Tackling Child Exploitation Programme — Young People’s voices in strategic decision making. #Week 2: 13th November 2020

Both Isabelle and I are so pleased with the engagement we have received from our Twitter conversations so far — it’s been wonderful to hear from so many of you, especially connecting with colleagues across the sector that we haven’t previously met.

Our second question was: what is your approach to engaging CYP (Children and Young People) in participation work to inform strategic work to develop child exploitation and extra-familial harm responses?

What we hoped this question would achieve is for us to increase the sector’s understanding of how senior leaders are working with children and young people, and to share approaches to encourage others to do so. Approaches across the sector can vary significantly, from engaging young people in participation work to informing a campaign or design a service specification. However, we wanted to probe a little further to identify specific examples and to consider what skills are specifically required from us as senior leaders to enable meaningful participation.

Some of the examples of approaches we heard about were:

• “Build requirement to coproduce service with young people into the contract/commissioning process”
• “Young person led social media campaigns”
• “Through the development of a trusted relationship it enabled young people to see the system problems, and for them not to face it as ‘my problem’”
• “Gathering insights from 1:1 work and looking at themes across the board in order to use these themes to inform decisions about which systems we focus on in our systems change work”
• “Co-designed an exploitation model with young people. Young people designed the tools, the pathways and practice standards to develop the complex safeguarding model to respond to exploitation”
• “We have recently used music and graffiti sessions to enable young people to describe their experiences and we are using these messages to update our campaigns, interventions, and overall approach to engagement with children and young people”
• “Young people have been part of our recruitment strategy and interviews for staff across the service.
• “Open access participation — explaining the project, how young people can be involved if they want to — being ok that young people will dip in and out as they choose and they are welcomed back when they are ready”

Something to consider further is the importance of placing participation at the core of all our activities and decisions we make. What would our strategies and action plans look like then? We think they would look different with children’s and young people’s input.

We recognise that is helpful for us to share how young people can participate, but equally important is: what are the skills required from us to enable meaningful participation?

• Investment of time and energy to move beyond feedback to collaborative service design
• Listen with intent to stop young people feeling as though “you keep asking us but no-one listens”
• Be open to self-reflection — is my approach to participation achieving what I hoped for? If not, who can help me?
• Be brave to act and work creatively — the best of ideas come from stepping outside our comfort zones and trying new approaches. If we do not try, how will we know?
• Work hard to share power and control and as Abianda described “Work in a non-hierarchical way to challenge unequal dynamics power & oppression”
• Ask open questions e.g., “what needs to change?”
• Embed feedback loops. Let’s stop asking young people for their involvement and then not giving them feedback on how their input has contributed or influenced the work
• Being honest with young people about where/how the request has come about and what you would like from their involvement
• Respect young people — respect their views, respect their knowledge and experiences of their own lives , respect their contribution and respect that what we may want to hear might not be the answer we receive.

We will be using these skills to inform our work on the TCE programme.

Next week we’re looking forward to more engagement and wanting to understand what the barriers are in engaging CYP in participation work to inform strategic responses for child exploitation and extra-familial harm?

Thank you again, and we look forward to talking more!

Ellie and Isabelle