adult’s involvement in children’s participation: juggling children’s places and spaces

Adult’s Involvement in Children’sParticipation: Juggling Children’s Placesand SpacesMichael WynessInstitute of Education, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

While children and young people’s participation is a well-established research field, much less

has been written about the roles that adults play in supporting this participation. This article

examines the involvement of adults within participatory forums in English schools and local

authorities. Drawing on empirical data from research on children’s participation in pupil and

civic councils, the article discusses the complex and sometimes contradictory pressures on

adults in their advisory roles with young participants. The article goes on to explore these roles

within a broader conceptual framework that counterposes children’s ‘places’ with children’s

‘spaces’. � 2008 The Author(s). Journal compilation � 2008 National Children’s Bureau.

Introduction

In recent years research has tended to concentrate on the roles and experiences of childrenand young people when examining structures, forums and more generally contexts withinwhich we find children as active participants (Hill and others, 2004; Matthews, 2003). This isunderstandable given that research conventions in the past have favoured adults as proxiesfor children’s perspectives and ignored children’s own subjective worlds (Christensen andJames 2000). However, given that adults within these participatory contexts are still crucialconduits and mediators, it seems important to look more substantively at the roles that theyplay. In this article I explore the ways in which professionals support children and youngpeople’s participation. More specifically the article explores the roles that adults play in twoparticipatory contexts: the school and local authority.1

Children’s participation has become a key reference point for those working with children. InEngland and Wales the government’s ‘Every Child Matters’ agenda draws on the participatorydimensions of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989) in locatingchildren as consumers of services (DfES 2003). Educational researchers and policy-makersare now advocating greater pupil participation as a means of improving the performance,commitment and attitude of students (DfES 2003; Rudduck and Flutter, 2004) While at thesame time citizenship has become a more contested concept within political and educationaldiscourses, with policy-makers firming up the relationship between children and their futureroles as political participants (Kerr and Cleaver, 2004; Qualification and Curriculum Authority(QCA), 1998).

While interest in children’s participation has focused attention on children in a numberof arenas, it has also created new challenges for adults involved within these participatory

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� 2008 The Author(s)

Journal compilation � 2008 National Children’s Bureau

contexts. In European and national contexts, there are established political and institutionalstructures such as children’s commissioners and ombudsmen where adults play an advocacyrole, speaking on behalf of children (Flekkoy, 1988). An alternative approach, one that isexplored in this article, is the adult who acts as a facilitator or mediator, working alongsidechildren’s forums and representative structures. Within pupil and youth councils children areexpected to speak for themselves with adults playing a more supportive role in the back-ground as advisors and facilitators (Kirby and Gibbs, 2006). The article argues that these sup-porting roles are complex ones largely governed by the nature of adult–child relations andprofessional and political agendas. These factors are located within a conceptual frameworkthat links children’s participatory spaces with their conventional places within the socialstructure (Moss and Petrie, 2002). I will argue that while professional adults are committedto creating and sustaining children’s spaces, they are equally concerned to locate thesespaces within the more conventionally defined structures of children’s places.

Participation connects with space in a number of ways. First, it locates children within thepublic domain as social agents. This might mean children being incorporated within arange of environmental initiatives that expand their use and control of the public realm asphysical territory. Second, it expands and deepens the social domain, with more reciprocaland negotiable relationships between adults and children, particularly where adults have towork alongside children when discussing local issues. Space also has an important ethicaland discursive dimension: children’s voices more likely to be taken seriously by adults(Moss and Petrie, 2002). Children effectively have more say in matters that affect them andthose surrounding them. Participation is intrinsic to the notion of space: children havea political voice; arrangements are made to incorporate children within decision-makingprocesses.

The notion of children’s places, on the other hand, locates children within specific domainswhere they are expected to conform to what Jenks (1996) calls a ‘vision of futurity’; childrenare social, economic, political and moral investments in the future. While space implies chil-dren’s here and now where children have commitments and interests as children, futurityemphasises childhood and education as individualised trajectories, or careers, which with thecareful attention from responsible adults nurture a nascent individual personality. Placelocates children as transitional objects within very specific and heavily regulated domainssuch as the home and the school. Space here only makes sense with respect to responsibili-ties that adults have as carers, protectors and teachers. It does not connect with childrenhaving agency or autonomy. Participation has only a limited role within children’s places: atbest it is incorporated within a broader ‘outcomes’ educational project becoming anothermeans by which children’s trajectories towards adulthood can be assessed (Fielding, 2001).

