Children's Consultation and Participation

1. Introduction

Participation of children and young people in decisions about their lives is an essential part of growing up and if done well it enhances children's safety and well-being and improves services designed to support and protect them. In the world of social care it is often happening in complex and emotionally charged situations. To be done well it requires a commitment at all levels of an organisation to reflect on and promote:

• Positive attitudes to children;
• Skills at communicating;
• Financial resources;
• Commitment to developing services which support children's participation, such as advocacy and participation services;
• Honest consideration of what expectations are of what can be achieved and what the level of willingness is to change existing services and decisions in response to children's views.

The Local Authority is actively seeking to ensure children and young people are consulted about decisions and processes that affect them. The Munro Review made clear that what is important to children and young people is 'reliability, honesty and continuity'. The Local Authority is committed to ensuring that children and young people are informed about what is happening to them and promotes opportunities to contribute to what is happening. The aim is to share and practise positive approaches to effective communication and learning through active listening. The Local Authority is committed to both speaking and listening clearly, purposefully and honestly with children and young people.

The Local Authority seeks to consider identity, diversity, culture, sexual orientation, language, disability, delayed speech, low confidence and trust in all its interactions with both children and adults.

The Local Authority seeks to ensure that children’s views are understood and taken into account as part of ensuring that their rights and entitlements are met.

Children, including those who communicate non-verbally, are supported to actively participate in decisions about their lives. They will be sensitively helped to understand when it may not be possible to act on their wishes and why other action is taken that is in their best interests. Children have access to, and are actively encouraged to involve, an independent advocate and, where appropriate, an independent visitor (see Advocacy Procedure).

Children can identify a trusted adult who they can talk to about any concerns, who will listen to them, take their concerns seriously and respond appropriately.

Every member of our staff is committed to seeking and recording the views of every child they work with. They will also record the decisions that are made and the influence that the views of the child/young person have had on those decisions. Where decisions are made that are different from or contrary to the views of the child or young person this will be clearly recorded with the reasons for the decision clearly explained.

In addition, the Local Authority will ensure that systems are in place to support formal consultation with young people's groups and will seek to aggregate individual issues and concerns so that managers may consider the impact that current services have on young people. This information may be used to inform future developments.

Surrey County Council has specific IT and personnel systems in place to support consultations with young people. These include:

• A Complaints and Advocacy Team who manage the process of ensuring young people's complaints are heard, acted upon and learned from;
• A User Voice and Participation Team who facilitate several young peoples' groups and feed their input into the appropriate Board or Service through regular meetings or reports;
• Feedback questionnaires for young people in a variety of formats (web-based, app-based or paper-based) which are collated by the Customer Engagement Service and systematically fed back to the relevant services for action.

Changes arising from consultations are carried out within the appropriate service, with support from the Quality and Performance team. Updates on outcomes from consultations are reported back to young people through "You said, we did" reports on our website.

3. Barriers to Participation

There are a number of barriers to participation. Broadly speaking these are:

• Structural - complex procedures and lack of clarity about responsibilities; too many changes of personnel;
• A lack of clarity about what participation is or confusion over how it will be addressed and a lack of clarity about what it can and cannot change and what it should deliver for the child, the family and the organisation;
• Competence - staff lacking in experience or having an inability to effectively communicate with children, or children of a particular age or from a particular culture;
• Capacity - a lack of time (e.g. staff too overwhelmed by other pressures) or other resources required to enable participation, thus 'rushing' or making it a 'box ticking' exercise;
• Inadequate plans that fail to be clear about who will be responsible for ensuring participation;
• Children's behaviour - can be misinterpreted and sometimes causes a barrier for professionals and carers. Those seeking to engage often need a variety of tools / methods and patience/space to deal with this to promote engagement;
• Children themselves can become disinterested and disengaged because of delays;
• Children are far more spontaneous and their timescales are far shorter;
• Professionals need to ensure that children have a variety of times, people, places and approaches to participation available to them (i.e. seeing children on their own, allowing time after traumatic events).

4. Promoting Participation

The Local Authority has a number of formal processes for seeking the Participation and consultation of children and young people. Staff, carers, managers and others who come into contact with children are encouraged and enabled to see each and every interaction as a potential opportunity to develop trust and confidence such that children and young people feel able to confide and state their views and preferences in matters that affect them.

5. Participation - the Role of the Social Worker

The most important means of encouraging and enabling participation by looked after children and young people in decisions that affect them and their lives remains the relationship with their Social Worker and other significant professionals and adults in their lives.

Enabling children and young people who have not previously had opportunities to express their views is demanding and can be challenging work that requires creativity, empathy and resilience on the part of the worker. Consultations need to be planned for, reflected on and, if necessary, returned to in order that children and young people are given every opportunity to express their views.

In order for them to express views about matters that affect them it is also vital that children and young people are in possession of information and have experiences that enable them to make informed choices.

If participation is not possible or is restricted for whatever reason, steps should be taken to ensure those affected are informed of decisions as soon as practicable after they are made, and an explanation for the decision given, together with the opportunity to make a comment and express their views.

