The benefits to your libraries of offering volunteer accreditation include a structure for developing meaningful positive activities, quality assurance and the possibility of accessing new partnerships and funding streams.

Use the Accreditation Handbook (PDF) to think about why you might accredit, the types of accreditation that would best suit young people and your service, who to work with and how to get started.

Through our work on HeadSpace and Fulfilling their Potential, we have negotiated an agreement with the four main accrediting bodies so that library volunteering activities are recognised as contributing to their awards.

Depending on the accreditation award you would like to offer young, download details about a particular award:

• Duke of Edinburgh (PDF)
• Youth Challenge and Youth Achievement Awards (PDF)
• Getting Connected (PDF)
• ASDAN (PDF)

Use the direct url addresses you have been given to download the resources that support any other Participate modules you have purchased or get in touch with Claire Styles to purchase more Participate modules.

Back to Involving Young People main page
Back to Making Change Happen home page.

Share your experiences of running Participate at the Participate forum.

This section of Involving Young People focuses on the practicalities of developing young people's volunteering within your service.

The Volunteering Handbook (PDF) is a guide to help you to think through all aspects of developing volunteering opportunities for and with young people. It includes information on:

• Developing a volunteering policy
• Legal requirements including CRB checking
• Creating volunteer roles
• Volunteer recruitment and training
• Volunteer recognition and progression

Use the Volunteering templates (Word) for sample documents to help you to risk assess, recruit and sustain positive volunteer relationships with young people.
* Templates include:
* Sample volunteer policy
* Risk assessment
* Developing volunteer roles
* Promoting and recruiting volunteer roles
* Volunteer application form, induction checklist and agreement

Use the direct url addresses you have been given to download the resources that support any other Participate modules you have purchased or get in touch with Claire Styles to purchase more Participate modules.

Back to Involving Young People main page
Back to Making Change Happen home page.

Share your experiences of running Participate at the Participate forum.

"One thing that builds confidence is the feeling that you're being listened to. Here [at Haslingden] there is a feeling of satisfaction because we are listened to." Young person, HeadSpace Haslingden

Welcome to web based resources for Involving Young People; one of the modules of the new Participate programme which your authority has subscribed to. Use Involving Young People resources in conjunction with Making Change Happen.

Involving Young People gives you access to:

• Consultancy support to help you develop and sustain a youth-centred approach
• Seminars exploring Consultation and Decision-making; Volunteering and Accreditation;
• Online tools and resources to help you implement change
• Shared learning through the Participate forum

Follow the links below to download the resources that support Involving Young People. These are split into three sections:

• Involving Young People (download from the Resources colunm on this page)
• Youth volunteering
• Youth accreditation

Share your experiences of running Participate at the Participate forum.

Getting started

Involving Young People helps you apply successful young people's involvement, demonstrated initially through targeted work. Download the Why Involve Young People (PDF) from this page for the rationale and resulting outcomes for young people, library services and partners when you involve young people in your service.

Developing Youth Participation (PDF) outlines key partners, critical success factors and tough questions to ask yourself when embarking on youth participation work.

Youth Involvement Methods (PDF) describes the excellent Youth Involvement Model which you can use to shape a broad participation offer for young people. It includes practical ideas and approaches to achieving this in your authority. Download Tips for library makeovers (PDF) to help you when planning library spaces with young people.

Use the Evaluation Handbook and Project Planning template from Making Change Happen to help you develop your initial focus and decide how you will evaluate progress and youth participation.

Back to Making Change Happen.

Use the Evaluation Handbook (pdf) to:

• Think about what you need to evaluate, why and how
• Plan and demonstrate youth involvement, including using What's Changed
• Gather and review evidence, using creative methods which will engage young people
• Think about how to use the evidence you gather to create strong advocacy messages and widen support from stakeholders and partners.

Use the Evaluate, Review, Advocate (pdf) guide to help you to think through key issues in planning and getting the most out of your evaluation and to think about advocacy messages to young people, staff, partners and other stakeholders.

