By Dr. Sarah Chicken, UWE Bristol & Dr. Jacky Tyrie, Swansea University
On Tuesday 21st of January we were delighted to participate in the Education: Insights Practice to Policy Event at the House of Lords organised by colleagues at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London and sponsored by Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick.
The event brought together a diverse range of education experts and government ministers with the aim of drawing attention to key issues in education and to begin to discuss how these might be resolved. ‘We enjoyed talking through our research with MPs and their aides including, Ruth Jones, MP for Newport West and Islwyn, Tonia Antoniazzi, MP for Gower, Maisie Caro, parliamentary advisor to Torsten Bell, MP for Swansea West and Karin Smyth, MP for Bristol South’s aide.
We presented on aspects of our three-year project, Children’s Participation in Schools (CPiS). This project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and involves working with children, student teachers, in service teachers and teacher-educators within the Welsh policy context. We are focusing upon the education of children between the ages of 3 and 7 as there is currently a gap within the research literature related to the enactment of participative rights for children within this age group.
Children’s rights are a cross-cutting theme of the Curriculum for Wales, and we are exploring how young children are listened to and involved in decision making in primary education in Wales. Building on a legislative and policy analysis, we have worked with initial teacher educators (ITE), teachers, and young children themselves. Findings suggest a strong policy framework in Wales, but that more guidance is needed on how to enact participatory pedagogies in practice. ITE in Wales is not fully reflective of this and ITE educators have called for more support.
Enablers and barriers to practice
In classroom practice, we are finding that there are complex relationships between enablers and barriers to the enactment of participatory pedagogies. Despite barriers, such as time constraints, limited resources, and perceived curriculum limitations, our findings emphasise how receptive teachers are and the critical importance of a supportive, flexible, and collaborative environment—both within the classroom and the broader school and community context—in enabling children’s participative rights.
Our research also highlights how different expectations of teachers shape the enactment of children’s participative rights in schools. While expectations from parents, senior leadership, and government policies can create barriers, they can also act as enablers when managed collaboratively and thoughtfully. Teachers play a pivotal role in navigating these competing expectations and require support to balance curricular demands with the need for child-centred practices. Furthermore, teachers’ personal reflections underscore the significance of professional development, self-reflection, and a school-wide ethos in fostering a culture that genuinely values children’s participative rights.
Children’s voices
The voices of young children are an integral part of our project, and we have foregrounded these through our use of creative methods with our Children’s Advisory Group (CAG) who steered aspects of our data collection. The CAG members offered lots of ideas for teachers to think about related to time, the environment, and their ownership of activities and creations. These ideas were used as prompts for Initial Teacher Education (ITE) students and teacher-educators to reflect on the inclusion of children’s participative rights in ITE provision, and classroom practice and to consider how genuine and authentic participatory experiences really are for young children in schools. The group of 3- to 7-year-olds are now making recommendations of how and where we can disseminate findings. We have also consulted with focus groups of children across Wales and have found that children are not always aware that they are involved in decision making in their classrooms and schools even when this may be the case.
If you are interested in our research, we warmly invite you to our next online event where we will report findings from the second phase of our research. You will hear reflections from the research team, some of our teacher participants and the artist-consultant who facilitated the dialogic sessions – sign up here.
Further Reading and Resources
For those interested in exploring ideas from this project further, we recommend the following resources:
- Murphy, A., Roberts, L., Williams, J., Chicken, S., Clement, J., Waters-Davies, J. and Tyrie, J., 2024. Participative rights in Welsh primary schools: Unpicking the policy rhetoric. Policy Futures in Education,14782103241257281.
- Waters‐Davies, J., Murphy, A., Chicken, S., Tyrie, J. and Clement, J., 2024., Constructing child participation in early years classrooms: An exploration from Wales. Children & Society., pp.1824-1841
- Chicken, S. and Tyrie, J., 2023. Can you Hear me? Problematising the Enactment of uncrc Article 12 in Welsh Early Years Classrooms: Exploring the Challenges of “Children’s Voice”. The International Journal of Children’s Rights, 31(2), pp.301-325.