Minutes:
Andrew Garbutt concluded his presentation on the Lincolnshire Youth Council and Ben Lilley addressed the Committee on the Participation Groups of the Lincolnshire County Council. During his presentation, the following points were made:
· Participation meant ensuring that children, young people and families were not only given opportunities to be involved in the decision-making process, but also acting on them as part of development and improvement
· The work of the Lincolnshire County Council followed the Lundy Model, created by Laura Lundy in 2007 and consisted of four concepts; space, voice, audience and influence.
· Voices 4 Change (V4C) was a participation group for children in care, specifically those in residential care homes, foster care and those who had been adopted. This group covered each locality, Lincoln, North & South Kesteven, Boston & South Holland and East Lindsay.
· V4C was created for young people in care to provide feedback to Lincolnshire County Council about their services and was an activity-based group with discussions, held in various locations friendly to those participating e.g. Youth Centres, Soft play areas, Ten Pin Bowling Alleys.
· Although some groups had been lost due to Covid-19, these groups were starting again next week and plans involved Councillors, corporate parenting and senior officers meeting with the young people face to face to come up with a plan moving forward.
· This group in particular was instrumental in updating the language used in policies and procedures. Previous work included consideration of the term ‘Looked After Children’ which when shortened, wasn’t liked as the term ‘LAC’. V4C gave their views on the abbreviation and following consideration, it was changed to ‘Children in Care’.
· Lincolnshire Young Voices was a pan-disability participation group created to research and act on issues faced by young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities up to the age of twenty-five.
· The group met regularly and carried out work on accessibility and transport issues including a number of visits to heritage sites where they conducted an accessibility health-check which would be shared with venues in an overall report on accessibility. This work was part of a service development plan.
· Lincolnshire Young Voice, had ongoing development of a training programme called ‘How To Avoid Putting Your Foot In It’ within which young people shared experiences on communicating with children and young people with SEND
· The group met regularly, every six weeks and was established in 2017 with Lincolnshire being one of the only counties that had a specific participation group for young people with disabilities.
· Young Inspectors was the third participation group within the County Council with a programme to inspect children’s services including interviewing other young people about how they felt about services e.g. quality of supervision social workers received.
· The participation group was involved in recruitment and sat on the employment panel to participate in the selection process.
· Young Inspectors also included participation in mystery shopping, observations, questionnaires and focus groups
The Chair gave thanks for such an informative and inspiring presentation and reiterated the importance of the participation groups in giving young people a voice.