Little Voices

Like the Children’s Legal Centre Wales, Lleisiau Bach | Little Voices developed within the Observatory on Children’s Human Rights, although Lleisiau Bach Little Voices had an earlier history in the work of Funky Dragon towards ground-breaking, child-led reporting to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. Read some of the project early work here ‘Our Rights Our Story’, and ‘Why do people’s ages go up not down?’,

Over fifteen years, with support from the National Lottery Community Fund, Welsh Council for Voluntary Action and Swansea and Bangor Universities, Lleisiau Bach Little Voices worked with children under 11 years old, empowering them as researchers and advocates for change at local, national and international levels. The work was recognised by the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement as an exemplary approach to involving young children as active researchers.

The legacy of Lleisiau Bach Little Voices can be seen in the rights-based approach to engagement adopted by the Children’s Legal Centre Wales. What children achieved during the Lleisiau Bach Little Voices years informs not only our thinking about methods and processes for engagement but also many of the substantive issues on which we now work. Across Wales, children selected and developed research-informed positions on issues as varied as plastics pollution, organ donation, smoking and mobile phone use (by adults), homelessness, hunger and displacement, as well as community or school-level improvements in their environment.

Read the original “Children as Researchers pack produced by Funky Dragon and the Welsh Local Government Association, which started the Lleisiau Bach journey.

Read here an article the Lleisiau Bach Little voices team helped to write, which explains how children’s rights and sustainable development can and should be given effect together.

Through the Lleisiau Bach years we learned just how much younger children can, and want to, understand about the world around them and want to be involved in making positive change. Please see our final project report They were not only concerned with “children’s issues”, but with justice, community, sustainability and fairness. We learned too that with the right support, children can engage effectively with systems of accountability and contribute to decision-making locally, nationally and internationally. In 2015, Lleisiau Bach submitted the first child-led report from children under 11 received by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

History

In 2007, Funky Dragon sent two reports to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child: the youth-led (11 – 24-year-olds) report, ‘Our Rights Our Story’, and ‘Why do people’s ages go up not down?’, a report on what children under 11 in Wales thought about their rights and how they could access them.

Afterwards, working with the Partnership Support Unit of the Welsh Local Government Association, Funky Dragon developed an approach to child-led research by children under 11.

Lleisiau Bach Little Voices built on this work in local and national projects supported by the National Lottery Community Fund and Swansea and Bangor Universities. Our work was recognised in 2016 by the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement as

‘an exemplary approach to involving young people – as young as 7 – as active researchers, using research to reflect critically on issues that really mattered to them, and to communicate their child-findings to key decision makers.’

Lleisiau Bach Little Voices projects have reached decision-makers at local, national and international levels, and contributed to professional research, education and training.

2019 – 20 Model Church in Wales

RQ: TBC at time of interruption due to Covid 19, but the pupils were planning to connect with groups of older people…