Child and Youth Participation in Policy, Practice and Research

Deirdre Horgan, Danielle Kennan, Deirdre Horgan, Danielle Kennan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367568368
• eBook ISBN: 9781000511291
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Travail social

This book showcases rights based participatory approaches to policy-making, practice and research with children and youth.

Throughout its three parts, the book conceptualises a rights-based participatory approach; showcases constructive and innovative rights based participatory approaches across the domains of research, policy and practice; and interrogates the challenges and complexities in the implementation of such an approach. In recent times, Ireland has been at the forefront of promoting and implementing participatory approaches to policy-making, practice and research focused on children and youth. This edited volume is a timely opportunity to capture previously undocumented learning generated from a wide range of innovative participatory initiatives implemented in Ireland. In capturing this learning, real world guidance will be provided to international policy-makers, practitioners and researchers working with children and youth.

This book is essential reading for those interested in a rights based participatory approach, for those who want to appropriately and meaningfully engage children and youth in research, and for those wishing to maximise the contribution of children and youth in policy-making.

Part 1

Child and youth participation in policy

1

Partnering for child participation

Reflections from a policy-maker and a professor

Laura Lundy and Anne O’Donnell

DOI: 10.4324/9781003099529-3

Introduction

Thirty-one years after the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, children’s participation in decision-making remains elusive or patchy in many respects, with much of the good practice in child and youth participation developed or promoted by NGOs and academics rather than governments. This is in spite of the fact that the legal obligation is on the States Party that has ratified the treaty – the government. Examples of governments undertaking all reasonable measures to implement its obligation under Article 12(1) are growing but still relatively under-developed, with many public bodies continuing to outsource their participation activities to NGOs and others. A notable exception to this is Ireland, which, in 2015, published its National Strategy on Children and Young People’s Participation in Decision-Making (DCYA, 2015). As part of these efforts, the then head of Citizen Participation at the Department of Children and Youth Affairs (Anne O’Donnell) approached an academic with expertise in child participation (Laura Lundy) to support the development of the national strategy. What follows is a conversation between Anne and Laura describing how the partnership came about and how they collaborated to render Laura’s model of participation, published in the British Educational Research Journal (Lundy, 2007) (and now widely known as ‘the Lundy model’), accessible to policy-makers and practitioners. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the wider lessons of this partnership for the successful implementation of child participation by governments elsewhere.

Laura and Anne in conversation

The use of the Lundy model in Ireland’s first child participation strategy

LAURA: Ireland, like many countries, had some children’s plan or children’s strategy and obviously the voice of the child is one of the key elements of that, but how did you get to the point where you thought ‘participation is going to need its own strategy’… because that was as a very big, brave and bold move that many countries still haven’t taken?

ANNE: There were gradual pieces of legislation that were being amended to build in the voice of the child but it was very, very slow. So we began to think that maybe the most appropriate way to get buy-in across government and all the state agencies was by developing a policy, which eventually we started to call a strategy. And in those years we would have worked very closely with the research unit [at the Department of Children and Youth Affairs], and it was a colleague of mine in the research unit who directed me to your model, having read your article on ‘Voice is not enough’. Up to then, we were using another non-hierarchical model developed in the United Kingdom [Kirby et al. (2003)]. We had early on decided that we weren’t comfortable with the ladders, and anything hierarchical that implied that one form of engaging with children and young people in decision-making is superior to another. We always thought that that was just not the way to go… So the minute we saw your model, we loved it. And that was back in the day when the version of the model was the one from your original 2007 article.

LAURA: So is that when you approached me? And you could have just taken it and used it your own way but I mean… my memory of it is that you invited me to come down to the meeting in Mespil Road [offices of DCYA] and you brought in various stakeholders from the department and you just asked me to talk people through it. I remember going down and being kind of curious, you know, what would those other public servants and agencies make of this thing. In my head, people think it always seems so obvious, you know? I mean I don’t think it is obvious and you don’t think it is obvious but other people do. But that wasn’t the reaction we got at the meeting, was it?

ANNE: No.

LAURA: No. From my memory, we were taken aback by how engaged they were and how much they wanted to get a set of questions or framework that would work for them in practice. Yeah?

ANNE: When you are working in the government department and you are driving a strategy, the secretary-general of your department writes to every other secretary-general to ask senior people to feed into and support the strategy. I had done a draft kind of begging letter and I remember the secretary-general of the department at the time said, ‘Redo that letter, Anne, we are asking them to cooperate with this strategy as part of their obligation to give children a voice under the national children’s strategy’.

LAURA: That is so interesting… Certainly the mood of the meeting wasn’t that people had reluctantly turned up to it. Maybe the people they chose within different departments and agencies were the people who were interested mainly?

ANNE: We did carefully select people who we knew were already allies.

LAURA: Oh, so that is very important strategically, isn’t it?

ANNE: Yeah. I mean if I learned anything from working in government for all those years was… you are much better off using your energy to work with people who want to work with you.

LAURA: There is learning in that – we are seeing generally that it is helpful to pick those pioneers, people who will promote, and then they will convince other people …

LAURA: Were you worried about working with an academic expert? I could have turned up and said, ‘Don’t touch it’,… you know,… ‘There is a purity here and you can’t go there’.

ANNE: I didn’t know enough about it to be worried. I would have been more worried at a later point. We were so used to working with academics… we regarded academics as our allies, our friends.

