Hear by Right - 70 and out (for the time being)

Jake Manning writes:

On the 22^nd October, Harry Wade and I completed our 70^th, and final (for a while at least) Participation Works Hear by Right Workshop, having now delivered to over 1200 people from 900 community and voluntary organisations. It’s been a brilliant “tour” (as we affectionately refer to it), and emotions on the last “gig” were mixed – not least because the venue lost our resource box with all the delegate packs and training tools!

Hear by Right, in case you weren’t one of those 1200 people, is a standards framework that enables organisations to map the extent of children and young people’s participation and plan for future developments. It’s a way of building the participation of young people right across an organisation. See www.nya.org.uk/hearbyright for more info.

Several key themes emerged from the workshops, but perhaps the strongest one for me was about keeping the process manageable.

Our three top tips for keeping Hear by Right manageable are:

• Have the right people in the room

This includes the staff members you need to provide a full picture of the organisation and, crucially, the views of children and young people.  But don’t wait forever for the perfect set – get started with whoever you can get!

• Prioritise your indicators

Don’t try to tackle all 49 at once – prioritise the most relevant ones and start with those (you could choose one from each standard).

• Set an appropriate review cycle

Strike a sensible balance between being often enough to keep your strategy live, but not so often that it supersedes your capacity.

If you were one of the 1200, and have now gone through the experience of implementing Hear by Right, then what are your top tips for making Hear by Right more manageable?