeing budget and how to design the budget accordingly
  Making recommendations about the the key changes required to government systems, budget-making processes, and the culture around them, to deliver on this ambition.
• Key areas of attention encompassed international best practice and ways to harness the National Performance Framework (NPF) to link government expenditure to interventions and preventative spend that improve children’s wellbeing.

The research project took a root cause perspective and examined why a life-stages approach to outcome-based budgeting underpins the attainment of a wellbeing economy.

In light of NPF evidence that the wellbeing of children in Scotland is not improving fast enough, and in the context of aspirations for post-Covid renewal, the project aimed to support a potentially transformational ambition for a Scottish children’s wellbeing budget.