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Participation

Y Speak Changemakers Funding for Bath Area Play Project

 

This Award followed on from an initial piece of work we did that was funded through the Local Network Fund in late 2004 where we piloted a participation group where children and young people using our services were able to become more actively involved in the organisation.

 

 

We have a long history of involving young people in BAPP with a Volunteer programme supporting disabled children to attend playschemes and a Young Volunteer Working Group where 2 representatives were chosen to sit on BAPP’s Management Committee. We even approached the Charity Commission to consider allowing young people to have a vote on the Committee but due to their age being under 18, this was not agreed.

 

As with all good quality play provision, Playworkers will always ensure that the provision is child centred and listens to the needs of individual children. Children choose who they play with, what they do and where they do it. Good playwork practice enables children and young people to become active participants in their play setting from making decisions within Childrens’ meetings, choosing where to go on trips, what activities to do to involving children in staff recruitment – a children’s interview panel.

 

The whole permanent staff team undertook some training with Dialog to reflect on our current participation practice and to consider what we wanted to develop in this area. The day provided surprising results with the facilitator as well as the team amazed at how much participation work we do as a matter of course. We built up a picture of what we would like to do to involve children and young people meaningfully in the management and development of BAPP and devised the Quality Assessment idea. We sought funding from Y Speak, which was successful.

 

As children and young people are the users of our services we did not want to use any kind of QA system, which was adult led as none of our services are.

Two members of staff worked with the group to talk about and think how a play setting could be “marked”, graded or assessed. How do you know whether it is good or not? What makes it good? Is this the same as good quality?

 

So far the group have met monthly as well as visiting play settings, which has helped form judgements about the settings. We have also held a Local Councillor Surgery at the Hut where children have been able to talk directly to Councillors about things that cause them concern in their local area. These surgeries now happen once a month and are open to the wider public however because they are located in an environment which children feel comfortable in and is child-friendly, we hope that where children have issues they want to talk about, they can do so easily.

 

 

The group then considered how to put the assessment criteria they came up with into a format which could be used by other children’s groups to assess the quality of their play provision. Little BAPP decided that they would develop their own criteria for assessment and concentrate on this task rather than developing a broader agenda for other groups. The group are also looking at attending various events and conferences on the theme of children’s participation and feeding back ideas and suggestions for change to the BAPP Management Committee.

 

Little BAPP was made up of eight children and young people aged from 6 to 15 years of age including a disabled child and all of them chose to get involved voluntarily. The group visited all of BAPP’s summer playschemes during the summer of 2005 using a list of questions which they had devised in previous sessions. The group interviewed both children and staff at each of the playschemes asking questions about their opinions of the building, the staff, the equipment, the resources and the quality of the play. They reviewed each of the venues used for playschemes from a child’s point of view commenting on how welcoming it was attractiveness, facilities and outside space.

 

At the end of the review and assessment stage, children’s confidence had grown enormously as they had progressively become more outgoing and developing skills in questioning and diplomacy. The group did come to a conclusion about the playscheme they thought offered the highest quality provision with the best play facilities but decided not to report the outcome and just to present the overall findings to the Management Committee.

 

In the summer of 2006 we piloted SOFA06 – Summer Of Fun Activity programme for children and young people aged 12+ running alongside summer playschemes for children aged 5 – 12 years. In the evaluations, there were fantastic reports of the difference this programme made to young people. We also asked whether any of the young people would be interested in being involved in the planning and organisation of any future programme. This has resulted in a small group of 10 young people who will start to develop ideas and plan future programmes with the support of staff in 2007.

 

The Y speak funding finished in 2006 and we are actively seeking funding to develop this work further as we believe the participation and involvement of children and young people is crucial to the success of any project providing services for children.