In illustrating the relationship between place and space the article draws on data fromresearch on young people’s involvement in English school and town councils.2 The fieldworktook place between March 2000 and May 2003 and consisted of interviews with 110 council-lors and 24 adult advisors from three socio-geographically distinct sites:

d Coronation: a small rural town with a young people’s town council and one secondaryschool.

d Marylebone: a medium-sized town with a predominantly white population. The young per-son’s civic council and three of the schools were involved — Copper Street, Goldengateand Silverside.

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d Jubilee: a medium-sized city with an ethnically diverse population. It contained one youthcouncil; two of the secondary schools were involved in the research — East End and WestEnd.

Systematic observation of a number of pupil council and civic council meetings also tookplace.

Methodologically, the research was concerned with the understandings that key actorsinvolved with the councils had of their roles and responsibilities. The data are drawn mainlyfrom the adult advisors and is interpretive in nature. In particular, adult respondents wereasked to reflect on their personal, professional and institutional commitments to children’sparticipation. These reflections are explored through three case studies of children’s politicalrepresentation: (i) pupil school councils, (ii) civic ‘shadow’ councils found in two of theresearch sites and (iii) a civic ‘youth’ council found in the third site. These case studies arethen located within the children’s places and spaces conceptual framework.

Pupil councils and conflicts of interests

The introduction of citizenship into the curriculum has placed participation on the educa-tional agenda in England and Wales. The educational establishment has been preoccupiedwith content and children’s understanding of political structures, with the Crick report on cit-izenship (Qualification and Curriculum Authority (QCA), 1998) education falling short ofadvocating the compulsory introduction of pupil councils (Kerr and Cleaver, 2004). However,reference was made in the Crick report to several schools within England and Wales whosepupil councils were highlighted as illustrations of ‘good practice’ (Qualification and Curricu-lum Authority (QCA), 1998). This emphasis on citizenship and pupil involvement was evidentduring the period of the fieldwork. Members of school management teams were taking theirpupil councils more seriously: in each school a citizenship coordinator had been appointedin the previous 12 months: in three of these schools the citizenship coordinator had beengiven responsibility to oversee pupil councils.

Despite this trend, the pupil council had an ambiguous relationship to the school structure.In some instances it was seen as a marginal adjunct to the organisational structure; at bestit had an anomalous status in relation to the curriculum (Wyness, 2005). One teacher,when asked whether responsibilities for pupil councils were part of his remit as the citizen-ship coordinator, replied: ‘(i)t seems to be because there is no where else to put it’. Thisambiguity was also reflected in the roles that teaching staff adopted in the researchschools. On the one hand, participation was articulated in a number of different ways bythe teachers involved with pupil councils. The following quotes from the teaching staffdemonstrate this.

There was an emphasis on children’s relationship to the school and their learning:

d ‘democratic involvement in school life’;d ‘Ownership of what was going on round and about so that they can see something is

happening as a result of what they were saying and doing.’

Adults and Participation 397



It was seen in relation to citizenship education:

d ‘corporate ownership and community responsibility’.

It was also expressed more broadly in terms of appropriate social development:

d ‘So they get more self-sufficiency, more able to deal with their own problems and beingable to talk about things…it’s to actually get them to listen to each other, to talk to eachother and to understand different points of views.’

In this latter case pupil voice is a prominent feature of pupils’ social development.

On the other hand, these commitments co-existed with other seemingly more importantcurricular and teaching responsibilities (Taylor and Johnson, 2002). The interviews withthe teaching staff brought out the difficulties in finding a balance between their workwith the school councils and their institutional priorities. The council agenda was onecontested area. Past research has suggested that school management marginalises chil-dren’s influences in decision-making processes by ensuring that schools have a function-ing school council that deals only with peripheral issues (Alderson, 1999; Baginsky andHannam, 1999). This can generate cynicism among pupils with regard to the purposes ofschool councils leading to distrust among the young towards participatory initiatives ingeneral (Griffiths, 1998).

