We can’t keep tinkering at the edges: how to put prevention into practice now

Scotland has talked about prevention with enthusiasm for years.  We have frameworks, strategies and speeches full of ideas to take on the root causes of everything from drug and alcohol addiction to poor mental health and attendance and engagement in schools.

And yet the data we have keeps showing the same problems: more than 1000 drugs deaths, more than 700 people dying by suicide, a third of school children missing 19 days or more of school. 

We are still spending time and money mopping up crises after they already happened.

We have political will to change this, now we need the way. 

That’s where Planet Youth comes in. It offers a toolkit for delivering the prevention we keep saying we want. It is a disciplined, long-term, community-driven approach grounded in evidence from Iceland and now adapted for Scotland. Crucially, it aligns with the principles of public service reform and the ambitions of our population health framework: partnership, empowerment, intelligence-led decision-making and trusting communities to lead. 

Planet Youth shows what these ideas look like when they move from theory into practice.

Across Scotland, 40 hyper-local Planet Youth communities are now leading the way. They are using local data to understand the pressures young people face and then reshaping local systems as a result. 

We are seeing a quiet but significant shift in how people work together. Partners who previously operated in silos are now sitting around the same table, looking at shared evidence and designing solutions collectively. Several areas report that budgets are beginning to move too, shifting away from crisis response and towards earlier, preventative activity. And although it is still early days, we have evidence that young people are starting to make different choices around alcohol, drugs, vaping and how they choose to spend their time.

The Scottish Government’s drugs policy division has shown real leadership in supporting the Planet Youth pilots. At a time when Scotland is wrestling with deeply entrenched harms, backing a long-term, evidence-based prevention model was a bold and necessary choice. But pilots can only take us so far. If we are serious about prevention, Planet Youth can no longer sit at the margins. It needs to become mainstream.

The independent evaluation of Planet Youth strengthens that argument. It highlights strong local ownership, high-quality and actionable data, real improvements in partnership working, increased motivation among practitioners and greater community participation. 

And it sees Planet Youth as a replicable structure rather than a one-off programme. Not a temporary initiative but a long-term scaffold. But it doesn’t shy away from the systemic challenges we face.

One of the strongest recommendations from the evaluation is the creation of a national Scottish Prevention Framework. This is a moment of opportunity. A framework could bring together government departments, local authorities, the third sector and even businesses around a shared prevention methodology. It would be practical, evidence-informed and cut across different policy areas. This is not about creating something new or reinventing the wheel. It’s taking the globally renowned Planet Youth model and adapting it for Scotland. 

In a landscape full of well-intentioned strategies, this could be the mechanism that finally aligns Scotland’s ambition with delivery.

If Scotland is serious about tackling its wicked problems, we cannot keep tinkering at the edges. We must line up our budgets with what we know works, back communities with long-term support and allowing evidence to guide us even when it challenges what we think we know.

The question now is whether we have the collective will to take the next steps.

This article is sponsored by Winning Scotland.

www.planetyouth.scot