Pregnancy and Parenthood in Young People Strategy

Felicity Sung, national lead for Pregnancy and Parenthood in Young People Strategy

The Pregnancy and Parenthood in Young People Strategy was published in March 2016. Since then, Scottish Government has been working to establish the Strategy and provide information across Scotland on the importance of this agenda and the evidence behind it.

In October, the first national progress report was published. The report sets out how we have progressed the priorities we identified for this first phase of implementation and what we plan to do next.

As set out in the report, the first period of delivery of the ten-year Strategy has been about establishing effective working relationships, communicating the evidence and aims of the Strategy and determining the initial priorities for implementation, namely:

• key messages for young people on consent and healthy relationships
• guidance for professionals to support young pregnant women and young fathers in their experience of maternity services
• improving access to, and provision of, post-partum contraception
• Young Scot's digital resource on pregnancy and support for young parents

Local implementation has been taking place through the development of needs assessments and action plans.

From October 2017, a second set of priorities was identified by the Steering Group:

• supporting young people with learning disabilities and other significant communication difficulties around healthy and safe relationships (including pregnancy prevention)
• increasing education and learning through encouraging and supporting school attendance as an intervention for reducing the risk of pregnancy, and enabling young parents to engage in education during pregnancy and following delivery.

This work will take place while we also finalise the outputs from the initial priorities, as well as continuing to support local areas in their implementation of the Strategy.

We have recently been working with our colleagues in the third sector on the development of a ‘Teen Parents Workers Forum’. The intention is that this forum will help to amplify the voices of the third sector agencies who support Scotland’s young parents, increasing sharing of good practice and reducing duplication.

The Forum is at a very early stage of development, if you’d like to get involved please contact Kath Miller kathryn@fifegingerbread.org.uk