On the blog

Building Standards - powerful tools to help ensure accountability

bill — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:19:13 +0000

This video from Nottingham explores the importance of building in the voice and influence of children and young people across services and organisations. There are a range of tools available to help with this. Two I make a lot of use of are the PowerPoint called Building Standards and the pamphlet that goes with it which are attached below.

Both of these were written by young people for everyone. They have been superbly illustrated by Brick, the international cartoonist with cartoons that show what happens when things go wrong and the standards are not kept to!

There are lots more tools that can help building voice and influence into an organisation. Drop me a line to bill@practicalparticipation.co.uk to explore more.

Attachment	Size
2-Building Standards 2010.ppt	979 KB
3-Building Standards by yp.pdf	791.91 KB

Rightspace National Event is cancelled

Fizz Shenton — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 12:57:45 +0000

The Rightspace National Event on April 19th has been cancelled........I have today, reluctantly, cancelled the event that we had planned to take place in Sheffield on 19th April. In the current climate it has just proved to be too difficult for people to book places and, although we had hoped that by postponing from the original date in October we would be able to increase the number of participanjts this has just not happened. Thanks to everyone who had planned to take part and apologies for any inconcvenience caused.

Felicity Shenton

The next Regional Rightspace Seminar

Fizz Shenton — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 10:49:16 +0000

The next Regional Rightspace Seminar will be held in historic Durham Town Hall on Thursday 24th February. For further information on the programme for the event or to book a place please email felicity.shenton@durham.gov.uk or phone Investing in Children 0191 3867485.

An Extreme Group of Young People for County Durham

Fizz Shenton — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 10:05:48 +0000

A group of disabled young people from the North East of England recently visited Brussels as part of the EY2010 European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion. See the attached link for their story...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/wear/hi/front_page/newsid_9180000/9180103.stm

Open Data and Accountability

admin — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 22:24:19 +0000

Open Data is a big thing right now. The last government, and the current government, have been committed to making non-personal information held by government open and accessible to citizens.

Open government data could be:

Details of government spending;
Performance statistics;
Information on where services are;
Organisational charts of central and local government

Much of the data government has made available can be found at http://www.data.gov.uk - including a large number ofdatasets about children in care and other datasets about young people and education.
In a recent open space discussion session at the CROA conference we talked a lot about the release of government spending data. All local authorities have to publish spending over £500 by January next year (guidance and consultation). Sites like Armchair Auditor and Openly Local are taking the spending data that has been published already - and are making it easy to browse and search.

With the Audit Office being abolished, government expect that citizens will be auditing what councils spend money on - using this open data to cast a critical eye over government spending and to set priorities. We talked about how advocates could enable young people to scrutinise open spending data, and other open datasets. Wider participation projects also need to think about how they will use open government data in their work - and how they will empower young people to be part of the citizen groups scrutinising government activitiy.

There is potentially a tension between data and voice/participation when it come to influencing the way services and communities are developed and governed. The idea that the story told by 'data', and the story told by children and young people can differ will hardly be an unfamiliar idea to many people who have worked to support youth participation. Is the right response to reject the use of data in driving service reform? Or to better equip young people to be interpreters of data - shaping statistics into stories that represent their lived-lives, and not that steamroller over the complexities and contradictions of growing up in many challenging contexts.

In the open space discussions with CROA we talked about events like Young Rewired State where young people have created impressive tools with data, such asGovSpark (focussed on energy saving); but we also talked about the importance of asking the right questions with data. We discussed the importance of not just relying on central government to provide data - but how CROA members may also hold important data and information that could be used to drive the improvement of services. By using shared lists of categories for issues and interventions, CROA members could put together their own datasets.

A practical suggestion from the open space session was that we should set up a workshop to explore data, advocacy and participation more (certainly something I'd be keen to get involved in!). Would you be interested in such a workshop? Let me know.

Youth Participation and the Big Society

admin — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 22:09:35 +0000

One of the big changes in political dialogue since the coalition government came to power has been the emphasis on ideas of the 'big society'. The big society is not a fixed policy programme, but is a loose collection of ideas - including ideas about localism and citizens taking on roles that previously may have been carried our or co-ordinated by the state.

