Kaizen Partnership

Specialists in Consultation and Engagement

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It is time that young people had their say on Brexit

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Photo by KATHY DEWITT

We know the UK isn’t great at asking young people their views under Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), or more generally in upholding our responsibilities under the UNCRC. In fact in the most recent KidsRights Index, the UK had dropped from 11th best to 11th worst performing nation (out of 165 countries) and was “urged to do more to foster the rights of their youngest generation”.

And here we are, with Brexit being the biggest decision in living memory which will impact young people in all manner of ways for many years to come, and we haven’t yet asked young people what they think about it, or what they want to happen.

Asking young people their views is routine for any other area that affects them (both at strategic and individual levels) and is a foundation of good practice across the youth sector. At a national level, no significant area of youth policy or law could be brought in without including the thoughts and voices of the young people themselves. There are numerous benefits to doing this and it is also of course rooted in international law, in Article 12 of the UNCRC, which states ‘Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.’

So it is clear that we have to very quickly now engage with and hold a vote, amongst young people age 11-18, to understand and quantify their views. I can think of no other way that we can credibly gather their views and ensure that young people are listened to both individually and collectively. The same argument applies to also hearing from 18-20 year olds who were too young to have voted in the June 2016 referendum.

I hope that a few large youth sector organisations will come together and coordinate the process and vote: in schools, youth clubs and Universities across the country. I suggest the vote takes place in October. If nearly a million 11-18 year olds voted last year in Make your Mark, then surely a similar number could be engaged to discuss and vote on Brexit. Not on the terms (which are still very unclear) but on whether they think it should happen at all – do they want it or not?

We have a moral, pragmatic and legal duty to hear what young people think about Brexit. Obviously, it won’t be binding; it will however be very interesting and enlightening, providing a clear steer on their views which are to be given due weight in this most fundamental decision which directly affects them.

It is time that young people had their say.

#youthvote2018

#youthvoice

@JonnyZander

To Consult or not to Consult?

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When and how is it OK to consult with children and young people? 

This may seem like a straightforward question but actually, as these things often are, it is a little more complex than on first sight, as it involves balancing the rights of the child with our responsibilities for safeguarding children. It is also a question that may well be looked at differently from within the youth sector as opposed to by professionals who are outside of the traditional youth sector.

A Local Authority client has recently told us they want us to consult with teenagers as part of a wider community consultation about how money should be spent locally, given that providing support and services to teenagers is a top priority issue for residents. However, because of their guidelines around consulting with young people (in this case the Market Research Society code of practice), this means if we want to speak with under 16’s we either need to get formal (written) parental consent, or it has to take place in a school where a teacher (who has presumed responsibility) can give permission.

For various reasons, neither securing parental consent nor working via schools is feasible in this instance, and so in practice, this means that young people are being excluded from a community consultation where services for teenagers are a top priority theme for enquiry. This is clearly ridiculous and has highlighted this grey area where safeguarding procedures, and traditional research protocols actually go against the rights of the child and the best interests of the community (which would undoubtedly be to include and engage young people).

Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child clearly establishes that every child has the right to say what they think in all matters affecting them, and to have their views taken seriously. This Article is referenced all over in guidance and toolkits around consulting young people, including even in Local Government Association guidance to councillors on engaging young people where they say:

“Elected representatives therefore have a duty to actively consider the views of children and young people in their work, and to create a culture where those views are forthcoming and given due weight.”

And yet, some Local Authorities, and it is likely other groups, clearly still stick to the old approach that to consult with under 16’s you need to first speak to their parents to get permission.

A more balanced approach can be seen in the Health sector where case law (and common sense) has dictated an approach, known as the Gillick Competency, where under 16’s are able to make their own decisions if they are deemed to be capable. Lord Scarman, in his summing up of the famous case of Gillick vs West Norfolk, (which went all the way to the House of Lords), said:

“parental right yields to the child’s right to make his own decisions when he reaches a sufficient understanding and intelligence to be capable of making up his own mind on the matter requiring decision.” Lord Scarman

And in the health sector, the Gillick Competency deals with much more serious issues than whether a young person can give their views in a community consultation – issues such as whether or not a child under age 16 can consent to their own medical treatment without parental consent or involvement.