ANNE: One of the things that has been such a joy and pleasure to work with you was that you had no problem with simplifying the original model from your article in 2007 to a version that would work for the participation strategy [see Figure 1.1 for the orginal model, published in the British Educational Research Journal]. Your original model had all the links to the other articles in the convention, which we felt was overly complex for a strategy or policy document. You had no issue with what the graphic designers did to make it easier to understand for decision-makers [see Figure 1.2 for the revised graphic adopted by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs in the strategy].

Figure 1.1 Voice is not enough: the Lundy model of participation (2007)

Source: Copyright: British Educational Research Journal.

Figure 1.2 DCYA’s revised Lundy model graphic (2015)

Source: Copyright: Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth.

LAURA: I felt as long as we captured the meaning and the questions [in the Lundy model checklist] you didn’t need to have it linked out to all the other rights. Obviously, there is value in the other, but we were distilling it but not losing anything of the actual points under space, voice, audience and influence with our questions. And I think people were very respectful when I said, ‘We can’t really lose that bit’ or ‘We need to keep that bit because you won’t capture that element’.

The partnership between Laura and Anne

LAURA: What do you think have been the biggest successes in terms of the relationship we have had and the strategy and the model?

ANNE: I think that the partnership and the relationship with you was absolutely pivotal for a government department, as it enabled us to go out and say that we have a model that was developed by a very respected academic. It helped us to sell the strategy, both within the government and the non-government sector. The engagement with you has been a huge success for the department. Also, the interpersonal aspect of the relationship between you and me has been very productive. We bring completely different things to the table and some very similar things. And I think that we have managed to be able to hear each other, listen to each other and to accept that there are times when one or other of us have had to compromise.

LAURA: Yes, for sure.

ANNE: You are not just in an academic space but you are also in a practice space, and we have been able to say to each other, ‘In the real world our checklist is just not really working, because we need to be much more demanding of decision-makers’. We realised that we were not setting a high enough bar for decision-makers and not asking that they really, really listen to children, give them feedback and make sure their views have an impact. The other thing that was really positive was that you agreed to work with us in reviewing your original model and look at making it more into a pathway, more a journey for decision-makers. [The Lundy Model Checklist produced for the strategy is in Figure 1.3.]

Figure 1.3 DCYA’s Lundy Model Checklist (2015)

Source: Copyright: Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth.

LAURA: I think I have always been practice orientated, and as you say I think what both of us have in common – apart from valuing this – is that we both have experience of directly working with children. So not all academics, legal academics will do the kind of work that I do with children.… whenever you were bringing concerns about implementing in practice, I had similar concerns… I was learning as I went along as well, and I was seeing some of the problems. So, when you were coming along and saying, ‘That’s not working’,… I could understand it, because I had gone from being a legal academic to a researcher who works directly with children. So, I think that the fact that we both had that practice element was great.

LAURA: Tensions… do you remember differences or tensions between us? I mean we got on like a house on fire personally but in terms of intellectual tensions?

ANNE: The only one I recall is our belief that there is definitely a difference between consulting with children and research with children.

LAURA: Yes.

ANNE: And one of the issues that we would have come across repeatedly over the years was that when we retained academics to write up reports of consultation, there were issues around them interpreting and analysing what children were saying. This sometimes ended up being their own interpretation of what children were saying as opposed to what the children were actually saying.

LAURA: Yes, I feel we had a heated discussion about that, and I know that you do feel strongly about reporting children’s own words, but as a researcher I understand the other perspective. Because if you can’t repeat every word a child says you have got to organize it, and you organize it in themes and we, as researchers, are trained how to do that in a credible way… in a robust way that is not about imposing interpretations but it is collating and theming data to present it. So it remains… no, not a tension… just a difference in approach I think.

ANNE: he way we always address the themes that emerge during consultations with children is that the methodologies we use enable children to create their own themes and prioritise those themes.

LAURA: Exactly, and Anne, you know that’s what we do as well with our rights-based approach …

LAURA: The other tension for me is that you wanted to call it the Lundy model and I didn’t.

ANNE: Laughs. I remember that, Laura, that was in 2013.

LAURA: I was saying, ‘Please don’t do that’, and I was explaining to you that in Northern Ireland the name Lundy is seen as being associated by some people with being a ‘traitor’ at the gates of Derry. [Laughs] I thought, ‘Well, the Irish government will call it that and nobody else …’. In my memory I was trying to say to you, ‘Could we not call it “Rights-Based Participation”?’ and I think you were worried about using the language of “rights” at that point, weren’t you?

ANNE: Well, it was not that I was worried… I just felt that that the model should have your name, as you invented it. Also, all the other models are known by the name of the academics who developed them. The other thing is that we were doing all this in 2012/2013, and the ‘rights’ word was less frequently used than it is now.

Children’s participation led and driven by a government department

LAURA: Okay, so talk about where we are now because we started that journey seven years ago. I mean I am stunned by what has happened. Does it surprise you? Were you expecting that?

ANNE: To some extent it did surprise me but not really, in that I think that a lot of organisations, particularly non-government organisations, began to realise that this was the right route to go and something they should be doing. Many NGOs who work with children are funded by the department and work in strong partnership with the department. They would have known in order to meet the [funding] criteria that the department set for them that they would have to show that they were doing this. So I think that even though the strategy is a government strategy it has seeped right out into the NGO sector [which was] already committed to the voice of children and young people but ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents Page
• List of figures Page
• List of tables Page
• List of boxes Page
• Contributors Page
• Introduction
• Part 1 Child and youth participation in policy
• Part 2 Child and youth participation in practice
• Part 3 Child and youth participation in research
• Conclusion
• Index