Julie Cameron
Every child deserves the chance to grow up healthy, happy, safe, and supported. Childhood health inequalities in Scotland are deeply unjust, but they are not inevitable. Scotland needs a bold, joined-up preventative policy approach.
On 27 February 2025, the Mental Health Foundation and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) co-hosted a national workshop on childhood health inequalities. More than 40 experts from the public, voluntary and academic sectors came together to identify and bridge gaps between research, policy, and practice and jointly confront a stark reality: Scotland’s children continue to face profound and preventable health inequalities.
It is to Scotland’s shame that children growing up in our most socio-economically deprived areas experience significantly worse physical and mental health outcomes than children in more affluent areas. They are:
- 6.5x more likely to have experienced three or more adverse childhood experiences by age eight
- 2.9x more likely to have emotional and behavioural difficulties by age three
- 3x more likely to have developmental concerns
- 10x more likely to be exposed to tobacco smoke during pregnancy
- 2x more likely to be obese at school entry
- And 3x more likely to die in their first year of life.
Long-term impact
These disparities result in deeply damaging long-term personal, societal and economic costs by stymying people’s life-chances based on their position in society. They also perpetuate cycles of disadvantage across generations.
Progress gaps
Expert discussions during the workshop identified three recurring gaps holding back progress:
Disconnect between research, policy, and practice. Despite a wealth of research, too often it fails to shape policy effectively, and national strategies frequently fail to translate at the local level.
Missed opportunities for co-design. Families, children, and diverse communities are rarely meaningfully included in shaping policies that affect them. The exclusion of lived experience as a central feature of such policies often makes them less effective in practice.
Data limitations. Current tools don’t capture the full picture. Experts stressed the need for richer, more accessible data—including qualitative insights—to truly understand what works, for whom, and why.
There was acknowledgement that these gaps sit within a broader context of significant underfunding across public services, with particular implications for third sector organisations burdened by short term funding cycles and related bureaucracy.
Urgent need for change
The key overarching message from the workshop is the urgent need to make a decisive shift from reactive, short-term fixes to preventative, upstream interventions to meet the Scottish Government’s child poverty targets by 2030.
This means investing in better living conditions, equitable access to services, stable incomes, food security, trauma-informed whole-family support, and inclusive, community-led policy design.
Workshop participants were also clear that bridging the gaps between research, policy and practice to reduce childhood health inequalities therefore necessitates the following actions:
- Investing in prevention—not crisis response.
- Empowering communities through co-designed policies.
- Improving data access and quality, especially for underrepresented groups giving researchers and practitioners the tools to act.
- Supporting the third sector with long-term, flexible funding.
- Prioritising strategic research into mental health, digital harms, and in-work poverty.
Time for a bold, preventative policy approach
Every child deserves the chance to grow up healthy, happy, safe, and supported.
Childhood health inequalities in Scotland are deeply unjust, but they are not inevitable. They are the result of political choices—about policy, investment, and priorities.
As the workshop’s findings make clear, Scotland needs a bold, joined-up preventative policy approach, rooted in equity and empathy to effectively tackle these inequalities. With a Scottish Parliament Election on the horizon, now is the time for policymakers to show how they intend to put such an approach into practice.