The importance of making sure that a looked after child is heard

Recent recommendations from the House of Commons EducationSelect Committee’s report on children’s homes include the importance of making sure that a child’s view is taken into account when recruiting care staff. On the same day the University of Oxford’s Rees Centre released a blog post on the importance of making sure a foster child has input into decisions that affect them.

Education Select Committee’s report on children’s homes

The Education Select Committee’s remit was to review the national strategy for Looked After Children in children’s homes across the UK and consider how organisations like St Christopher’s can help young people to achieve better outcomes.

Amongst the recommendations were some along the theme of how young people can feed into the development of their service:

“Children and young people should be given more of a say in recruiting their care workers.”

This is something that St Christopher’s believes in. We involve young people benefiting from our services in the recruitment process. For example, when our newest children’s home opened in 2013 we had young people from one of our other children’s homes sit in on the interview process and importantly they got to ask their questions.

This is not the only way that we get young people’s views and feedback on all of our services including fostering, children’s homes and 16+ accommodation and support. In this case young people were also involved in how we decorated the home to make sure children coming in would feel welcomed.

Rees Centre blog post

So what part of the Rees Centre’s blog post particularly resonated with St Christopher’s? Well this bit:

“On the whole, my research shows that foster youth can be active participants and agents in their own lives, both developing and breaking relations. This is strengthened by the negotiations and taking part in decisions about themselves.”

This to us summed up the very importance of participation to ensure the best outcomes for the young people we are working with.

Our model of youth participation

When we recently explained our model of youth participation to a local authority we used this picture. It shows several things:

·        That listening to young people is a virtuous circle that then feeds back into how we deliver our services, recruit and train staff.

·        That there is more than one way for young people to feed back into our services. Whether it is attending one of our regional Challengefor Change (C4C) meetings or speaking to their foster carer or support worker. We listen to it all.

·        Our young people have shaped the way we communicate to them as a result of listening to them. We did a series of films with our young people called the Wrap because our young people asked us to stop giving them leaflets. By listening and responding to them we’ve managed to produce something that allows us to effectively communicate with them.

Listening to the voices of our young people is something that is built into our culture at St Christopher’s. We welcome the Educational Select Committee’s recommendations on involving young people in staff recruitment and look forward to seeing the industry embrace this.

If you would like further information on how we approach youth participation please visit our website.