FLARE Member, Carys shares her experience on delivering a workshop at the Making Participation Work conference.
A few weeks ago, I was given the opportunity to share this and my own personal experiences of participation at the Making Participation Work Practitioner’s Conference, alongside Jonathan (another FLARE member). In our workshop, we discussed FLARE’s role as an advisory group to the Department for Education and what challenges and opportunities we often find in our work. The conference provided a great opportunity to share our thoughts with practitioners across the country, answering their questions and giving them our thoughts.
The FLARE group shapes services and support for children, young people and their families across the country through our work with the government and other national organisations. Despite being an important role, especially considering the group amplifies the voices of young people themselves, many practitioners don’t know about the work we do. Doing events like the Making Participation Work Practitioner’s Conference allows us to not only share our work and our ideals for participation and engagement at all levels, but also to reflect on our own work.
As a Governmental advisory group, we face unique challenges and opportunities in comparison to many other participation groups and networks across the country. Our role in FLARE is relatively unique, working on a national level and allowing the opportunity to participate with people across the country, rather than in just a local area. However, while it is easy to think of FLARE as the ideal advisory group (and while we are definitely proud of the work we do), the event provided some time for reflection on our development and to reiterate to professionals the need to not set certain groups as templates for all advisory groups or ideals.
It's important first to consider that too often people often talk about co-production and participation as an ideal, a gold-standard to strive towards to. However, this mindset is setting ourselves up to fail. Co-production and participation should be at the foundations of everything professionals and practitioners do, not an after-thought or an optional add-on.
And it’s crucial to note that while FLARE is a step in the right direction, we need more than us. Now, more than ever, it’s imperative for events like this to take place and to talk about the challenges we face in setting up/maintaining participation groups and practices and discover how we can see them as opportunities to improve rather than insurmountable barriers. Participation groups across the country are being closed down due to lack of funding and we need more to fully capture the opinions of disabled children and young people from all backgrounds in order to make more efficient services which put people, not disorders, at the heart.
As a young person sitting on a national advisory group, it’s a privilege you don’t take for granted but this comes with equal burden. While the group represents a variety of different special educational needs, disabilities and experiences, we cannot capture every individual’s experience or the impacts of every condition on daily life. We don’t want to and are not able to speak for others, so it’s imperative they have the opportunity, where they want to, to speak for themselves.