From the data the problem was more complex. In three of the schools the teachers wereaware of two sets of, sometimes, conflicting interests: the kinds of items that continuallyfeatured on pupil council agendas and institutional priorities. There was a tension betweenwhat some of the teachers saw as the ‘childish’ nature of many of the items on councilagendas and ‘bigger’ adult-oriented educational issues. In relation to the former, closescrutiny of 15 sets of council minutes, the interview data and observational schedules inthe six schools, revealed that the most common agenda items were food-related issues,access to prohibited areas of the school, the supporting of charities and pupil access totoilets. Teachers in three of the schools were critical of school councillors because theseissues reflected what was for them the short-term, limited almost ‘childish’ nature of pupilinterests.

I was also thinking that, this is the same as any meeting, the items, which they discuss are importantto them but don’t always seem to be issues of major concern….A typical example is they constantlycomplain about toilets for one reason or another. (Deputy Head, Coronation)

(W)hen we first started they (the councillors) came to the student council with all sorts of unre-alistic requests… we want more chips on our plates…and we want lockers and we want nonuniform days every other week and less homework….And that’s how they see their role andslowly as the year went on they’ve now understood that their role isn’t that …Their role is tolook at teaching and learning and the whole school education issues as well. (Deputy head, WestEnd)

Teaching staff here seemed to think that whilst these interests may connect with thelife-worlds of children, they hampered pupil involvement in big educational issues suchas teaching and learning and behaviour. In the second quote there is also an important

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‘developmental’ dimension as these ‘childish’ interests are eventually superseded by moreserious concerns as they get used to the participatory process.

A lack of seriousness among the pupil councillors was sometimes articulated in terms oflevels of ‘realism’. One example of this was the topic of food in school, which was oftenunsatisfactorily managed in council meetings. Staff often felt that this was due to theimpractical and unrealistic way that the topic was discussed by the students.

Teacher: The kids are always asking about things like having more drinks machines available, awider variety of things, snacks…they are always complaining about the food. I know that is proba-bly a perennial issue…Interviewer: One thing that was perhaps a slight irritation to some of the councillors was that a lotof issues do keep coming up.Teacher: It’s because there’s no way of actually solving them.

One deputy head went as far as to define ‘student’ issues in terms of false consciousness,with the councillors unaware of the real purpose of school councils (Lukes, 2005). Whenasked to comment on what students wanted:

It’s linked into them not knowing what they want. They’re dealing with stuff that doesn’t really mat-ter. For the sake of argument…they’re dealing with canteen prices. Now I suppose that boils back tothe business of their consciousness of what does and doesn’t matter but they are involved in verysafe areas.

Thus the problem was not student apathy, although some teaching staff referred to thisamong the general student body, but a conflict of interests between the perceived commit-ment among the student body to ‘non-educational’ issues and the current educational priori-ties of teachers, schools and educationalists. We might speculate here: first, that this conflictbetween pupil issues and teachers’ priorities reflects a deeper divide between the life-worldsof pupils and teachers, with the latter having limited insights into the former. Second, thatthe ‘childish’ interests of pupils might be better interpreted as pupils’ concerns over theirown social spaces in school, with access to toilets and the quality of school dinners indicat-ing a commitment to an increasingly attenuated social centre in schools (Wexler, 1992).

‘Shadow’ civic councils and ‘undue influence’

In turning to the two ‘shadow’ civic councils there were some notable differences betweenCoronation and Marylebone councils with respect to the recruitment of members and therelationship to the local schools.3 There were also some significant similarities, whichrevolved around their function as a ‘shadow’ to their adult counterparts. Meetings tookplace in council chambers and adult officers were involved in taking minutes and in somecases chairing meetings. Adult protocols were observed in the conduct of meetings, suchas the formal ways in which issues were raised. Moreover, many of the local issues dis-cussed at the adult level, such as crime, leisure and the running of local services, were onthe agendas at shadow child council meetings. This shadowing was a form of politicalapprenticeship, giving young people insights into, and experiences of, the way that localauthorities are run, without the attendant political responsibilities that their adult counter-parts assume when taking office.




This shadowing meant that the civic councils had quite close links with the adult councils.The adults supporting the young councillors were either council employees or had localpolitical commitments as mayors or town councillors. They acted as advisors to the shadowcouncillors, and this sometimes clashed with their institutional and political roles. If we takeCoronation council first: the two advisors had prominent positions on the adult council andthey had a strong commitment to children’s ‘spaces. Both were keen to see the youngstersinvolved in decisions that affected the town. The shadow council was seen to be an impor-tant vehicle for the expression of the town’s young people’s interests as well as a forum thatestablished adult groups could draw on in assessing the opinion of young people. One of theadvisors was the existing mayor:

About four years ago we were talking about the re-generation of the town. They (the young council-lors) came up with some very innovative ideas and also the sort of shops they wanted to see…Theycame up with sign posting in the town to show where the different shops were… They sit ondifferent committees and they report back to the Young People’s Town Council… It’s a soundingboard…it also gives them a say.

