{"id":264408,"date":"2025-11-06T00:08:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T00:08:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/264408\/"},"modified":"2025-11-06T00:08:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T00:08:07","slug":"mental-health-bus-travel-and-school-meals-issues-that-matter-to-first-time-voters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/264408\/","title":{"rendered":"Mental health, bus travel and school meals – issues that matter to first-time voters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sophie Wright, 15, was also impressed by the event as a “very good opportunity” to ask questions of politicians.<\/p>\n

“I think there are many issues around bus travel, young carers, free school meals, things like that,” she said.<\/p>\n

“It was good to just hear what the MSPs were doing to help us with this.”<\/p>\n

Since 2022, everyone aged between five and 22 has been entitled to free bus travel in Scotland.<\/a><\/p>\n

Free school meals are available, external<\/a> for children from P1 to P5 and for older pupils if the family is in receipt of certain benefits.<\/p>\n

Sophie, too, will be a first time voter next year but knows that a lot of her generation are less engaged than she is – but her message to peers about politics is quite clear.<\/p>\n

“I think it definitely does affect young people,” she said.<\/p>\n

“If it doesn’t affect you, it will definitely affect people around you.<\/p>\n

“There are so many issues – like housing – that affects older people would also affect younger people, so it is important to get involved.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sophie Wright, 15, was also impressed by the event as a “very good opportunity” to ask questions of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264409,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[49,48,84,393,394],"class_list":{"0":"post-264408","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-mental-health","12":"tag-mentalhealth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}