Use the Staff Skills Questionnaire (Word) to audit staff skills and confidence in working with young people at the beginning and again at the end of your Particpate work.

Use the direct url addresses you have been given to download the resources that support any other Particiapte modules you have purchased or get in touch with Claire Styles to purchase more Participate modules.

Back to Making Change Happen home page.

Share your experiences of running Participate at the Participate forum

Doing the Groundwork (pdf) is a guide to help you to lay strong foundations for your practical planning with young people. It includes information on:

• Strategic ownership and business planning
• Establishing outcomes and an evaluation strategy
• Auditing staff and creating a staff development programme
• Partnership opportunities (also covered in the Strategic Planning section of Making Change Happen)
  

Building on your experience through HeadSpace and regional FtP projects, we have developed guidance and resources to help you to develop good practice in planning and managing a focus activity to test your learning and use as the basis to roll out new approaches across your service. You can use the Project Planning Template (Word) to help you develop your project planning.

See the Critical Success Factors checklist (pdf) which describes the key elements that we have found from experience are needed to get your participation work with young people and partners on track and keep it going.

To help you with your evaluation strategy we have developed a comprehensive Evaluation Handbook (pdf) which includes:

• the characteristics of good evaluation
• qualitative and quantitative evaluation methods
• how to measure the outcomes for your service and for young people (including those who are socially excluded)
• practical, fun and creative tools to measure outcomes for young people.

Use the Staff Skills Questionnaire (Word) to audit staff skills and confidence in working with young people at the beginning and again at the end of your Particpate work.

For good practice in evaluating your youth involvement work we recommend the National Youth Agency's What's Changed tool

Use the direct url addresses you have been given to download the resources that support any other Particiapte modules you have purchased or get in touch with Claire Styles to purchase more Participate modules.

Back to Making Change Happen home page.

Share your experiences of running Participate at the Participate forum

Primarily, this section provides you with information about:

• the wider policy context for youth involvement
• the values and culture you will need to adopt in order to effectively embed young people's participation
• how to develop effective partnerships to support young people's involvement in your service

It also includes practical tools such as the Participate Improvement Framework (Word) (a tool to assess current levels of provision and identify priorities for service improvement) and a Staff Skills Questionnaire (Word) to help you to audit staff development needs.

The Policy and Context (pdf) document outlines how your work with young people can help you to meet policy agendas such as Youth Matters, Every Child Matters and Aiming High. It covers Local Authority PSAs and NIs that are relevant to this work and includes information about the Library Offer to Young People. It includes information about how involving young people in your service can open up new sources of funding.

By working through Values and Culture (pdf) you will gain an understanding of the core values of Hear By Right (the National Youth Agency's standards framework which informs Participate). Assess levels of youth involvement against Hart's Ladder of Participation. Values and Culture also reflects on outcomes for young people and the community.

The Partnership Working (pdf) document will help you to identify and articulate your youth offer with key partners. It also addresses partnership agreements and evaluating success.

Use the direct url addresses you have been given to download the resources that support any other Particiapte modules you have purchased or get in touch with Claire Styles to purchase more Participate modules.

Back to Making Change Happen home page.

Share your experiences of running Participate at the Participate forum

"When young people are involved in the design and delivery of services, they are more likely to access them and sustain their participation." Aiming High for young people, DCSF 2008

Welcome to web based resources for Making Change Happen; the first module of the new Participate programme. As a Participate authority, you have free access to this module.

Follow the links below to download the resources that support the Making Change Happen module. Resources are split into three sections to make them easier to work through:

Strategic Planning
Practical Planning
Evaluate, Review, Advocate

Share your experiences of running Participate at the Participate forum

Making Change Happen gives you access to:

• Consultancy support to help you plan, develop and sustain a more youth-centred approach
• Seminars for senior managers to explore Values and Culture; and Leadership and Partnership.
• Online tools and resources to help you implement change
• Opportunities to share learning with other Participate authorities

Making Change Happen helps you embed the values of successful young people's participation across your service, demonstrated initially through targeted work. It supports you to nurture vital partnerships and discover new funding and policy opportunities to make your development sustainable.

