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Children's Participation in Social Policy: Inclusion,

Chimera or Authenticity?

Tom Cockburn

Social Policy and Society / Volume 4 / Issue 02 / April 2005, pp 109 - 119
DOI: 10.1017/S1474746404002258, Published online: 12 April 2005

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1474746404002258

How to cite this article:

Tom Cockburn (2005). Children's Participation in Social Policy: Inclusion, Chimera or Authenticity?.
Social Policy and Society, 4, pp 109-119 doi:10.1017/S1474746404002258

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C 2005 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S1474746404002258

Children’s Participation in Social Policy: Inclusion,

Chimera or Authenticity?
To m C o c k b u r n

Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Bradford

E-mail: t.d.Cockburn@bradford.ac.uk

This paper explores the recent plethora of commitments by government to include children
in social policy decision making in the UK. The participation of children is located in the
tensions between children perceived as competent and/or incompetent that underlies the
ambiguities of children’s participation. The paper examines the ways participation, power
and empowerment can be used in the context of children. The paper looks at children’s
civic engagement and suggests that the participation of children is difficult with the ways
representative governments operate in a liberal democracy today, but ends with some
suggested ways forward.

I n t ro d u c t i o n

The improvement of children’s lives has received considerable attention from the New
Labour government, with additional investment in schools and health. A host of new
measures have been introduced to reduce child poverty.1 A unit, the Children and Young
People’s Unit (CYPU), in the Department of Education and Science was established to
represent the views of children in Westminster. The CYPU has now been merged with
the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) Children, Young People and Families
Directorate. The government claims to have raised over 1 million children from poverty2
and one of the government’s Policy Action Team’s key recommendations is ‘putting young
people at the centre of policies that affect them, organising services around the needs of
young people’ (CYPU, 2001a: 31). In 2002 the Department of Health declared:

participation should go beyond consultation and ensure that children and young people initiate
action and make decisions in partnership with adults, for example, making decisions about
their care and treatment or day to day decisions about their lives (DoH, 2002).

Built in to the social inclusion measures of the New Labour government is a

commitment to listen to children. These have been consolidated in two documents
produced by the CYPU in 20013 where government departments are to ‘consider’
establishing ‘young people’s advisory or decision-making bodies’ and must ‘consider’
children in the ‘membership of main adult-led advisory and decision-making bodies’
(CYPU, 2001b: 14). One of the frameworks for the Strategy for Children and Young people
is for ‘children and young people’s engagement in the local and national democratic
process’ (CYPU, 2000: 22) and to establish a Young People’s Advisory Forum ‘to advise
the Minister for Young People and ensure that we involve young people in our plans to
improve policies and services’ (CYPU, 2001a: 28).
However, as Badham (2004) has noted there is a tension between the government’s
desire for increased active citizenship and high voter apathy, on the one hand; and the

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 Tom Cockburn

achievement of the better services that children themselves have identified, such as clean
streets, safety from harassment by adults in public, cheaper transport and leisure facilities.
In 2003 the CYPU was disbanded as a result of the restructuring of the Department for
Education and Skills and the Department of Health. In the Green Paper Every Child Matters
(DfES, 2003) children’s engagement in local democracy was lauded but was distinctly
quiet on children’s demands for rights to advocacy and representation in parental divorce,
and school exclusions and still the government resists a fully independent children’s
commissioner for England.
The first section of this paper explores the barriers to children’s participation in policy.
The participation of children is located in the context of a distinct lack of trust in children by
government and many adults in today’s society. The tensions between children perceived
as competent and/or incompetent underlies the ambiguities of children’s participation.
The second section examines the ways participation, power and empowerment have been
discussed in the literature and identifies how this can be used in the context of children.
Indeed, may be the task of empowerment of children as a group (or any other group for
that matter) is incommensurate with the task of governing in a liberal democracy. This
forms the basis of the final section that explores the issue of children’s civic engagement.
Before this it is necessary to acknowledge the heterogeneity implied in the term
‘children’; of course this encompasses an enormous range of childhood experiences,
from pre-school age children up to those who may have left school and entered the formal
labour market and a wide range in between. Furthermore, one can add identity issues,
such as those based around class, gender, ethnicity and (dis)ability. However, because
all children share a common experience vis-à-vis adults, it is worth exploring common
issues. After all even fairly young children can express their views (Borland et al., 1998;
Lancaster and Broadbent, 2003). Therefore, following the United Nations Convention on
the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), I will define children as all those under 18 years.
Another acknowledgement of complexity must be applied to the term ‘participation’.
Participation has many meanings ranging from giving information to children, consulting
with children, involving some children in the planning of policies, working in partnership
and children managing programmes and policies by themselves. However, it is worth
noting at this point what Roger Hart (1992, 1997) has referred to as ‘non-participation’,
which involves the manipulation, deception and tokenism of children within participatory
frameworks.

