Participate: Practical Planning

This section of Making Change Happen focuses on the practicalities of planning for young people's participation within your service.

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