Marking one year of our Participation Strategy

I’m Joe, a Participation Officer at Anna Freud. 

This February, the Participation team, which I have been a part of since March 2023, will be celebrating the first anniversary of the launch of the Participation Strategy. 

In reviewing working with the strategy, the team have reflected on our progress and made plans to continue the momentum of the strategy throughout 2025 and beyond.  

In this blog, I will be sharing an overview of our strategy, our progress in embedding this across Anna Freud in 2024 and some of what’s to come. 

What is the Participation Strategy? 

The Participation Strategy outlines our commitment to actively ensure that young people, parent and carer voices are considered throughout our work across Anna Freud.   

As part of this, the strategy recognises that all staff have a role to play in championing participation and providing opportunities to influence all our decisions. 

The main aim of the strategy, therefore, is to provide guidance on how best to involve people with lived experience within our work. 

To achieve this, we adopted the Lundy model of participation, which uses the four domains of Space, Voice, Audience and Influence as a framework, to ensure that young people, parent and carers’ views are respected, heard and acted upon. 

The adoption of the Lundy model means that we are meeting our duty under Article 12 of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. Read more about this in our strategy 

Over the past year, staff have implemented this model when working alongside our groups, which include:

• Young Champions - Young people aged 14-25 from across the UK with experience of mental health services. 

• Parent and Carer Champions - Parents and carers with lived experience of mental health services or of supporting children with mental health services. 

• Participation Programme Assistants (PPAs) – Paid lived experience colleagues who work on longer term projects.  

What did we do in 2024?  

We’ve been busy since the launch of the strategy, beginning with the recruitment of 12 fantastic members to our Parent and Carer Champion group. This has brought the total number of Champions and PPAs within the Participation team to 43.  

Within the strategy, we mapped out individual aims to embed the four domains of Lundy’s model throughout Anna Freud. This is an ongoing process, however we did make some good progress in achieving these last year: 

Space  

One of our aims to support the implementation of the Space domain, was to increase opportunities for young people, parents and carers to be involved in the work we do across Anna Freud.   

• Last year we received 104 requests for participation for example, to sit on an interview panel. This was an increase from 71 requests in 2023.  

• Over 2024, we held 25 fortnightly PPA meetings, monthly Youth Huddles for our Young Champions and Parent Panels for our Parent and Carer Champions. These meetings consisted of skills sharing, workshops and providing a space to discuss project work. 

Voice   

In supporting Champions and PPAs to feel comfortable to express their views, we said we would offer training to everyone that works with us.   

• We delivered several training sessions, including recruitment training to support Champions to sit on interview panels and co-teaching training to support PPAs with co-delivery sessions with students  

• We held space for staff to share best participation practice through our Share, Learn, Update meetings. We also delivered our Participation Lundy Level One training to staff throughout the year. We are currently working on the next iteration of this training, which will be rolled out in 2025.   

 Audience  

One of the aims outlined within the Participation Strategy was to offer takeover opportunities for our groups to ‘step into’ the roles of our directors and managers to influence decisions at a senior level.   

• We are currently working on the proposal for a takeover day to achieve this, which will be hosted later in the year. 

• We also launched our new participation steering group for managers to oversee and provide support to all participation activity across Anna Freud.

• In addition, it was great to welcome our new CEO Professor Eamon McCrory into our Youth Huddles, Parent Panels and PPA meetings towards the end of last year.   

Influence  

One of our aims for the Influence domain was to continually provide feedback to young people, parents and carers on how their voice influenced our decisions.   

• We continue to hold debrief meetings for the end of projects for staff, Champions and PPAs to discuss their input into projects and complete feedback forms. We use the data from these feedback forms to continually improve our internal processes.  

• In supporting our aim to publish data on all participation activity for public access, we began work on refining our data recording processes, starting with a review process of our consent form library.   

• Another aim was to celebrate young people, parent and carers involvement. We are currently looking to accredit our participation offer through AQA, to formally recognise Champion’s and PPA’s work.  

 Our thanks to Champions, PPAs and Staff

I wanted to say a thank you to members of our team, namely, our Young Champions, Parent and Carer champions and PPAs who work on behalf of all young people, parents and carers that our work at Anna Freud serves.  

Across a range of projects, the work of these groups has been invaluable, evidenced by the incredible feedback we received last year. 

I would also like to thank all staff that have engaged with the strategy so far. It has been great to see how colleagues have supported and worked alongside Champions and PPAs over the last year.    

What’s next  

In 2025, we want to continue to embed the strategy and to close the gap between young people, parents and carers and our most senior decision makers. Our biggest aim is to introduce organisation wide mechanisms for recording participation activity, developing good practice case studies, and celebrating the contribution of young people, parents and carers wider.   

Learn about our Participation Strategy and approaches 

Learn more about the variety of approaches we take to involve children, young people and families in achieving our goals, via our Participation Strategy  

Read our Participation Strategy

For any participation related questions, including how to better embed participation into your organisation, please reach out to us at participation@annafreud.org.