ABSTRACT
Recognition of the importance of acknowledging the participation rights of young people is now evident throughout current government thinking. The Department of Health (2001), in its introduction to the Children's Taskforce, acknowledges the role young people can play and commits itself to ‘ensuring that the voice of the child is heard and correctly acted upon’. Young people's participation underpins the development of the Children's National Service Framework and plays a major role in the Quality Protects programme. In November 2000, the UK government launched the Children and Young People's Unit (CYPU). This cross-departmental unit stresses that central to its work is a ‘commitment to engage with children and young people themselves, learning from what works and from each other; to develop services that are better designed and delivered to meet young people's needs' (CYPU 2000: 1). This increased commitment to listen to the views of young people has emerged as a result of a general explosion of interest in them and in their lives, fuelled by the government's need to comply with the articles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) 1989 and the Children Act 1989.