We are very aware that parents are any child's first and most enduring educators. There's plenty of research which shows how important parents are for their children's learning and development. Where parents are involved in their children's learning, children do better at school.1

For all children, the quality of the home learning is more important for intellectual and social development than parental occupation, education or income., according to a report from the Department for Education and Skills2

One of the best things parents can do to support their children is to read together at home. This starts with babies. Parents who introduce their babies to books give them a head start in school.3 It continues as children grow, with reading aloud, sharing books and much loved bedtime stories. Research shows that parental involvement continues to be important well into the teenage years and even into adulthood.4

Librarians, teachers, early years workers, family learning tutors and others concerned with education and child development know what a difference reading makes. So to support everyone working with families, we have developed a range of offers to help libraries to engage families in reading.

Our programmes for families:

• The Big Book Share - using reading to bring together families separated by imprisonment.
• The Six Book Challenge - helping adults with literacy needs to gain confidence with reading, and being used successfully in a growing number of family settings, as a focus for children and adults to grow their reading together.
• The Summer Reading Challenge - the biggest national promotion of children's reading through libraries. An ideal way to engage families to support their children and expand their reading too.
• Chatterbooks - reading groups for four to 12 year-olds, which offer a great way to involve parents too.
• Family Reading groups - where adults and their children can come together to share and build their reading experiences.
• Training opportunities - we offer a range of training courses which support libraries and their partners in working with families - see our training page for current offers.

"Libraries are just totally different for my children than for when I was a child - you weren't allowed to speak! If you go to our library over the summer, adult customers can barely move for children rushing around looking at books, cutting and sticking and making things. I think that's really good." Debbie Jarrett, Yaxley library, Cambridgeshire

1. (Fan & Chen, 2001); (Feinstein & Symons, 1999), (Melhuish, Sylva, Sammons et al., 2001).
2. Sylva,K., Melhuish,E., Sammons,P., Siraj-Blatchford,I. & Taggart, B. (2004). Effective provision of pre-school education (EPPE) project: Final Report. London: DfES.
3. (Wade & Moore, 2000).
4. (Desforges & Abouchaar, 2003).

The report on phase one of this project is now available and you can download it from Resources.

We are aiming to achieve this by:

• encouraging young people in youth groups and other settings to read more
• supporting activities that encourage young people in youth groups and other setting to read more
• getting young people involved in choosing reading materials
• developing projects with librarians and youth workers that get young people reading more
• spreading the word about the most effective ways of getting young people reading more.

Six projects in Dorset, Portsmouth, Stockton, Hertfordshire, Lancashire and Norfolk are currently testing the Out of the Box approach. The plan is to learn from their experience so that by the end of March 2009 we will have increased our understanding about what works and does not work.

In particular we are looking at:

• how librarians and youth workers can work in partnership
• how opportunities can be developed for young people in non-formal setting
• pracitcal ways to get young people interested in reading, including through groupthing our new website for young people
• how reading can support informal education opportunities
• if librarians, youth workers and young people's have different attitudes to reading
• if reading activities are a sustainable way of supporting informal education
• if there are any pre-requisits for things working (or, indeed, not working)

We'd love to hear from you if you are running or have run any reading based projects with young people. If you have any case studies or reports please email them to outofthebox@readingagency.org.uk

Download the report on phase one from Resources and check back for more information soon as we enter phase two.

What libraries could, and should, be doing for young people is described in national Library Offer for Young People that has been developed by key organisations within the sector. Any library that delivers the complete Library Offer will be improving the outcomes for young people in their area, and meeting the government requirements set out in Aiming High. There are new funding streams from the DCSF to support Aiming High and Participate can help you to access this funding.

We are running a small number of full Participate programmes on a first come first served basis.

To find out more download the further information from Resources. There's information for public library authorities and for authorities that are already running HeadSpaces. Or contact Claire Styles, project manager.

Other support for young people

Participate is part of a package of programmes and products that we are offering to support work with young people.