Youth charities across the board do, of course, routinely consult with young people and it is my belief that most (if not all) would take the view that youth consultation is very important as this quote exemplifies: 

“Children and young people have the right to participate in decisions which affect their lives, the lives of their community and the larger society in which they live. Participation should run alongside decision making at a local and national level.” Save the Children, Consultation Toolkit

In fact, within the youth sector it is generally accepted that you have to consult with young people if you want to design and develop youth provision which meets their needs – it is not only good practice but essential practice and this is echoed by funders such as the Big Lottery:

         “In order to ensure that projects attract and meet the needs of young people that they target, you must take    account of young people’s perspectives at all stages.” Big Lottery Foundation Research – Engaging Young  People in Evaluation and Consultation

But this common practice does not always translate into guidance, as the same toolkit mentioned above nicely illustrates, where under the heading of consent, they advise:

‘Where consultation involves research (e.g. a questionnaire) with persons under sixteen years of age consent should be obtained from parents or from those ‘in loco parentis’ Save the Children, Consultation Toolkit

Clearly there is some confusion on this issue and it concerns me that as a result of this confusion, young people may be commonly excluded from giving their views in public consultations.

But do young people actually want to give their views? Our experience at Kaizen and research from the field suggests without doubt they do….

For example, research by the British Youth Council in 2011 (with over 1000 young people across the UK age 7-25) found that 82% believe it’s important for them to speak up about their local area, and 75% want to have a greater influence in decisions made in local areas, on topics such as how the local community is run, and what happens to local services.

In our work at Kaizen we regularly consult (in the community) with young people as young as 9 – we find young people of all ages ready and willing to engage about topics that concern them and the communities where they live.

Sometimes we do get consent, for example in a recent consultation with young people with disabilities as part of getting their views to shape the Local Offer in Central Bedfordshire. But often this is neither possible or appropriate – for example last year we did a street consultation with young gang members in Peckham and Brixton to get their views on a large gangs programme design which was in the final stages of getting Lottery finding and the funders wanted evidence that the young people thought the new approach could work. In another recent project we were working for a local funder in Islington who wanted to hear from young people about how money should be targeted and again, while we did consult within schools and youth clubs, street outreach was key to hearing from young people who would not have been reached through the other channels, and a need to get parental permission would have meant we could not have engaged the range of young people in giving their views.

We fundamentally believe that it is vital that young people are included in conversations about their community and are treated with respect and shown that their view matters. We often hear the old saying that with rights come responsibilities, but that goes both ways – if we want young people to act with maturity and feel a part of the community, then we have a responsibility to treat them with respect, to include them and listen to their views.

There are obviously times and places where it is wholly appropriate and necessary for parental consent to be sought, but this is surely in the minority of cases and therefore I believe that the starting default should be to get consent from the child themselves (as long as they meet the Gillick competency) and then, in each situation to look and assess if it is also necessary to get consent from the parent. It may be necessary to get parental consent, but the presumption should be that, in most cases, the young person is capable of making this decision for themselves.

I believe it is time that guidance is updated to take into account not only shifting attitudes to young people (thankfully we have moved past the seen and not heard attitudes of yesteryear), but also the shifting dynamics in consultation brought on amongst other things by digital engagement and consultation methodologies which make parental consent impossible. It would be helpful to have a clear framework to set out the circumstances where parental consent ought to be sought that would give clarity on this issue.

Young people are ready to be consulted with and it is our belief at Kaizen that doing so does not put them at risk as long as the purpose of the consultation is clear, the people doing it have been DBS checked, they are given the choice whether to participate and can stop at any point they chose. It is surely their decision whether to give their views and participate, not ours, and Local Authorities and other providers should be strongly encouraged to consult widely with young people rather than be fearful of it.

We all need to be resilient

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Last week I co-facilitated a session on resilience at the wonderful CreativeCollisions conference. Way over 100 youth professionals and young people spent nearly 2 hours engaging with the subject, focussing on the following question:

• How can we increase resilience in young people and communities?

This is a critical question and gets right to the heart of community empowerment and positive youth development.

Resilience is one of those in vogue concepts that is used all over the place, but few people seem to be clear with what it actually means. In the session last week the first question I asked was who felt confident that they could define resilience – almost no hands went up. At a fundamental level this is important – it you can’t say what something is, how can you take steps to increase it.