Barriers to children

One of the main difficulties in addressing children’s relationship to participation is a

problem attached to children in most aspects of life in British society. That is, the labels that
are attached to children by adults. Dominguez (1992) argues that we need to pay attention
to the social, political and discursively created ways children are described, analysed,
argued, justified and theorised by academics, local communities and nation builders.
The contradictions of discourses around children can be demonstrated by the
juxtaposition of children the risk with children at risk (Stephens, 1995). Different labels are
applied to children such as incompetent, unstable, unreliable or emotional, and children
are thus to be located within a-political ‘safe’ spaces of the family, school and day care
centre. As Mayall (2001) has noted, children are placed inside the ‘private’ sphere and
‘protected’ from the public sphere. Yet the ‘private’ sphere is not necessarily private and

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 Children’s Participation in Social Policy

children are affected by policies, theories, social changes and actions. In a similar vein,
Buckingham notes: ‘policies that directly concern them – in areas such as education,
family welfare and leisure provision – are generally devised with little attempt to consult
or gather the views of children’. (2000: 168).
Discourses around children and childhood are usually couched in moral terms
(Mayall, 2002). This can be easily demonstrated in the community and family policies
of the government and left-leaning think tanks to date (Wilkinson, 1994; Wilkinson and
Mulgan, 1995). New Labour, even before being elected, was concerned with questions
of law and order and the perceived breakdown of civil society, especially in inner cities.
There was a seeming slide towards anarchy in the sphere of ‘sexual mores’, violence in
children’s TV and video games, street crime, etc. The influence of communitarians can
be detected in the language that attempted to shift the balance of individuals’ rights with
responsibilities.4 The ‘moral deficit of the young’ was due to the failure of institutions to
impose self-control and of families to facilitate the internalisation of restraint. New Labour
has targeted parents as a crucial part of the ‘informal mechanism’ of social control.5
If we use the example of New Labour’s youth justice strategy that involves the
induction of new, younger children into the youth justice system, integrative alternatives
to custody give way to community penalties, and thereafter an expanded range of
semi-intermediate custodial penalties apply. There is an exclusive stress on offending
behaviour by children and the expectation that it is the child, not their social and
economic circumstances, that must change (Drakeford and Vanstone, 1996). With the
case of Youth Offending Teams (YOTS) child safety orders and parenting orders bring
ten-year-old children routinely into the caseloads of YOTS making it difficult to adopt
strategies to keep less serious offenders away from social work intervention (Bailey and
Williams, 2000). Furthermore, there is an increasing range of surveillance and control
techniques of ‘socially excluded’ children occurring at earlier stages in some their lives.
This is exemplified by the £600 million scheme to target children at risk of re-offending
through Identification, Referral and Tracking (IRT)6 that reflects government concerns
with those children ‘showing early signs of difficulty’ (CYPU, 2000: 8). Socially excluded
young people are the central targets of surveillance (see Rose, 2000) and this process
is accelerated by the policies of New Labour and is seen by some commentators as
complimentary to participation strategies (James and James, 2001).
However, the government has attempted to initiate processes to include children
in decision making. The CYPU has identified core principles for the involvement of
children and young people (CYPU, 2001b), where children ‘should be involved . . . where
individual decisions are being taken about children’s own lives . . . where services for, or
used by children are being developed or provided locally . . . where national policies and
services are being developed or evaluated’ (CYPU, 2001b: 4). Such practices, begun by
voluntary organisations, are being adopted not just by central and regional governments,
but also by local authorities (Local Government Association, 2002). Yet within the strategy
documents there is confusion over the risks of children being involved in public life. In
the Learning to Listen document it acknowledges that children: ‘can understand that ideas
requiring more money cannot always be followed through quickly or at all’ (CYPU, 2001b:
13). However, within the same document one of the core principles for the involvement
of young people states that children are ‘helped to understand any practical, legal or
political boundaries of their involvement’ (CYPU, 2001b: 10). It is quite unlikely any
adult group would be ‘helped to understand’ the boundaries of their involvement.

