Get involved

Welcome to the Children, Young People and Families Participation and Engagement Network 

We are a small team that work across all the services in the Care Group that offer support to children and young people and their families. Our role is to support young people and families to tell us about their lived experience of our services and also help us think about how we can make things better in the future.  Why not check out our 3 videos at the bottom of this page where young people talk about how they have worked with us in the past and why this is important to them.

Ways you can get involved

The Children, Young People and Families Participation and Engagement Network captures feedback and make sure that you are given lots of opportunities to have a view and a voice about the support you receive when you are seen by our services. These include opportunities to:

• Complete questionnaires
• Join one of our young people’s engagement groups
• Work with us to develop a case study or digital story to share your own experiences

We make sure that this feedback is heard by the right people and that we use this to make positive changes to how we support other children and young people in the future.

We also involve you in our future service development and think about the different ways we can all work together to develop our services, looking at things like:

• How our services work, for example the support we offer and how we work with you
• How we communicate with you, for example letters we might send to you, information we share about our services 
• How we recruit people to work with us, for example involving you in our staff interviews, as well as how we train and supervise staff
• How we develop policies and governance for the future, for example, how we make sure children, young people and families are kept safe when we are supporting them

Why is it important?

The network is important because you are the people who know best, you can tell us exactly what has worked well for you and what could have been better.

But it is also important because we are led by the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child. There are 54 different articles that all protect children and young people but there are two that we think are important:

• Article 12 which says that every child has the right to express their views, feelings and wishes in all matters affecting them and to have their views considered and taken seriously.
• Article 23 which says that a child with a disability has the right to live a full and decent life with dignity and, as far as possible, independence and to play an active part in their community

The children and young people we work with already give us lots of ideas, help us interview new staff and always bring their perspective to things we might want to change.  But we also use something call the Laura Lundy Model of Participation which has the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child at the heart, its guides us and challenges us to think about the best way for children and young people to have a voice and how we must make sure this makes a difference.

The model breaks Article 12 down into four elements which follow each other in order:

• Space - children must be given safe, inclusive opportunities to form and express their views
• Voice - children must be facilitation to express their views
• Audience - the view must be listened to
• Influence - the view must be acted upon, as appropriate

Our Voice Matters is a series of videos coproduced with Young People showing the different ways young people can have a VOICE and can INFLUENCE how our services support themselves and other young people – why not take a look and get in touch if you would also like to help us.

"NHS  and CWP animation" 

"Our Voice Matters, How young people can have a voice and make a difference"

 "Our Voice Matters, Why is this important to us"

How to get involved