Anyone working with young people (you don't have to be a librarian) can subscribe to our innovative new social reading website groupthing.org. groupthing.org is available to libraries, schools, youth centres and anyone else working with young people.

Libraries that are refurbishing their spaces or building new libraries can get young people involved through HeadSpace. HeadSpace offers exciting opportunities for young people to get involved in designing library spaces and services to create an environment where they can read, listen, surf and chill.

Benefits

From our earlier projects we know how valuable it is for young people to get involved with the great creative reading opportunities that libraries provide and to have a say in the services that libraries run. Our evaluation shows that it improves their self confidence and esteem, and that it particularly benefits young people who are socially excluded.

For libraries, it supports them to meet their obligations under the national Library Offer for Young People. It also helps them to met targets set through Local Area Agreements and National Indicators.

If you are interested in finding out more then email Claire Styles, project manager.

This is the question that the National Youth Libraries Board, which The Reading Agency is part of, has been working to answer.

The answer that we came up with is the National Youth Offer, which you can download from Resources. The youth offer describes the sorts of services libraries can, and should, be providing for young people and how young people can get involved in running services in their local libraries.

It is based on extensive research, consultation and all the good examples of young people and libraries working together. The National Libraries Board hope that this youth offer will challenge libraries to look again at the services they offer to young people. And illustrate the vital role libraries have in running activities that young people want to get involved with and learn from.

The offer was launched at a national conference on 29 January 2008 ran jointly with The Reading Agnecy and the Local Government Association.

Following this conference, we have written more about the youth offer, gathered examples of initiatives involving young people and libraries working together, and made suggestions for how libraries can campaign to deliver the youth offer. It's in the second of our New thinking series of publications available through our online Shop.

Resources for libraries

In Resources you will find a number of documents to help you understand and deliver the youth offer. These include the:

• heads of library services PowerPoint presentation to use with your Director of Children's Services and other strategic partners
• guidance notes to use with the presentation
• a briefing paper for heads of library services and ASCEL members, about the youth offer and the National Youth Libraries Board
• an evidence-based research report on young people's views, which inspired the youth offer.

Multiple copies of the youth offer have been distributed to library services and other key partners across the country. Order additional copies through our online Shop.

National Youth Libraries Board

The National Youth Libraries Board is chaired by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council and is managed by The Reading Agency.

Other members are:

• Society of Chief Librarians
• MLA Yorkshire
• Local Government Association
• Department for Children, Schools and Families
• Department for Culture, Media and Sport
• National Youth Agency
• Association of Senior Children's and Education Librarians
• Head of Community Learning and Development at Norfolk Children's Services.

Take a virtual tour of groupthing now.

See groupthing on You Tube

Follow groupthing on twitter. sign in at http://twitter.com/groupthingpro

Put your content onto groupthing

groupthing is live - young people can start putting their creative content onto groupthing. groupthing will be fully launched in June 2009.

Libraries, schools and other professionals working with young people and reading can buy a subscription to the site and access the professional side where they can find out what's going on, talk to other professionals and exchange ideas. It's also the place to launch a group page for your young people.

Find out more by reading the briefings available to download from Resources.

Subscribe to groupthing by going to the Shop. For more information email Ruth Harrison, project manager.

It's about you and them and us, it's a groupthing."

More info

groupthing is the major new initiative we are launching in June. It's a new online community where young people aged 13 to up to 18 can be creative. Based on all forms of words - magazines, non-fiction, manga, graphic novels, plays, scripts, music (lyrics), short stories, film, games, websites, blogs, journalism, fiction, poetry, spoken word and 'how to' manuals. If it's got words in it then it's welcome on groupthing.

Young people will be able to write, review, chat and 'meet' authors on the site as well as publish their own creative work.

We have developed groupthing with young people - they have been involved at every stage. They have helped us to develop the website content and even helped us to decide what it is called. We are working with the RNIB to ensure that the site is accessible and that blind and partially sighted young people can join their sighted peers.

TRF is the way that we make important contributions to some important national policy agendas such as Change for Children, which safeguards the wellbeing of children and young people, and Framework for the Future, which develops the skills of librarians.