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 Tom Cockburn

Ann-Li Lingren (2002) has suggested, from her work in Sweden, that there are two
perspectives on children. One has them as competent while another creates them as
dependent. Children become involved in what opinions are to be considered but it is
adults that make the final decision of what is in a child’s best interest. Adults become
interested in their opinions only if it suits their own interests. It is ‘a split attitude towards
children’s legal status’ (Lingren, 2002: 8). This ‘split attitude’ towards children cuts deep in
our society, so how can participatory schemes address this? The next section explores some
of the problems of ‘participatory’ schemes in general and suggests some ways forward.

C h i l d re n a n d p a r t i c i p a t i o n

In 2000 the Audit Commission produced a report identifying the failure of local and
national government to link consultation and the decision making process (Audit Com-
mission, 2000: 8). In this section I will argue that children’s ‘involvement’, ‘participation’,
‘consultation’ and ‘empowerment’ must be located in the process of participation in any
scheme. Children share with marginalized adults this exclusion from the process of
decision making and it is worth briefly exploring some of the themes raised in the wider
literature.
Most of the literature in participation begins with Shelley Arnstein’s (1971) ‘ladder of
participation’. At the top of the ladder stands citizen power, where principles of fairness
and competence are recognised, and at the bottom lays manipulation. This continuum
draws our attention to the ideologies of those undertaking the consultations. Those
seeking consensus are drawn towards the manipulation end of the continuum, while
those with a critical or conflictual approach tend towards providing participants with
citizen power. Thus any evaluation of participation must focus on the initiator’s agenda
about the substance of the participation and the democratic process (McCulloch, 1997).
Participation itself has various forms. Sarah White (2000) has identified four different
forms of participation that begins with ‘nominal’ participation, which demonstrates that
the organisation is ‘doing something’ or has a ‘popular base’. The sole function of
‘nominal’ participation is to provide the appearance of inclusion. Secondly, ‘instrumental’
participation provides raw materials, which people can then develop. This approach
aims largely to initiate efficiency within organisations. The third form of participation
is ‘representative’, where people are given a ‘voice’ and participants are allowed some
kind of leverage to initiate changes in the participant’s interest. Finally, she identifies
‘transformative’ participation, which ‘empowers’ people to have confidence in their own
actions and to be in a stronger position to initiate changes. There are parallels with
Arnstein’s ‘ladder of participation’ but White’s focus spotlights the process of participation
as much as the outcome. A focus on issues of power in participatory process become
important, rather than narrow technocratic ‘outcomes’ or ‘findings’.
If then the aim is for children to be active participants in agendas for change,
participants need to challenge and the absence of conflict is something that should
raise suspicion. The issue of conflict is entirely absent from Learning to Listen and other
government publications. The document leans towards a rather weak form of ‘nominal’
or, at best, ‘instrumental’ inclusion, rather than a whole scale transformation in children’s
lives and their ability to control the policies that affect them. However, the introduction of
a Young People’s Advisory Forum makes a nod towards ‘representative’ participation, but