However, she also expressed some concern that her political opponents would see her advi-sory role as a means of unduly influencing the minds of the young councillors.

Mayor: There is one thing I would like to say that I hit very hard on at the [adult] district council meet-ing when a member of another party, knowing I sat on this town council (shadow council), sort ofmooted the view that we were putting our political views to them. That is no. I am there purely asan advisor, a link if you like between other things and I regard their help and sounding for ideas onthe drop-in centre and the different things. There is no question of any political motive from my point.Interviewer: The shadow council isn’t party political?Mayor: No, it’s not party political at all.Interviewer: Does it ever come through in the meetings?Mayor: No, no, no. Politics are never mentioned.

In one sense this distancing from party politics was a consequence of the social geography ofCoronation. The town was small, political and community networks were close and much moretransparent and personalised. Having said this the issue of ‘undue influence’ surfaced duringan interview with one of the adult advisors of the other shadow council, Marylebone located ina much bigger town. The young councillors here were seen as advocates and representativesof local young people. Similarly, great care was taken to ensure that their meetings werea-political. As one advisor commented, ‘(It was) seen to be dangerous to get young peoplemixed up in party politics’. There was thus an element of vigilance and protectionism involvedhere with the young councillors needing to be secluded from the adult world of party politics.

Interestingly, not all adults with political commitments saw these as having a bearing ontheir advisory roles with the young civic councillors. The second adult advisor at Coronation,a prominent councillor, was also a local teacher. As with the mayor, he saw the inclusion ofyoung people within localised decision-making structures as a civic duty.

I was particularly concerned with what was happening in Coronation because the centre of the townhad been knocked. A big factory was closed, (the town’s largest employer)…I thought if young peo-ple were involved somehow in what was going on in Coronation they would feel some sense ofownership of it and that would have some significance for whatever was put eventually in place ofthe factory that was removed.

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Unlike the mayor he was less concerned with the content of council meetings and the possi-bility of undue influence because of his educational background; in particular, his rolewithin the school as a citizenship advisor generated a familiarity with the notion of politicalliteracy (Qualification and Curriculum Authority (QCA), 1998). His own experience as a localpolitician as well as a teacher generated a commitment to children learning the craft of poli-tics, how to mobilise support, have influence and change things.

One youngster got it into his head that it would be a good idea to see whether there is any interestin having a cinema in Coronation and so he put it on the agenda. He’d obviously done a survey inschool… Part of young peoples’ involvement in this sort of process has to do with finding out whatlobbying amounts to. We don’t have lessons in school about the art of lobbying but this is one wayof addressing it. You need to speak to so and so, you could do this. That’s part of the educational bitof it. They learn how to get some influence, be listened to.

‘Youth’ civic councils — adult structures and ambiguity

In turning to the third case study, Jubilee city youth council, the two adults involvedhad a quite different conception of children’s relationship to the political sphere. Therewas little anxiety about the influence of party politics here. If anything both adults andcouncillors expressed a degree of cynicism and a heightened awareness of the influenceof ‘adult’ politics within the youth council. The council consisted of about 30 youngstersaged between 12 and 18 from a range of social, cultural and educational backgrounds.They were invited to a series of well-publicised breakfast and dinner meetings with oneof the local Members of Parliament (MP). Whilst there was no consensus on the meaningof these meetings, there was a considerable degree of scepticism among the young coun-cillors.

It looks good. In his first set (the MP’s first round of meetings), I don’t know if he had it for hissecond set of evenings and morning, I don’t know if he had a press release but in his first onethere was a huge article in the paper. ‘John X shall be meeting with young people’... It’s just ameans of tokenism. (Joseph, young councillor)

There were important differences in style and substance between Jubilee and the twocivic ‘shadow’ councils. The latter was characterised by a degree of integration with adultstructures. This was missing in the former case with a much stronger emphasis on hori-zontal links with other youth groups. In part this was due to the size and composition ofthe population. Coronation and Marylebone were small- to medium-sized English towns.Jubilee, on the other hand, was a city with a large and ethnically diverse population,well served by a range of groups and services catering for young people. As youth work-ers the adult advisors had considerable experience working alongside other youth groups.Rather than there being one forum that represented the voice of young people within aspecific geographical area, there was a search for other forms of youth participation andrepresentation involving a number of forums representing different sectors of the youthpopulation.

