Children’s and young people’s participation and engagement

A key aspect of achieving our vision that all children in Scotland have an equal chance to flourish is the inclusion and participation of children and young people in our work.

In line with this, our goal is to engage children and young people in meaningful, ongoing dialogue and to enable them to have effective and fulfilling participation in all areas of our work. This will help ensure their voices influence our own decisions and practices and those of policymakers and practitioners.

The participation of children and young people is also an important mechanism to ensure that we are listening and communicating to our members the views and perspectives of children and young people on a wide variety of issues. We combine this with the best available evidence of what works for supporting children and their families.

We aim to embed children and young people’s inclusion across all our work and go about this in a number of ways, including:

• A specific Participation & Engagement Team within the organisation
• The development of a children and young people’s advisory group to help shape all aspects of our work, Changing Our World
• One of our Strategic Plan priority areas being ‘championing participation and inclusion of children and young people’
• Delivery of specific projects and pieces of work focusing on the voices and experiences of children and young people
• Young people sitting on our Board of Directors (click here for more about the Board)
• An internal Participation and Engagement cross-organisation working group.

Sharing our learning and knowledge

We also like to share our learning and expertise in this area and support the wider work force in a number of ways:

• Our Learning and Events programme offers useful sessions for practitioners, including our free eLearning modules (click here for more about our eLearning Hub)
• We offer bespoke training for organisations on a child rights approach and participation methodologies (click here for more about bespoke training)
• Offering our Principles and Guidelines to meaningful participation and engagement of children and young people (click here to access)

If you would like to get in touch with regards to our participation and engagement work, please contact David Mackay: dmackay@childreninscotland.org.uk