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 Children’s Participation in Social Policy

one suspects that this may be a series of events rather than taking young people through
the processes of change that affects their lives.
In order to identify ways forward it is necessary to look at the meaning and
understanding of power and empowerment that affects children. The dominant paradigm
of understanding power in the social sciences has been concerned with ‘power over’,
whereas critical or feminist understanding of empowerment emphasise a dynamic one,
which conceptualises power as a process rather than a particular set of results. Nancy
Harstock (1985), for instance, contrasts power in terms of ‘obedience’ with the ‘energy’
definition of power – a power generating activity and raising morale. In this context power
becomes a process that cannot be done to people, but has to emerge from them. Thus
the focus of any participatory or policy action looks at interventions that are enabling and
those that are not.
Some useful parallels between children and women can be drawn from feminist
scholarship and activism, particularly around the fashionable notion of ‘empowerment’
(Humphries, 1994). Rowlands (1998) identifies three areas in women’s lives that need to
be addressed to empower them, namely ‘personal’, ‘collective’ and ‘close relationships’.
Applying this to the context of children, ‘personal empowerment’ may refer to the
empowerment of children’s own sense of self, ranging from being able to leave the
house unaccompanied, to moving to positions of active engagement in the wider
community. In considering each child’s experience, it is possible to identify the changes
that involvement brings to personal empowerment or those aspects of his/her situation,
context or culture that hinders this. This is important for children whose life experiences
change and develop along their life course. ‘Collective empowerment’ looks at the
ways in which groups change, the ways they are organised, the activities undertaken
and the relationships between them. In the case of children we can look at the ways
children’s organisations are working to further the interests of children as a group.7
Rowland’s concept of ‘empowerment in close relationships’ is, of course, hard to identify.
However, listening to children talking about parents, brothers and sisters, it is clear that
this is part of their lives where they were ‘on their own’. Positive and negative aspects
of themselves are closely entwined with their close relationships. Thus a process of
empowerment needs to engage in this arena that is considered to be ‘private’. The New
Labour government is very reluctant to engage with these ‘private’ arenas, such as the
withdrawal of legislation to ban the assault (or ‘smacking’) of children demonstrates. There
is seldom any sustained political will by any public organisation to make links between
these elements. For instance, empowerment in close relationships will involve supporting
children in their relationships within their families; it seems unlikely that the government
will have the political will to do this other than in extreme circumstances. Issues of
personal empowerment are also strongly embedded in the educational discourses of the
government. The aim of personal empowerment in the here and now does not sit easily
with the educational policy of examination success and target setting. I have written
elsewhere that the citizenship education initiative is more concerned with children’s
citizenship in the future than encouraging immediate political activism (Cockburn, 1999).
Under these circumstances participation and policies of inclusion must set out to support
or act as catalysts in the empowerment process of children in all the elements.
Consciousness raising about discrimination and oppression is a necessary pre-
condition to effective participation. People may not be aware of their real interests,
and creating opportunities for the involvement and participation in the decision-making

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 Tom Cockburn

process will be of only limited value without encouraging collective self-advocacy and
action. This has been utilised by disabled people to some effect by focussing on disabled
people’s abilities and contributions rather than dwelling on specific physical impairments
(Oliver, 1992). In the context of children’s rights one can easily determine the vast levels
of structural power held within institutions and organisations, such as schools, local
authorities and in families. It must be recognised that ‘conceptualising the powerful–
powerless dichotomy may in itself disempower and marginalise’ (Pease, 2002: 138). The
process of empowerment is a fluid process, as Starkey (2003) notes, empowerment is
not: ‘a sequential linear process and that people working towards empowerment may
experience events and changes in their circumstances that are disempowering’ (p. 279).
However, empowerment is a process of personal development that leads to broader
collective participation (Gaster, 1996) and one must not loose sight of the need for people
(including children) to influence the policy-making process (Sharp, 2002).

