In 2023 Involve co-designed what is believed to be the first citizen panel about improving the English school system, with a particular focus on inclusivity.
Importantly, this was also the first citizen panel to include children and young people with additional needs as panel members. Funded by the RSA’s Innovation in Democracy programme on behalf of UKRI, this project had two aims. First to understand how democratic processes such as Citizens' Panels can be made more inclusive. Second, to understand how education professionals, young people with and without special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), and partners can work together to make recommendations for how schools can become more inclusive.
The teams leading the project included academics from the Universities of Exeter, Portsmouth, and Northumbria. The panel was made up of young people with additional needs, their parents, young people without additional needs and teachers. The young people with additional needs and their parents met online in preparatory sessions which enabled the team to build relationships and understand how best to enable the young people to be active participants.
Over the first two sessions, done online, panel members were taken through a facilitated process of learning and dialogue. The process was designed to ensure all participants felt comfortable with the level of complexity in the information received, the way this information was presented, and the pace of the dialogue. The importance of building relationships and familiarising the young people with SEND to the panel's process paid off at the final face-to-face event.
We distributed photographs of the venue during the on-boarding of panel members, which helped when we came together to run the event. We offered a quiet room which was used, along with providing tours of the venue. We learned through the process that attention to these small allowances to better familiarise members with a space can be beneficial to all participants, not only those with additional needs.
The panel’s key purpose, which we achieved, was to agree on a set of recommendations by young people with SEND for themselves, and other young people with SEND, which could have a real-world impact on their school and future experiences. We hope that with this project, a standard can be set to normalise spaces where voices less heard are listened to — and spaces can be made to fit them, rather than the other way around.
You can read a full report of findings from the panel here.