Edinburgh Children’s Partnership

Children and young people have a right to participate and influence how adults plan and run services in the areas where they live and learn. This is called good strategic planning. It is the responsibility of adults who run services to involve children and young people in all aspects of strategic planning.

Edinburgh Children’s Partnership was successful in a bid to Scottish Government to develop and deliver an approach to better their engagement with children and young people. This approach is based on a model drawn from Scotland’s National Action Plan for Human Rights.

Children’s Parliament has been a key design and delivery partner in the Edinburgh process. The model started with the structure of three linked events:

Event 1 engaged with children and young people as rights-holders.
Event 2 engaged adult duty-bearers.
Event 3 brought children, young people, and adult participants together.

The purpose of the events was to identify what children and young people need to live their lives with dignity, to recognise barriers and to explore solutions across the domains of life at home, in school, and in the community.

For the partners in Edinburgh, the pilot initiative was a way to develop a methodology for engagement that is jointly owned by children, young people and adult duty-bearers. The approach would then be shared as a model of good practice with other Community Planning Partnership areas.

In Edinburgh, the work helped shape and deliver the 2017-2020 Children’s Services Plan in the context of an ongoing commitment amongst the planners (duty-bearers) to meaningful ongoing engagement with children and young people. For Edinburgh, the work was also an ideal and timely opportunity to shape the City Vision 2050, work around Future Schools and push to create a child-friendly city.