C h i l d re n a n d c i v i c e n g a g e m e n t

The government’s aim of increasing the participation of children and young people is
something that it has been reiterated at numerous points. For instance the CYPU’s Learning
to Listen document states: ‘promoting early engagement in public and community life is
crucial to sustaining and building a healthy society’ and ‘good participation opportunities
produce more confident and resilient young people’ (CYPU, 2001b: 6). Yet how are
children and young people receiving this message today? It has been suggested that young
people are ‘turned off’ civic engagement by the personalities involved in politics (Edwards,
2002), however I will suggest that the problem is more deep rooted and is to do with
persistent liberal assumptions behind the role of the governing and the governed.
There is persistence in liberal democratic thinking that treats the inequalities of
political culture in liberal democracies as separate and irrelevant to the formal equality
of citizenship. Periodic electoral participation is the mechanism where political rep-
resentatives are held in check. Children, who do not have the right to vote, are unequal
in terms of political rights as well as the general inequality of power children have in
relation to adults. Pressure group activity and other ‘political’ actions are perceived by
government as supplementary to electoral participation. The civic culture today persists
in ignoring ‘protests’, ‘demonstrations’, ‘disobedience’, ‘resistance’, etc. There is no sense
in which ‘unorthodox’ political activity, which goes beyond the ballot box or official
‘consultations’, is perceived as a voice worth listening to. Furthermore, as Pateman (1980)
has argued, non-participation is necessary for those governing in liberal democracies
to govern (hence the invention of concepts such as ‘social contracts’ or ‘consenting’ to
government). Thus successful governments are those where the individual citizen does not
‘interfere’ with the due process of government. If the actual political culture rests on non-
participation, people will have an unrealistic belief in their opportunities to participate.
Thus it is no surprise that the children in Morrow’s study found they had ‘limited efficacy
and participation in decision making in their communities and schools. There were no
consistent channels for children’s and young people’s views or creativity’. (2001: 47)
Individuals are expected to ‘generalise’ from their own immediate experiences to
political structures. Children meet authority structures in the home, school, media and
other institutions. In most spheres of children’s lives they are made to feel that they are not
politically competent. They perceive the ‘closeness’ of political life similar to the closeness

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 Children’s Participation in Social Policy

of the decisions of their parents and teachers. Experiments with schools councils show that
children’s own sense of competence can be changed but that participation tends to be by
the usual selected students who are close in belief and attitudes to teachers. Morrow (2001)
found that ‘[c]ivic engagement for . . . young people . . . barely existed, and they were well
aware of their limited efficacy even where structures that were intended to enable partici-
pation (such as school councils) were in place’ (p. 47). The conclusion that can be drawn
from this is that if inclusion is to be democratised ‘some very radical changes are required
that go far beyond the multiplication of miniature liberal democracies’ (Pateman, 1980:
91). The daily organisation of children’s worlds needs to be challenged and the balance
of orientations will quite probably be greatly disturbed. Thus the ‘development of a
democratic political culture demands, in short, a radical restructuring of all aspects of the
organizations and associations of everyday life to provide opportunities for worthwhile
participation for all citizens’ (Pateman, 1980: 92). Sharp and Connelly (2001) maintain
that the participation of people in decision making involves a ‘degree of danger’ by those
in authority. Whether people in authority today are prepared to take those risks is doubtful.

Conclusion

The last section of this paper has outlined a rather sombre view of representative
democracy and is of concern to all of us, not just children. The recent government
initiatives, however, are at least placing children’s participation nominally at the centre
of policy and it has at last recognised children as serious social actors in our society,
and children’s participation is formulated and taken into account alongside those of
adults (James and Richards, 1999). Pateman’s contention that there needs to be a radical
restructuring of all aspects of organisations and associations at one level appears naively
despairing. Is this likely given the firmly embedded structures of adult power? However,
participation in practice has moved a long way; although one must be aware that with
each step forward we must be aware of the need to learn more (Sinclair, 2004). Yet
the participation of children is something that agencies are getting better at. There are
a range of government initiatives in which young people can effect decisions at a local
level (Willow, 2002), a large database of participation examples are held by the National
Youth Agency,8 and a growing literature on the forms of children’s participation (Kirby
et al., 2003).9 Of course, this is variable, as there is still a long way to go for effective
participation leading to children’s overall empowerment as outlined above.
In order to bring this forward attention must be paid to issues of engagement, co-
construction and partnership in participation. Adults need to check their own motivations
and assess their readiness to work in partnership with children. They need to work on
whether they accept the validity of young people’s agenda and whether the processes they
adopt are more effective and respectful to children. Furthermore, children’s views must
be placed alongside with other adult stakeholders who may have conflicting agendas.
These issues may appear insurmountable; however, they are being addressed in a number
of models, including the Investing in Children in Durham (see Cairns, 2001). Kirby
and colleagues have also gathered evidence of 29 case studies where organisations
have moved their current structures and cultures from a ‘consultation-focused’ to a
‘participation-focused’ approach (Kirby et al., 2003). As Cairns (2001) has noted the
experience of dialogue for both children and adults in engagement, co-construction and

