Children and Young People's Mental Health and Wellbeing Joint Delivery Board newsletter: October 2022

Children and Young People's Voices at the Centre

The Joint Delivery Board is committed to listening and acting on the views of children and young people to inform the work of the Task and Finish Groups focused on service design, delivery and evaluation. This is being achieving through a range of engagement activities with third sector partners to reach a wide audience and seldom heard groups of children, young people and families. The engagement work is aligned to the Principles of Participation and Engagement, which underpinned by Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child ( UNCRC).

This newsletter intends to provide an overview of engagement/ outreach work undertaken across different areas working with children and young people. The work of the Joint Delivery Board was informed by previous research and engagement work, which you can read more about this on the website History of the Joint Delivery Board. Since then, further engagement work informed by the Task and Finish groups, has been undertaken to ensure the voices of children and young people remain central to this work. Working in partnership with third sector organisations, including Youthlink Scotland, Scottish Youth Parliament, Young Scot, Children's Parliament, Early Years Scotland, Children in Scotland and Who Cares? Scotland, a range of engagement activities and approaches have been undertaken.

The engagement undertaken with children and young people has already made a real difference. All the findings from the engagement work have now been reported back to Task and Finish groups to directly inform the design, delivery and evaluation of supports and services and recommendations for consideration will be presented to the Board at the October meeting.

The Board wish to thank all the children and young people, parents and carers and the early years workforce who have shared their experience and views across the engagement activities, as well as the organisations that supported children and young people to take part. The Board is considering the best way to feedback to children and young people who took part in the engagement, the impact their views and experiences have had across the work of the Board. An update will be provided in the next edition of the Newsletter.