Welcome to the Child & Youth Participation Self-Assessment Tool

This Self-Assessment Tool is a fundamental element of the Sligo Leitrim Children's and Young Peoples Local Participation Practice Lab. It aims to present all individuals, organisations and groups with responsibility to provide services for children and young people with an opportunity to consider individually and collectively how their practice actively facilitates and supports children and young people to participate and engage with them and their services. It provides:

- An introduction to the Lundy model of Youth Participation.

- An opportunity to reflect on the ethos of your practice/ your organisation in relation to child and youth participation by answering a number of questions. A report is generated particular to the respondent with suggestions on how to encourage child and youth participation.

- Examples of tools and activities to support participatory practice.

This resource is aimed at management, staff and/or organisations whose work has an impact on the lives of children and young people and who want to assess, increase and ensure they are incorporating meaningful youth participation in their work.

How To Guide

- To access the Self-Assessment Tool initially please click ‘start here’ above.

- You will be required to set up as a new user; all further log-ons and information will be saved under your user.

- You will be prompted to enter your details and a password specific to you.

- Once you are set up as a user you will be redirected to the home page, scroll to the Lundy Model image and click on each quadrant (i.e., Space, Voice, Audience and Influence) to access the self-reflection questions under that quadrant of the model.

- To begin, select ‘start questions’, each quadrant is further broken down into three age groups: ‘Preschool Aged Children’, ‘Primary School Aged Children’ and ‘Post Primary Aged Children and Young People’. Answer the questions in the age category relevant to you.

- To advance to the next quadrant select ‘save and next’.

- Answers can be ‘saved’ at any stage and can be accessed under ‘Start Here’, ‘Return to Questions’; the ‘pending survey’ is saved under the date the questions were completed.

- Once you are happy with the questions answered under each quadrant, click ‘save and generate a report’. This will be saved under ‘My Reports’ on the date it was generated. Double click on the pdf to access the report.

Note: All questions under each quadrant are not required to be completed in order to generate a report. The Self-Assessment Tool can be completed as many times as you wish, it is suggested that the tool could be revisited once you work on the suggestions from the report.

This resource is NOT a definitive and fully comprehensive list of participation activities. It is NOT about reinventing how children and young people are involved in decision-making but rather aims to bring youth participation to the fore and build on structures and policies that are already in place.