We are developing TRF in partnership with the Association of Senior Children's and Education Librarians (ASCEL), the CILIP Youth Libraries Group, the Society of Chief Librarians (SCL) and the Arts Council.

Visit the TRF website to take one of our interactive learning packages, join our discussion forum or download practical planning tools and advocacy documents, which help librarians develop skills and plan services. You can also find information on our face-to-face training courses.

Our partners in this venture were the South West Museums Libraries and Archives Council (SWMLA) The National Youth Agency and library authorities in Dorset, Gloucestershire and Swindon.

Partners for Change has shown that libraries have much to offer socially excluded young people. It has shown that with the right training and a commitment to outreach work to build the trust of young people, library staff can achieve great things. And it has shown that young people from socially excluded backgrounds are willing to get involved in shaping the services that local libraries provide for their age group.

The work in the region goes on. A HeadSpace has opened in Lyme Regis. Young people will be involved in Swindon's new Central Library and in Gloucestershire young people are having their say through focus groups at Cheltenham, Matson and Cirencester libraries.

HeadSpace is the project that proves that we can successfully put young people at the heart of projects meant for them.

Working in partnership with young people, libraries and youth services we've created places where young people aged 11 to 19 can read, listen, surf and chill. It is a place where the experience of enjoying reading can be shared, where young people can meet others, take part in positive activities, volunteer, seek information and inspiration, or simply pick up a book and enjoy a drink and a snack.

We are currently working with 20 local authorities where HeadSpaces are being developed and run in equal partnership between young volunteers and their local libraries. Over 700 young people have already been involved in choosing books and other stock, deciding how the HeadSpace looks and delivering the activities that go on in their libraries.

HeadSpace provides a model for delivering the national Library Youth Offer and is meeting the urgent need up and down the county for free, safe spaces where young people can take part in positive activities. It gives a clear message that young people are welcomed in libraries and their participation is valued.

It's been particularly successful at getting young people who are socially excluded involved.

Sign up

Any library that is refurbishing or building a new library space can sign up to HeadSpace and get all the consultancy, training and support needed to involve young people.

For more information about how to develop your own HeadSpace download further information from Resources. There's information for public library authorities and for authorities that are already running HeadSpaces. Or contact Claire Styles, project manager.

"It's really good that we've got the HeadSpace, because there is nothing to do for young people locally - you would be amazed how many young people come to the library on a now we have got our own space."
Khalid Amin, young volunteer at HeadSpace Haslingden

Other support for young people

HeadSpace is part of our package of programmes to support work with young people.

Anyone working with young people, librarians, teachers, youth workers, education officers, etc, can subscribe to our innovative social reading website - groupthing.org. groupthing provides creative opportunities for young people to read, review, write, listen, chat and create original work.

Alternatively, libraries can join all their work with young people together by signing up to our new modular programme, Participate.

Open (ing) HeadSpaces

The first HeadSpaces have already opened and lots more will follow up until March 2010. Eventually there will be a HeadSpace in (those marked in bold have already opened):

East Midlands
Buxton Library, Derbyshire
Corby Library, Northamptonshire
Worksop Library, Nottinghamshire

North West
Halewood Library, Knowsley
Halton Lea Library, Halton
Haslingden Library, Lancashire
High Street Library, Bolton
Longsight Library, Manchester

South East
Burgess Road Library, Southampton
Café IT, Folkestone, Kent
Crawley Library, West Sussex
High Wycombe Library, Buckinghamshire
Lordswood Library, Medway

South West
Barcode Youth Café, North Somerset
Central Library, Swindon
Efford Library, Plymouth
Hartcliffe Library, Bristol
Lyme Regis Library, Dorset
Melksham Library, Wiltshire
Padstow Library, Cornwall

"We'll be there in the library for when a child or teenager comes in - we will be talking to them about books and suggesting books that we think they will really like. HeadSpace is going to make a difference." Sameeha Patel, volunteer at HeadSpace Bolton"