Every June, thousands of school leavers across Scotland step through the gates for the last time, clutching their SQA results and facing a world that can feel suddenly enormous. In Perth — a market town where the next stop for many ambitious young people is a university city or a new job elsewhere — that transition can feel particularly sharp. You leave a familiar community, and you arrive somewhere that doesn't yet know your name.
That's the gap our organisation exists to fill. Vibrant Health Advocates – Gamma has been running mental-wellbeing and life-skills workshops for school leavers in Perth for several years now, and the programme has grown steadily because the need is real and the results speak plainly. We work with young people aged 16 to 19, primarily in the months just before and after they leave school, offering a series of structured sessions that cover stress management, understanding mental health services, building daily routines, and communicating clearly with GPs, employers, and landlords.
The workshops are deliberately conversational. We don't hand out laminated leaflets or recite statistics. Instead, facilitators — many of whom grew up in Perthshire themselves — sit with groups of eight to twelve young people and work through real scenarios. What do you do when anxiety is stopping you from sleeping the week before you start a new job? How do you register with a GP in a city where you know nobody? How do you ask for help without feeling like you're making a fuss?
One of our most popular sessions is what we call the 'Boring But Important' workshop — a two-hour deep dive into the administrative side of adult life that nobody teaches in school. Participants learn how to read a payslip, what to do if their mental health dips and they're not sure who to call, and how NHS 24 and local CAMHS services work once you age out of the school support system. It sounds dry on paper. In practice, the room is always buzzing.
This year we ran sixteen workshop series across Perth and the surrounding area, reaching just over two hundred young people before the summer break. Feedback has been consistently strong: 87 percent of participants said they felt more confident managing their own health after attending, and nearly three quarters said they knew more clearly who to contact in a mental health crisis than they had before.
We know that the young people who leave Perth often come back — for weekends, for summers, eventually to build lives here. Our goal isn't to keep them in one place; it's to send them out into the world with a toolkit that actually works. When they're ready to come home, we want them to have thrived in the meantime.
Our next workshop series begins in August. Sessions are free, informal, and open to all young people aged 15–19 in Perth and Kinross. You don't need to be struggling. You just need to be curious about how to look after yourself well.