I've reflected before on whether there is a clear notion of young people in the big society, but a really useful recent paper from the North West Regional Youth Work Unit takes the discussion further - setting out a range of different approaches that have been taken to young people's participation over recent years and asking how each will fare within a discourse of smaller state and big society.

With their permission I've put the document online using a tool that lets you read and comment on particular paragraphs - so do take a look and share your thoughts on what big society means for approaches to youth participation including:

Youth led grant giving
Youth inspectors
Shadow boards and youth panels
Youth councils and fora
Campaigning work
Regional youth fora & youth parliaments
Peer education
Short-term projects
Rights and advocacy work
Health service participation
and
Youth-led organisations

Dan Moxton's analysis for NWRYWU notes that formal structures might have tougher times finding the resources to engage more excluded young people - but that peer-leadership and volunteering programmes (not strictly youth participation in most definitions, as the report notes) are likely to fit right in with big society rhetoric and action. Youth-led grantmaking faces an uncertain future with the loss of central YOF and YCF ringfenced funding, although for some in the YouthBank movement who saw YOF and YCF as a distraction from effective youth-led fundraising and grantmaking - this may present opportunities as well as challenges.

To add your comments just click the speech bubble icons next to each paragraph. I'll try and round up some of the discussion and post a future blog item here with a summary of some of the thoughts shared...

Read and comment here.

In a week full of doom and gloom some good news!

Fizz Shenton — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 12:57:23 +0000

Amidst a difficult and challenging week for most of us we want to make sure we don't lose any ground in our efforts to promote the human rights of children and young people. We are delighted, therefore, to be able to announce that Dr. Maggie Atkinson, The Children’s Commissioner for England, has accepted our invitation to provide a commentary on the children’s human rights agenda from her perspective at the RightSpace National Event to be held on 19^th April 2011 in Sheffield.

To book a place please contact Investing in Children 0191 386 7485 or felicity.shenton@durham.gov.uk

RightSpace events update

bill — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 15:41:21 +0000

Our proposed seminar at De Montfort University on Tuesday 26 October has been postponed, but we are still building toward the large national event in Sheffield on 19 April 2011. For further information contact felicity.shenton@durham.gov.uk.

Consulting on cuts: Roger Morgan and Mike Lindsey from Office of the Children's Rights Director

admin — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:36:07 +0000

I was at an event with local authority participation workers recently where many workers expressed frustration that they had been told not to consult with young people on public spending cuts because of the risk of a conflict of interest. Yet, as Dr Roger Morgan and Dr Mike Lindsey from the Office of the Children's Right Director emphasised at the CROA Conference, "It's important that children and young people do get consulted about priorities and cuts, as well as their being consulted on what happens in good times, their being consulted on what happens in bad times too is absolutely vital".

You can hear directly from Roger and Mike in the video report by Joe Roberson below. As they explain: "We're doing more consultation than we've ever done before to feed into government decision making" and "consulting children is not just a good thing to do in relation to Article 12, participation etc. It's also a pretty smart thing to do in terms of efficiency."

How can public employees support young people to express their views on current policy and spending changes? Are we doing enough? Or is there more that could be done?

:D :) :| :( How do you feel about participation & rights right now?

admin — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:58:03 +0000

Bill Badham got everyone to their feet at the start of the CROA conference - asking participants to move around the room and vote with their feet to answer four key questions. Participants could stand by one of four faces:

:D The delighted face - We're doing well on this issue.

:) The happy face - We're doing OK;

:| The unhappy face - We're not doing so well on this

:( The very unhappy face - We're not doing well on this at all.

The graph shows how participants here at the conference felt.

How do you feel about our four statements? You could copy them into a comment below and add your own 'face' to the end of each statement along with some comments if you like to share where you think we are on children and young peoples human rights and participation right now.

The four questions

1) Children and young peoples human rights have made significant advances in the last 13 years

2) The participation of children and young people has made a big impact on organisations and how services are delivered

3) The participation of children and young people has made a significant difference to their lived lives

4) I am positive about the next decade for advancing children and young people's human rights