There are lots of ways of looking at resilience – I like to see it as bounce-back-ability, like an elastic band that you can stretch out but will then return to its original shape afterwards. This capacity is vital for young people and communities and is a prime determinant on how we will cope with the inevitable stressors in life. We are all too aware of what happens when a rubber band gets stretched beyond its capacity – it snaps. This is also what happens to individuals and communities with similarly devastating consequences.

After the session I was reflecting with my co-facilitator, Tom Currie from Leap Confronting Conflict, and it occurred to me that there was a key area of resilience that didn’t get mentioned once – the resilience needed to be effective as youth and community professionals. We talk about developing resilience in others, but where is the talk about also developing this in ourselves?

Being a youth/community professional is incredibly rewarding, but also very challenging. We are faced with having to grapple with ‘wicked’ problems, with heart-wrenching sorrows, with unsolvable dilemmas, with pain and misery and injustice. No matter how hard we work our work is never done. No matter how much of ourselves we put into our work, we are not able to stem the flow of issues we face in our communities. And in the current economic climate we are facing increasing challenges with reducing resources.

It takes a lot of resilience to stay positive and active in the face of these challenges. Resilience is increasingly being recognised as an important factor and there are organisations looking at the issue creatively and holistically – both in terms of personal and organisational resilience (obviously there’s a connection as if individuals aren’t resilient, this impacts the ability of the not just the individual but the organisation to make a difference.)

When we aren’t able to stay resilient, we burn out and either leave the profession for other careers, or stay and pay an immense personal price (often measured in failed relationships and health breakdown). Neither option is a good one.

Now I’m not against people leaving the youth and community sector (it’s not a life sentence) but I do think that we are doing something wrong as so many people are leaving because of burnout. Aside from the personal cost, as a sector we cant afford to lose so much talent, experience and skills. We need them now more than ever.

So what can we do, as individuals and organisations?

• We can play the long game, and recognise that if we want to still be active, passionate and engaged throughout our career that we need to take care of ourselves
• We can invest in developing and nurturing resilience in ourselves, just as we do for others
• We can encourage funders to invest in maintaining and supporting existing professionals so that we can continue to be effective and reduce the amount of burnout

There are no easy answers, we will always be faced with the issues we grapple with today.

I personally fully intend to continue in this sector as long as I am working and able to contribute – there is no work I would rather be doing. I have been in the profession for over 20 years and feel as excited and committed now as when I started. I hope that I can say the same thing in another 20 years; and I believe that if I cant, then the fault will be mine for not doing what I need to do, to stay resilient.

@JonnyZander

Kaizen and the Street Focus Group

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Kaizen is a Japenese word that means continual improvement through small incremental steps. We chose the word Kaizen for our organisation because we believe that it is a great fit for our work in the community sector, where we should always be looking to improve what we do. No matter how successful something is, we will talk about how we can improve it the next time.

Here is a recent example of this process in action, with the result being what we think is a really useful innovation in consultation.

In most consultations it is a good thing to include some form of focus group as part of the methodology. But there is a fundamental problem with focus groups that is as follows: in general, only a very certain type of person will attend. The customary response to this fact is to widen that group by use of straight out bribery – free food, gifts or other incentives. This in turn has the result that the focus group may well be attended largely by people who are interested in the loot, not the discussion. These are serious limitations on the reliability of the information coming out of most focus groups.

We do a lot of consultations and community research. In the past year alone we have engaged and spoken with several thousand people in the community, and with a particular focus on people who don’t normally get involved with or participate in consultations. (Typically about 60% say they have never been consulted with before and another 20% or so say they have, but not much). We have engaged with people at 6am in the gym, and 2am in a nightclub; at train stations and bus stops (including jumping on the bus to continue a conversation); in parks and estates, cafes, hairdressers and a very wonderful array of other places. (If you want to see an example of the type of thing we do, have a look at pages 9-10 in this report on the consultation and engagement we did for one of the DCLG neighbourhood community budgets in East London.)

Kaizen Street Focus Group during LFB consultation                                                                                                Photo by Qavi Reyez

Now, these are one-on-one conversations, they produce great qualitative and quantitative data, and really work well. But they aren’t group discussions; and there is something different and exciting about having a discussion about the issues rather than working through the medium of a questionnaire.

There are various issues with the traditional focus group. The first is the reason above – the people attending are a self-selecting and niche group, who have the inclination, time, capacity etc for that type of process. The second issue is not about the focus group itself, but about a challenge in doing street engagement. When you are out doing street engagement there are often times and situations when you cant always isolate an individual to do a one-on-one questionnaire because they are in a group. Examples of this could be mums outside the primary school, teenagers hanging out in an estate late at night on a summers evening, a family having a picnic in the park. People in groups are in this way excluded from most street consultation, and that means their voice is not heard.

