Listening to young people
The Government wants children and young people to have more opportunities to get involved in the design, provision and evaluation of policies and services that affect them or which they use. Ministers will be looking to their individual departments and agencies to develop robust but realistic arrangements to make sure this happens. Actively involving children and young people in this way will produce better services. Ultimately that will
produce better outcomes for children and young people, as well as stronger communities, as departments and agencies across government draw on children and young people’s contributions to shape and tailor services to meet real, rather than presumed needs.
The purpose of Learning to Listen is to:
- introduce the core principles on which this work should be based; provide departments with some early advice and background and with signposts to additional help, so that departments can develop effective plans and
- let departments know the broad timetable for action.
The guidance is divided into the following sections:
Section 1 What do we mean by children and young people’s ‘participation’?
Section 2 Why should children and young people be involved?
Section 3 The core principles
Section 4 Practical issues for action
Section 5 Next steps and action plans
Section 6 Annex – useful contacts
A resource for work with children and young people
The Evaluator’s Cookbook contains ideas for participatory evaluation exercises developed by National Evaluation of Children's Fund staff, Children’s Fund workers.
The Cookbook is divided into three main sections;
Starters
These are short ‘warm-up’ exercises which can be used to generate initial evaluation ideas and issues as well as setting a framework for actually evaluating individual sessions with participants
Main Courses
These are more substantial exercises. These aim to provide children and young people with opportunities to creatively explore the issues in their lives and generate evaluation information.
Puddings
These are again shorter exercises to ‘round off’ and evaluate sessions with participants.