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partnership is rewarding for everyone. The complex flows of power are not being reversed
by any means, but the beginning of a process has started.
The participation of children is different to those of adults and as Fitzpatrick et al.
(1998) have noted greater time and resources are necessary to meaningfully initiate
and sustain children’s participation. This is necessary in order to allow children and
young people to develop the skills and confidence to become full participants, especially
younger children and children with communication difficulties; more time is necessary
for adults and children to gain trust in each other and for adults to gain meaningful insight
into what children are saying (McNeish and Newman, 2002). Not least time is necessary
for parents’ views to be engaged alongside with children, partner agencies and formal
organisations.
The lessons of the participative activities to date emphasise the importance of children
determining the way that they participate in their own terms. Or as Malcolm Hill and
his colleagues have argued; it is necessary for children not to be viewed as ‘respondents
but are seen as actors’ (2004: 86). Thus children and young people contribute to political
debate on their own terms and through their own volition. This is necessary to reverse
the presumption that children are to be expected to fit in with adult ways of participating.
In this sense, children are allowed to inhabit ‘child friendly spaces’ while participating
(Moss and Petrie, 2002).
The task of the government is to embed children and young people’s participation
into mainstream political institutions. The spirit of engagement and children’s direction
of policy can be initiated through partnerships with other organisations. For instance,
the Scottish Executive has worked with Children in Scotland (CIS) to consult children
over the development of the Executive’s policy review over special educational needs.10
CIS built upon its developed partnerships with children and young people to increase
children’s participation in policy decisions. The process worked over a two-year period
(sufficient for children’s skills to develop) and employed different styles of communication
(utilising drama, art, e-mail, discussion groups, questionnaires and discussion groups)
with different representative groups of children.11 Like many adults, children have only
a limited power to actually influence policy decisions and it is only through processes
of meaningful engagement, co-construction and partnership with policy makers, other
advocacy agencies and with different groups of children and young people that influence
can be a possibility.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank all the academics, practitioners, policy makers and young people
who participated in the Challenging Social Exclusion seminars in Edinburgh, Glasgow and
Stirling. The nine days work firmly established and were inspirational to my views. The
paper reflects my own view point and I singularly accept the blame for any inaccuracies.

Notes
1 Such as increases in Child Benefit and Income Support for children, the Working Families Tax
Credit, Child Tax Credit, Childcare Tax Credit, a lump sum payable to all newborn babies and the
Childcare Strategy.
2 The Guardian, 19 September 2002.

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 Children’s Participation in Social Policy

3 Namely: ‘Tomorrow’s future: building a strategy for children and young people’, and ‘Learning to
listen: core principles for the involvement of children and young people’.
4 The CYPU’s ‘Building a strategy for children and young people: consultation document’, states
that ‘responsibility’ can be measured by ‘decreases in youth offending and anti-social behaviour, drug
and alcohol use, teenage pregnancy and positive examples of children and people contributing to their
community’ (CYPU, 2000: 23).
5 For instance, parents are to be ‘taught parenting’, ranging from formal ‘Parentcraft’ classes,
‘counselling’ in Sure Start programmes, to leaflets available at Supermarkets. See the programme based in
www.ivillage.co.uk sponsored by Tesco’s.
6 The Guardian, 23 August 2002.
7 There are numerous organisations of children locally in the UK, although adults are also involved. In
Bradford there is a strong Bradford Youth Parliament. Notable national organisations include the Children’s
Rights Alliance England, British Youth Council, National Black Youth Forum and A National Voice.
8 See www.nya.org.uk
9 In addition, there are the changeable purposes and contexts of participation initiatives themselves
with no single model of participation that could or should be adopted to suit all occasions (Shier, 2001).
10 Summarised and discussed by Tisdall and Davis (2004).
11 Including children with special educational needs, children with English as a second language and
traveller children.

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