31 Mar 21
Following the announcement that the Review of Children’s Social Care will work with our ‘A National Voice’ programme, we wanted to update our supporters and give a bit more context to our involvement as an organisation.
As a leading children’s rights charity, seeking to ensure children and young people’s voices are heard is our core purpose. The Care Review provides an opportunity to ensure care experienced children and young people’s voices are heard as part of the national picture. It would be remiss of us to not take this opportunity to support young people to feed into this significant piece of work.
As part of our involvement, our A National Voice Ambassadors will be designing a route for children in care councils and participation teams around the country to input into the review, as well as hosting workshops for young people not engaged with their local authority participation teams. Key to this work will also be ensuring young people are getting feedback about what has happened with their views and how this is reflected in the review outcomes.
We remain independent of the Care Review and are one of the engagement methods the review is using. Our support of young people in accessing the review does not exclude us from being critical of its findings, should we find that the voice of children in care and care leavers has not been reflected in the outcomes.
Our goal remains the same, to champion the rights of children, to get young voices heard in decisions that matter to them and to work to improve the lives of children in care, care leavers and others who depend upon the help of the state.
We want this to be a positive experience for the young people we work with and they have our full support as part of this process.
We are also happy to discuss the matter further directly. Should you have any further questions please do contact our Managing Director: Brigid.robinson@coramvoice.org.uk.
Coram Voice is one of a number of independent charities that is part of the Coram Group of Charities.