Participation in multi-agency working

If you are setting up or working within a multi-agency service, this section has ideas for securing the participation of children and young people to help ensure that the service is relevant to them and something they feel they have a stake in. There is information on three related aspects:

• Involvement in service development

• Involvement in service delivery

• Letting children and young people know about your service

It is applicable to children and young people of school age and therefore refers to schools as the universal service.

Involvement in service development

The planning and development phase offers a good opportunity to get the ideas of children and young people on the services they want and would use. You can do this by:

• Building representation by children and young people into the terms of reference of your steering group or management committee
• Developing mechanisms with schools to enable children and young people to identify representatives
• Working with schools and other agencies to find out what children and young people have already told them about what they want and need
• Asking the school council (if there is one) to carry out research with pupils to find out what services they want and need

Involvement in service delivery

Children, young people and families are key partners in service delivery. If they are encouraged to generate the ideas themselves and feel properly involved in the creation of solutions, they are more likely to invest time and effort to ensure their successful implementation.

As well as the important principle of involving service users, there are also opportunities for involving young people who are not direct recipients of services. Peer support has an increasingly positive evidence base and involves a wide range of activities, from mentoring and counselling to buddy systems, peer mediation and peer listening.

Peer support can be an effective element of a child or young person's support plan because:

• Young people will often share feelings and sensitive experiences more readily with each other than with adults.
• Peer culture and opinion is a major influence on behaviour and attendance in a school.
• Peer-based work allows for pupils both to receive more support from members of their own cultural or faith-based community within the school, and also to learn more about how other cultures and faiths experience the world.

Letting children and young people know about your service

To ensure that children and young people know about your service and know how to access it:

• Involve them in the development and delivery of the service, so that they know about it before it happens (see above).
• Tell parents about it, who may then ask their children about it. Click for more information on involving families.
• Ensure teachers know about it so they can mention it to their classes and tutor groups.
• Create a display about the service in school foyers.
• Discuss it in school assemblies.
• Hold a competition that is related in some way to the introduction of the service.

Some services have developed a leaflet for children and young people, targeted at primary or secondary school pupils, which sets out:

• What the service does
• Who the different practitioners are
• What pupils can expect from the service
• How and when they can access the service
• How they can get involved in developing and delivering it
• Who to contact for more information

Resources and reading

Working Together: Giving Children and Young People a Say 
Guidance on pupil participation.

Promoting Children and Young People's Participation Through the National Healthy School Standard - Advice and case studies on improving participation within the context of a healthy schools approach.

School Councils UK - This website provides information and training to help schools introduce a school council, including a Toolkit for Schools.

Peer Support Forum - Hosted by the National Children's Bureau (NCB), the forum promotes peer support as a process of developing social and emotional well-being.

Mediation UK - A national voluntary organisation which develops constructive means of resolving conflicts in communities. The site has information on the benefits of mediation in schools, including peer mediation.

Young NCB - A free membership network open to all children and young people, run by NCB.

Community Service Volunteers - This organisation works to reconnect people to their communities through volunteering and training.