Engagement can be seen at 3 levels
- Personal
- Service
- Strategic
Purpose and assumptions
A good place to start with planning for engagement is to think about the purpose of the activity, and write down your assumptions about the outcomes.
Examples of purpose of engagement might be to
- find the points of stress in a service (Personal)
- understand why schools are excluding more pupils (Service)
- create an council inclusion strategy (Strategic)
Everyone will have some assumptions that they make, and it's a good idea as an engagement facilitator to write your assumptions down before you start planning the workshop or survey.
When you have your list of assumptions, write some open questions for particiapants.
You may find it helpful to use an AI such as Claude.ai to write some open questions based on these assumptions.
An engagement framework
Engagement can be both formal exercise and an everyday activity. It can be a specific exercise to help understand and improve a service. But it can be part of the day to day work of teachers and support workers, and parent carers.
We should try to create an environment where co-production of services is the normal way of working, whether formal or everyday.
The cycle could be
- Facilitate
- Participate
- Interpret
- Make decisions
- Feedback
Facilitate
The workshop facilitator's job is to make bring the ideas and the resources needed to get the best out of the people taking part. Using open questions and engaging resources will help this.
Participate
The participants may be
- children and young people
- parent carers
- support staff
- teachers, SENCOs, or specialist professionals
Sometimes it's useful to get "everyone in a room together". Sometimes it's better to have separate workshops. Some children and young people may need their support workers with them.
Especially in formal engagement activities we need to support children and young people, and parent carers. But in everyday activities we also need to support teachers and professionals to be able to engage at a wider service or strategic level.
Some things to think about
- making sure that children and young people, and parent carers can attend engagement activites
- tailoring activities to your specific audience
- using simple frameworks that encourage participation and feedback
- being creative
- being open
Interpret
Once you have the data from the engagement workshop or survey, you'll need to interpret it. This shouln't be done in isolation. Again, work with the same groups as in the workshop. You may find it helpful to ask the Youth SEND representatives or Parent Carer Forum to help with this.
Make decisions
This is what the whole process is about. Go back to the purpose of the engagement to see
- what has been learnt
- how your assumptions turned out
- what needs to happen as a result
Remember that co-production is about making those decisions together with children and young people, and their parent carers.
Feedback
Giving feedback on the whole process
- helps participants believe that the process was useful
- supports future engagement and co-production
You might feedback the survey results or workshop findings, as well as the decisions made.
Further reading
Engagement activities for children and young adults
Engagement activities for parent carers and professionals
Guidance from the Code of Practice 2015
4.12 When organising participation events for young people, local authorities should
endeavour to ensure full accessibility by considering:
• timing: holding events when young people are most likely to be free and not when they are likely to be in education (unless arrangements have been made with their education providers)
• transport: explaining to young people how to travel to an event, with clear instructions, maps and, particularly in rural areas, details of a taxi service which is accessible to those with disabilities
• physical accessibility: for example, access for a number of wheelchair users
• accessibility of content: providing materials in different formats and tailored to meet different cognitive abilities and reading skills and supporting different communication needs, avoiding jargon and acronyms wherever possible and where this is not possible, explaining terms used
• age appropriateness: keeping membership of young people’s forums under review as the participants get older, and bearing in mind the very different stages that young people will be at from the age of 16 to 25
Whatever the means of consultation and engagement, local authorities should let participants know the outcome of discussions so that they will know what will happen as a result of their contribution.