So, in response to these issues, we have pioneered what we call “street focus groups”. Just as it says on the tin, it is a focus group discussion, held on the street – with no bribery and no incentives, beyond the conversation itself.

Kaizen Street Focus Group                                                                                                    Photo by Tracy Woodford

And it works. It works really well.

This is an exciting new technique that we now use in all our consultations, and it means we can effectively have lots and lots of focus groups, with different sorts of people, in different sorts of places. These street focus groups last from between 15-30 minutes and cover a range of questions, in a semi-structured process. We may talk about just one aspect of the project or cover several – it really depends on where the conversation goes.

On a recent project for the Canal and River Trust as part of a medium size engagement (500+ people) we conducted 23 street focus groups with over 130 people participating in them. We also did 1 normal focus group, well, normal except for the fact that we held it on a moving boat which meant we literally had a happy, but captive audience for 1.5 hours.

So, its not like we are abandoning sit down focus groups of the traditional kind, but they will from now onwards be the exception not the norm for us. If there is a particular reason that has them be a reliable methodology we will use them. But I couldn’t think of ever doing a community consultation again that didn’t have street focus groups as a central part of the methodology.

There is no magic to the street focus group, and we think that it could really add benefit to lots of consultations that genuinely want to reach out beyond the usual / bribe-able suspects.

So…..

If you do consultations, then I encourage you to try it out and see what you think.

And…

If you commission consultations, then I encourage you to start asking delivery organisations to do them.

@JonnyZander

Where is the good news?

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“Youth is disintegrating. The youngsters of the land have a disrespect for their elders and a contempt for authority in every form. Vandalism is rife, and crime of all kinds is rampant among our young people. The nation is in peril.” 

Quote from an Egyptian Priest, circa 2000 BC

It is all too easy to find out negative stats about young people in the UK – from unemployment to crime to teenage pregnancies. But why is it so hard to find positive stats that highlight how amazing, wonderful and talented our young people are?

Some recent research has shown that over 75% of media stories about young people are negative, and there is all sorts of evidence that public perception of young people is very negative and that this has a significant impact on young people themselves and on adults’ experience of young people (eg. if you see a group of young people and assume they are a “gang” rather than a group of friends, it is predictable that you might feel anxious and fearful).

Kaizen are mid process on a consultation with young people and youth professionals on behalf of a large national company who are wanting to make an impact with youth. We have conducted one on one interviews with over 400 young people and 93 professionals have also been a part of the research. The data (both quantitative and qualitative) is depressing – especially in answer to the question “how are young people seen and treated in your community”.

A few days ago I started looking for some positive stats about young people in the country, and pretty quickly it became clear that while they may be there, they are not at all easily found. I believe this is a significant issue and one that can actually easily be addressed (in contrast to all the other significant issues in the youth sector that can’t be solved so easily).

So what would be the benefits of having clear positive stats and data? There would be many including:

  • It will help us to redress the balance of negative information and mis-information about young people
  • We can use positive reinforcement to encourage wanted behaviour, attitudes and attributes
  • We can actually be more representative of the true nature of young people
  • We can celebrate the difference they (and we) make

Just to be clear I am talking about the following types of things (these are just examples):

  • How many young people are employed (we know there are 1m unemployed, but how many are in employment or training)?
  • How many young people volunteer, how many hours of volunteering does it represent, and what do they do?
  • How many young people are carers?
  • How many young people set up businesses and how much income/impact do they generate?
  • How many young people are part of shaping local or national strategy, from school youth council members, to youth trustees of charities?
  • What % of young people are law abiding (rather than what % commit crimes)?
  • What is the gap between what adults think about young people (on all sorts of metrics) and what is actually the case?

One possible route would be to take every easily available negative stat and find the positive reflection of it. But I think it would require a deeper dive to really pull together a comprehensive set of positive stats that could potentially help to reshape how we think about the youth of the country, and how they think of themselves.

We should be very proud of our young people – they are wonderful and talented – and I would love to be able to back this belief up with stats….

I am sure that there must be a funder out there who would commission such a piece of research……any thoughts on moving this idea forward, anyone???

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