Children’s rights are everyone’s concern, but are especially relevant for professionals working for and with children on a daily basis. Strong youth participation components in the development and delivery of training programmes on the rights of the child is a very effective method applied in France during the implementation of the EU co-funded project “Training Care Professionals working with children in Care”.
To initiate this collaboration, young people with alternative care experience and young people with expertise in child rights (child rights ambassadors) were invited to participate in the project’s national steering committee.
A group of nine young people aged 16 to 24 took part and outlined how they wanted to participate: they chose to create and facilitate a training session for care professionals. With the support of a professional trainer they set to work on developing their training session. After a discussion about the aim of the EU co-funded project and an overview of techniques of training facilitation, it became clear that their training session should focus on the balance between needs and rights of children in alternative care.
The half-day training was organised into three parts:
- The needs game: The practices of professionals are analysed based on the experiences of looked-after children and young people as well as from the child rights perspective.
- The change game: Confronts participants with orders they have to follow in a very limited amount of time, which symbolises how traumatic the change endured can be.
- The engagement charter, meant for self-reflection and identification of how the training will change professional practices and attitudes towards children in care.
At the workshop, which will be delivered by young people, participants will get the chance to try the needs game and hear directly from young people about their experience as trainers.
