Tackling Child Exploitation Programme Priorities: Children and young people’s voice — Introduction

November 2020

Hello — and welcome

We are really looking forward to working with the sector on our action research project on children and young people’s voice by the Tackling Child Exploitation (TCE) programme.

Young People’s voice is one of our programme priorities, and our aim is to identify and share ways in which senior leaders can bring children and young people’s voice into strategic discussions about child exploitation and extra familial harm. This piece of work is being led by Ellie Fairgrieve (The Children’s Society) and Isabelle Brodie (University of Bedfordshire).

To get this underway, we have scoped examples and evidence of children and young people’s participation work from within the consortium and across the sector. We’ve also pulled together evidence from TCE’s own learning and evaluation to date, including our sector survey, bespoke support project applications and project learning reports.

From our initial scoping focused on participation of children and young people’s views into strategic responses to tackle child exploitation, there is some recognition of the importance of children and young people’s views, however, it is not clear how this contributes to decision making within local areas. Children and young people are too often absent from the debate — and there is uncertainty about what to do about that.

We want to find out more.

The next stage of our approach was to talk to the sector via Twitter (@EllieFairgrieve and @uniofbedsCSE). Conducted during November 2020 we asked a question a week and collected the responses received. This thread of diary entry style blogs over the course of the project will reflect on our work and the questions it poses.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at ellie.fairgrieve@childrenssociety.org.uk / @EllieFairgrieve and Isabelle.brodie@beds.ac.uk / @uniofbedsCSE