Attainment Scotland Fund evaluation - voice of children and young people: thematic evaluation report 2024

Introduction

Children and young people have the right to participate in decisions which affect them. This is a central right in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) which was incorporated into Scottish legislation in January 2024. This means that the structures within which decisions are made in Scotland must enable children and young people to be heard and take an active role in their own lives and communities.

Young people have the right to be heard, and evidence shows that meaningful engagement has benefits for both individuals and public services. This is particularly the case in education, where there is considerable evidence from research that supports the view that addressing learner participation makes for effective policy making, enhances school life, and improves a range of outcomes for learners.

In the Scottish Attainment Challenge, learner participation is crucial to ensuring that children and young people have a voice in the decisions that most affect them. In particular, it is important that children and young people affected by poverty – those that the programme is designed to support – are able to influence and engage with the decisions that affect their education. Both learners and schools benefit from meaningful engagement with children and young people.

This report

This thematic report aims to map out children and young people’s engagement in decision-making across the Attainment Scotland Fund. This will start to assess the extent to which children and young people are engaged in decision-making, how this differs across schools and local authorities, and across the learner journey, as well as any evidence of the difference such involvement is making, what is working well and what could be improved in such engagement.

Additionally, this thematic report provides a number of case studies related to work being undertaken to engage children and young people in decision-making in relation to the Scottish Attainment Challenge. This will support our developing understanding of the national picture, capturing work from across Scottish Attainment Challenge National Programmes, Education Scotland Attainment Advisor-led projects and existing activity related to engaging children and young people in decision-making at the local level in the context of the Scottish Attainment Challenge.

Whilst this report predominantly focuses on voice from the perspective of children and young people, the broader theme relates to engagement of families and communities in decision-making as well as children and young people. This wider aspect will be considered further in future thematic reporting.

Evaluation Questions

The Scottish Attainment Challenge Logic Model published in 2022 illustrates, at a high level, the activities that will lead to the short, medium and long term outcomes designed to achieve the Scottish Attainment Challenge mission ‘to use education to improve outcomes for children and young people impacted by poverty, with a focus on tackling the poverty-related attainment gap’.

The refresh of the Logic Model in 2022 introduced a new outcome domain related to engagement with children and young people and their families, reflecting the importance of engaging children and young people in the programme. This was introduced in both short-term and medium-term outcomes:

• Short-term engagement outcome: ‘Meaningful engagement with children and young people and their families and communities embedded in decision-making in relation to the Scottish Attainment Challenge.’
• Long-term engagement outcome: ‘Embedded engagement and participation of children and young people, families and communities in the learner journey’.

The Evaluation Strategy developed for 2022 – 26 included a new evaluation question related to engagement in decision-making/voice:

Engagement in Decision Making

‘To what extent were children and young people and their families and communities engaged in decision-making, what was the impact of this engagement, and was there evidence of engagement becoming embedded in the learner journey?’

And the related Sub-evaluation questions:

• How and to what extent were children and young people and their families and communities engaged in decision-making?
• Did this differ across schools and Local Authority areas, and/or across stages of the learner journey (eg primary versus secondary)?
• What difference did children and young people’s involvement in decision-making make?
• What difference did families and communities involvement in decision-making make?
• What is working well and what could be improved in engaging children, young people and their families and communities in decision-making?
• To what extent is engagement in decision-making embedded in approaches and across stages?