Tim's Blog

Last year I spent an afternoon working with a number of charities who had come together to plan a residential that would involve a few young people linked to each organisation working together planning a shared social change campaign. We were talking about the different things that event organisers need to think about when bringing together a diverse group to make big decisions.

It quickly became clear that to make the residential sessions truly participative so that everyone could have an equal chance to be heard and to influence decision making and to make the sessions truly effective so that they could lead to solid decisions everyone could work with, all within in a tight timescale required a lot of planning and forward thought.

I recently co-designed and fascilitated a series of dialogue events for The National Youth Agency (NYA) between young people, officials from the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and Parmjit Dhanda MP (then Minister for Children and Families). We focussed the dialogues, which were part of a broader UK tour by Parmjit Dhanda, on the Local Offer.

The Local Offer is a guarantee introduced through Section 6 of the Education and Inspections Act that gives young people the right to: