Education and Youth Participation

Identify education improvement areas in collaboration with young people.

At Participation People, we feel strongly about improving the provision of education for young people and helping to build educational practices that drive engagement through youth participation. Over the past 14 years, we have been lucky enough to work with several universities and higher education institutions in the UK and the US. 

Through youth engagement training, higher education employees gain insights into drawing the best out of young people, whilst our bespoke audits capture youth voice to help improve institutions’ organisation, processes and approach.

Why Use Participation People

Working with Participation People can unlock a whole range of benefits for your organisation. For your educational project, we will recruit young people on your behalf, conduct initial screening interviews and train them if necessary. We are fully GDPR compliant so you don’t need to worry. 
  • Our Youth Network will provide you with access to the insights of 800 young people from diverse groups across the UK every week
  • Plus, 250,000 young people aged 11-25 can offer their unique insights for your organisation through our network of youth partners.
  • We’ll undertake bespoke recruitment and conduct full screening interviews for your project
  • We’ll also promise you an 89% young people attendance rate

Bespoke Education Projects

In a world where, traditionally, an older generation teaches a younger generation, it is exciting and necessary to flip this concept on its head. By applying cross-generational mentoring, we can learn so much about improving your education institution in areas such as pastoral care, facilities, course selection, and more. 

Our audits are designed to dig into key areas that are bespoke to you and your goals. Participation People can select a relevant panel of young people to investigate and give feedback on each area. You will receive a report highlighting what’s working well, what could be done better and what needs improvement. This implementation plan will help you take the findings and instigate real change.

Youth Engagement Training

It might seem like pointing out the obvious, but educational institutions can be complex communities made up of many departments – not all of which are young people facing. We’ve worked with university marketing teams, for example, to help them improve their messaging to young people. As your target audience, our young people have come up with great ideas on how to reach them, what language to use and creative ways to engage them.

Our training is bespoke to your objectives.  We plan creative, interactive sessions led by our experts and young people. Our team of professional trainers travel to you to conduct your personalised session on-site.

Academic models for education reform

An academic model called the Lundy model was developed at Queen’s Belfast University in 2014 and underpins our methodology of youth participation. Our work within the Lundy model lends itself nicely to instigating change among education decision-makers and leaders. 

It is often difficult to implement these measures from within an organisation because it requires expertise from an external viewpoint to help draw out and highlight the change needed.

Talk to us about youth participation