The Right Way Hub has a variety of very useful Participation Resources including:
Online UNCRC Article 12 Training.
The AIM the Right Way Checklist which supports you to check your youth participation is Accessible, Inclusive and Meaningful.
12 Steps to a Youth Friendly Board/Strategic Meeting Resource
The Children in Scotland 'We Are Here' Toolbox is designed to support children and adults who advocate for the rights and wellbeing of children, through children's participation.
Children in Scotland also have an e-learning hub, with free modules on Building Good Relationships with Children and Young People, Participation with Children and Young People, Children's Rights and My Rights, My Say.
The Young Minds Participation toolkit aims to support organisations to increase the participation of children, young people and families who face marginalisation and barriers within the mental health system.
As well as insights into how these barriers impact young people's experience of service and engagement with participation opportunities, this toolkit provides practical tools you can use to make your participation more representative.
The Hub na nÓg Framework was developed in Ireland as a collaboration between the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Hub na nÓg and Professor Laura Lundy of Queens University, Belfast.
We refer to the Lundy Model a lot throughout this site, as we have chosen to use the Lundy Model to underpin the Highland Children and Young People's Strategy, as it fits closely with the key themes identified by our children and young people.
The Framework is detailed and includes a variety of useful tools to support children and young people's participation in decision making. Some of which, we have shared here. There is an Evaluation Checklist and Feedback Forms that can be used with children and young people to assess how they felt about the participation opportunity they engaged in.
They also have a detailed page which houses a variety of other Toolkits and Guidance relating to Participation.
This page is full of practical resources to help practitioners to support children and young people to have their voice heard on issues that affect them. Within this page, you can also find guidance on how to create youth-friendly versions of your work. Making information accessible to children and young people is listed under Article 17, and is an important aspect of all four of the Lundy Model's key concepts.
5611-Hub_na_nOg-LundyModel (1).pdf5611-Hub_na_nOg-everyday_spaces_checklist-2.pdf5611-Hub_na_nOg-planning_checklist.pdf
Save the Children's Child Rights Resource Centre have created useful guidance on how to write a child-friendly document. They focus on short, visually appealing, summaries of documents, written in simple language that children understand. The guide describes a process for producing documents this way, and children act as advisors to support this.
The Centre for Children's Rights at Queens University Belfast, also share a useful guide about how to create child-friendly documents.
Children said that documents, policies and laws should be child-friendly because if it's friendly for the adults wit should be friendly for the kids. If it is friendly for the kids, it will also be more friendly for the adults!
The Children and Young People's Commissioner for Scotland has shared a useful guide for involving children in CRIA (Children's Rights Impact Assessment) and CRIE (Children's Rights Impact Evaluation).
The factsheet provides some useful do's and don'ts style tips to support you to ensure that the information you are providing is child-friendly.
Highland Council Educational Psychology Service worked with schools across Highland in 2021 to co-create the Our SHANARRI School survey.
They wanted to know what children and young people think that wellbeing should look, sound and feel like in their school. They asked over 500 Children and Young People across Highland what SHANARRI meant to them, and what that should look like in their schools.
Watch the video to hear what children and young people had to say.
The Our SHANARRI School survey is available to all schools in Highland. Find out more here.
This universal pack of ideas includes a range of attractive, interactive tools devised and collated by Highland Council Psychological Service – they follow a developmental sequence to allow you to select the most suitable approaches for gathering child views at all ages and stages.
For some children with complex needs, gathering their views can seem a difficult task to complete. This can be particularly challenging for very young children as well as for young people with barriers to communication.
The strategies in this toolkit can be used by adults working on an individual basis with a young child for a specific purpose or by adults who have significant contact with young children on a frequent basis embedding meaningful consultation in daily practice.
This tool will support you to engage in a fun playful way to enable young children to gain knowledge about their rights and develop a range of skills to support them to engage with their rights.
The book titled “My Journey” was created by care experienced young people in The Highlands, in collaboration with Aberlour Children’s Charity, Barnardos, Highland Council and The Promise Scotland. The journal allows young people aged 12 and up with care experience to record important information about themselves. The Corra Foundation provided funding for the journal, and the young people behind it hope that every care-experienced young person in Scotland will receive a copy.
infant-pledge.pdfHas been co-produced by members of the Voice of the Infant Short-Life Working Group
Is written in simple language from the baby's perspective
Details what a baby can expect from the adults around them
Encourages mindful commitment to facilitate infants to express their feelings, consider their views, uphold their rights and take action accordingly
Is a reminder it is everyone's responsibility to listen to the voice of infants
All babies and young children have a right to meaningful participation, but as they may be preverbal, non-speaking or still developing language, practitioners will need to access innovative ways of facilitating this. Good practice should always address Space, Voice, Influence and Audience, which are inter-related and overlapping. They put the infant front and centre so that they are always in focus, support the use of appropriate tools and mechanisms to facilitate the capturing of their views and ensure that opportunities exist for these views to be shared with decision makers and ultimately acted upon. This requires the use of creative and infant-led approaches that go beyond relying on parents and carers as proxies for the infant voice.
You can find the Voice of the Infant: best practice guidelines and infant pledge on the Scottish Government website here.
The aim of the work being done around Reimagining Justice in Highland is to make sure children and young people’s views and rights are at the centre of youth justice service design. The Highland Child Protection Committee have worked with the CYCJ to develop an engagement pack.
The sessions included within the facilitators pack cover several consultation questions in an interactive way for children and young people who want to engage in the discussions as a group or as individuals. The pack contains a number of activities and options for facilitators to consider depending on the number of children and young people in a group, and the facilitator’s knowledge of group members.
The engagement sessions cover:
Understanding Rights
What is a safe space for children and young people to talk to trusted adults?
Understanding and experiences of the justice system.
For more information contact Donna or Carrie who are the local leads for the Project.
Reimagining Justice Engagement Sessions - Facilitator Presentation_.pptxFacilitators Pack - Reimagining Youth Justice_.pdf