The Highland Children's Forum
About the Highland Children's Forum
The Highland Children's Forum is a registered charity created in 2000 by the parent carers of children with additional support needs to ensure that the voice of these children was heard in the design and provision of services in the area. The Forum membership includes individuals and many specialist groups that represent the concerns of specific conditions.
The Forum concentrates its activities on developing ways to hear the voice of children in need and to relay this to central policy authorities. It seeks to influence changes in policy so that the investments create services that better meet the needs and aspirations of young people. The Forum now acts as the consultee on a number of local authority and statutory bodies providing services to children with additional support needs in Highland.
Children's Consultation Worker
Gillian Newman was taken on as the first Children's Consultation Worker for the Highland Children's Forum (HCF) in 2004. Her role is to engage with children and young people who are in need and consult with them about issues which affect their lives and to promote and raise awareness of the issues affecting children in need. Since introducing the post of Children's Consultation Worker, the Highland Children's Forum has been invited to consult with children and young people as part of some service evaluation. HCF consulted with some children with learning disabilities about their experience of health services for the Quality Improvement Scotland (QIS) inspection visit, and a young person who had participated came along to meet with the inspection team. This report was welcomed by the QIS team and has been shared widely amongst professionals in the health service.
Seeking the views of young people
HCF was also invited to do a consultation with some of the children and young people who use a local respite centre. The children and young people taking part had a wide range of communication difficulties, disabilities and health needs. The young people's stories of their stay in respite were represented through video, slide shows and magazine/comic-style booklets. This report was launched to parents and key players in the provision of services and there were immediate improvements to some aspects of the service as a result of consultation with the children.
When the views and experiences of children in need were being actively sought, it became clear that there was no wide picture of what children's experience looked like across Highland against which individual experience could be compared. There needed to be a representational study to say what it was like to grow up in Highland. HCF brought forward a proposal to seek out that representational view; this project has been supported by the Joint Committee for Children and Young People. This is a three-year project which is looking at children's experience of services as part of the evaluation of the effectiveness of the 'For Highland's Children 2 Service Plan 2005-2008'. There is an interim report from the first year of this project available on the Highland Children's Forum website. The project is working with over 250 children and young people across Highland, visiting them once a term for the three years, using the themes of the children's service plan (safe, healthy, nurtured, achieving, active, included and respected and responsible) to find out children and young people's views on what is good, not so good, or could be better in their experience. The Joint Committee intends to use this report as part of the consultation process for drawing up the 'For Highland's Children 3 Service Plan'.
Using children's experience to frame policy
In the first year of working, the Children's Consultation Worker wrote to schools, out-of-school provision, support groups, specialist play schemes and childcare centres explaining her role and asking to be able to visit and speak to children and young people as well as parents or staff.
Over the first year of her visits, many anecdotal stories were heard on various different topics, but the issue of inclusion in its broadest sense linked many of these stories. HCF worked closely with people in Education Culture and Sport to investigate good practice in inclusion, as the nature of anecdote is that the stories tended to be negative as children recognise when they are not included and want to share that experience so that things can change; when children are included they are the same as everyone else and have no particular tale to tell. These stories were brought together in a report about inclusion.
The report, called 'Inclusion: What Difference Would There Be If Children's Experience Framed Policy?', was written from these anecdotal stories and good-practice examples. The title of the report came from a point made in the summary:
'The order of these comments reflects the current order of influence:
- Policy-makers make policy
- Teachers and staff implement it
- Parents make decisions from the options available
- Children experience the result
What difference would there be if children's experience framed policy?' (page 6)
The report ends its recommendations with the following statement:
'Children need to know that their voice matters, that their experience can shape policy and that they are of equal value to the community, whatever their needs or circumstances. All services should have clear procedures for listening to the otherwise silent voice.' (page 24)
This report has been well received by the Joint Committee (of Highland Council and NHS Highland) for Children and Young People. HCF has been given opportunities to share the findings of the report with principal teachers and Support For Learning area team leaders. The Joint Committee is looking at the recommendations made in the report to take these forward.