The Children’s Workforce Development Council (CWDC) is building in the voice and influence of children and young people with strong strategic leadership and effective executive coordination. The recent report approved by the Senior Management Team summarises progress and affirms next steps.

After a comprehensive staff development programme across CWDC, leaders and managers agreed key strategic participation priorities. These included a more proactive championing role with external partners, scrutiny to ensure participation is more regularly built in to their projects, programmes, tenders and commissioning and fuller attention is paid to monitoring and evaluating the impact of participation, including through feedback from children and young people themselves.

When CWDC adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 2006, it then began using the Hear by Right participation standards framework to engage staff, establish priorities and plan agreed actions. It made significant progress on, for example, shared values, involving young people in recruitment and having participation champions in each department.

CWDC then embarked on this next phase in 2009. This included a staff training programme that reached 121 staff, 100% of whom said it was either very important or important to involve children and young people in its work. 37.5% said participation activity was in place, while 62.5% said it was currently being established.

“We've come along way but we have a long way to go; we need to be tough on ourselves about the impact - what difference would or has it made? What do children and young people say the difference is?”

The programme partnership of Investing in Children, Practical Participation and NYA was delivered with young people from Barnardo’s Willow Young Carers Project in Leeds, Investing in Children and London Borough of Richmond Looked After and Leaving Care young people. It was coordinated by Alice Taylor at CWDC: Alice.Taylor@cwdcouncil.org.uk.