In 2011 the Government asked BYC to promote the involvement of young people in local and national decision making, to provide support to local authorities and young people with recommendations on how to do this, and to build on existing good practice. This included designing a way for local authorities and Youth Voice Vehicles (YVVs) to assess their current arrangements.

In response to this BYC's Youth Voice initiative, with local input, produced a self-assessment toolkit which was provided to local authorities to complete voluntarily and return to us during the summer of 2012.

This report, Involving Young People in Local Decision Making - The Youth Voice Vehicle Self Assessment Report (July - August 2012), describes and analyses the results of self-assessments from 70 local authorities, to provide an overview of how effective YVVs currently are across England, and provides a benchmark against which we can measure change, or offer support.  

 

Case studies

We've also published a series of case studies from local authorities which took part in the research:

Handbook for practitioners

This handbook has been developed to accompany our self assessment toolkit. It is aimed at managers, practitioners and elected members involved in delivering a youth voice structure within a local authority setting. We don't want to reinvent the wheel - we know there are plenty of participation guides out there, including our own series on how to set up and operate models of youth councils, young mayors and local youth parliaments, and this handbook will signpost you to some of them.