If it is then felt that a different decision may have been appropriate, steps should be taken to reconsider the decision.

If decisions are made against people's wishes, they should be informed of the decision and the reasons for the decision should be explained. In these circumstances, the person should be informed of any rights they have to formally challenge the decision, and of the availability of the Complaints or Grievance Procedure (see Complaints and Representations Procedure).

Sometimes children and young people express their preferences through their behaviour rather than through words i.e. by running away or by having tantrums. It is important to attempt to see beyond the behaviour and to try to see what the child or young person is trying to express. (Note: that where children have returned home from having run away, the 'return' interviews should be conducted by an independent person who has been trained to undertake this. See Surrey Children Missing from Home and Care.

Finally, children and young people should be made aware of the systems and processes available to them if they wish to raise concerns or complain and what, if any, other forms of redress may be available to them if things go wrong.

6. Participation - the Role of Managers

Managers must ensure that social workers and/or staff have the time and resources available to them to ensure the effective participation of children and young people.

Managers should:

• Use supervision to consider issues relating to the Voice of the Child in ongoing cases;
• Check that records show where and how the Voice of the Child has been sought, what was said and how the child's wishes have been responded to and, if not, why not;
• Review, on a regular basis, the various methodologies whereby children's views are sought;
• Review complaints or concerns raised by children and young people and what actions have been taken to address these;
• Review compliments to build on this;
• Consider how representative issues raised by children and young people are in relation to such issues as gender, culture, sexuality and disability;
• Ensure processes designed to aggregate issues raised by children and young people are in place and are routinely being used;
• Ensure processes are in place whereby it can be fed back to both individual children and the wider group what changes have been made as a result of issues raised.

7. Processes for Consulting Children and Young People

1. Children and young people can be involved in the development of services through The Surrey Care Council;
   
   Surrey's Care Council is made up of young people aged 13+ who are currently Looked After or Care Leavers. There is also a Care Council Juniors for those aged 8 – 13. Each group meets monthly and their feedback about their experience of the care system is fed back to the council via the Participation Team. If a particular concern or query is shared by a number of young people, this is raised as an 'Action Card' which requires a formal response from the Corporate Parenting Board within two months.
   
   
2. Children and young people can also be involved in:
   1. Recruitment – Surrey runs a Recruit Crew scheme in which young people are involved in recruiting senior management and frontline workers. Care Council have created a 'Top Ten Must Do's' for professionals working with young people which help to form the basis of interview questions;
   2. Mentoring – the council runs a 'Finding Your Feet' scheme in which young care-experienced people can be matched with a mentor who has a trade or professional background in order to support them with entering the world of work. Mentors can then share key themes that have been raised by these young people to help improve services;
   3. Training – Several of Surrey's participation groups offer training to relevant professionals about how best to support the young people they work with. For example, care-experienced young people deliver 'Total Respect' training to Social Workers, Health Workers and police, while CYPMHS-experienced young people deliver training in schools and to healthcare providers.
      
      
3. Looked After Reviews and other Meetings (see Looked After Reviews Procedure).
   
   Every Review and/or meeting relating to a child's case is an opportunity for children and young people to participate in their Care Plan and arrangements;
   
   
4. Advocacy and Independent Visitors (see Advocacy and Independent Visitors Procedure).
   
   Advocates and Independent Visitors support and assist children and young people to participate in the services offered;
   
   
5. Support to children who have communication difficulties;
   
   Support and specialist services to children who have communication difficulties will always be offered. For children for whom English is not their first language a translator should be considered to enable the child to contribute. For children with communication difficulties as a result of physical or learning disabilities people who can use whatever medium of communication is most helpful to the child will be used;
   
   
6. Social media:
   
   Increasingly children and young people are becoming confident users of social media such as Facebook, texting, X (formerly known as Twitter) and other apps. We see this as an opportunity for enabling children and young people to participate in decisions about their life whether by texting their IRO or by using social media applications;
   
   Young people in Surrey can use the MOMO (Mind of my Own) app to share their wishes and feelings before and after reviews or to make an enquiry or complaint. This is particularly useful if they cannot attend their review meeting in person but want to ensure their views are heard and taken into account.
   
   All participation groups have a Facebook and/or Instagram account through which they can liaise with members, ask for feedback and respond to any issues raised. Many groups also use X (formerly known as Twitter) to keep interested professionals informed about their views and ask what is being done about particular topics.
   
   
7. Youth Council:
   
   Surrey's youth council is called the Youth Cabinet. This group is open to any 11-19 year olds (or 25 if additional needs) who live or go to school in Surrey. The group meets monthly to discuss priorities for young Surrey residents. They run annual campaigns to drive change in services, processes or attitudes which affect young people. They also have direct links with the Surrey Cabinet in order to make an impact on decisions made at a senior level.
8. Young Inspectors:
   
   Surrey teenagers are able to take part in a 'Young Inspection' in which they inspect a particular service delivered by the council and provide feedback. In dialogue with the inspectors, the service agrees areas of action and promises to make reasonable changes within a particular timeframe. The young people then check these changes have been made.