There was some resistance to adult forms of political representation with elections and politi-cal formality coming in for considerable criticism. For one of the advisors, the formality ofelections inhibited less confident young people coming forward to participate.




The reason why I like the idea, in not having them elected on to the youth council, is that it enablesyoung people that maybe wouldn’t actually attract a huge following to get on it. To put themselvesforward, for whatever their reason…and to be involved and stand up and be counted….There are nohoops for them to have to jump through.

The other advisor talked in terms of making the council as accessible as possible. ‘One of theground rules was that it should be fun and there should be elements of fun and it should beas informal as possible’.

At the same time the political structure of the city incorporating both local and nationalpoliticians was an important frame of reference. Hence there was some accommodationof ‘adult’ structures. In part this was reflected in their conceptions of participation, whichemphasised young people having a greater involvement in local democratic processes.One advisor referred to the political influence of the youth council: ‘One of the limits thatwe reached was when we actually got somebody onto a policy team for the city council’.However, he went on to say, ‘these policy teams were abolished and we haven’t got that levelof involvement yet’.

The advisors seemed to be following Hart’s (1997) advice that the most effective youthorganisations are those that do not try and replicate the adult version. However, theywere pragmatic enough to realise that in order for the council to make a difference for youngpeople, they had to connect with adult structures. Interestingly this often meant a morechallenging relationship between the councillors and relevant adults. As one advisor noted:

Some adults feel quite intimidated by articulate young people. I don’t, I think it’s wonderful, I thinkit’s exciting, it keeps us on our toes and young and engaged with them and I think it’s the way itshould be.

This was articulated by the other advisor in terms of the language of risk:

Advisor: What I would like to see is where young people are actually sitting alongside councillorsand influencing directly their decisions, we haven’t quite got that yet. I think that might be a riskyone.Interviewer: Challenging?Advisor: Yeah. I think the challenge is probably where you have to decide to hand over money andresources and buildings to young people. The city council isn’t geared up for that.

Children’s places and children’s spaces

In each of the three case studies the adults’ involvement with children’s participation werecircumscribed by institutional priorities, which at times generated ambiguities with respect totheir relationship with the young councillors. These ambiguities might be better understoodif we locate adults’ involvement in children’s participation within a conceptual frameworkthat juxtaposes Moss and Petrie’s (2002) children’s spaces with the idea of children’s places.In the case of the pupil council the school provides a paradoxical context for the situating ofchildren’s’ participation. Children in school are the majority population and yet schools arechildren’s places. Despite their numerical supremacy, they have little sense of ownership oftheir education. The school regulates their lives, locates them within time and space throughthe age structure, the timetable and the curriculum (Christensen and James, 2001). At the

402 Michael Wyness



same time this whole process is given to them as a natural and inevitable feature of growingup, what might be termed an ideology of childhood (Epstein, 1993). Schools are quintessen-tially children’s places rather than spaces for children.

Despite its ‘adult’ nature, politics is incorporated into the school via the citizenship curri-culum. In one important sense citizenship education strengthens notions of place. For pupilsare conceived as citizens-in-waiting rather than citizens-in-being, strengthening the notion offuturity. The majority of teachers made clear links between citizen education and schoolcouncils: they viewed them both partly in terms of pupils’ educational and social develop-ment. The dominance of the curriculum and notions of educational ‘growth’ inevitably meansthat the teachers incorporate the role of the council within broader educational priorities.

The teachers’ conceptions of participation can be understood in relation to the lack of fitbetween children’s spaces and places. Thus just as the pupil council has an ambiguous loca-tion within the school organisation, the teachers’ commitments to children’s spaces and par-ticipation are tempered by professional duties that structure pupils as ‘becomings’ ratherthan beings (Qvortrup, 2005). This is highlighted by the ambivalence to the school councilagenda, with the importance of student voice clashing with the ‘bigger’ adult-dominatedinterests in behaviour and the curriculum. Whilst adults were committed to incorporatingpupils’ within decision-making structures, their political activities were viewed in terms of‘futurity’. The pupil councillors’ commitments were not valued as sets of interests reflectingtheir current positions as pupils. They were measured against moral, social and educationaltrajectories that constructed the pupils as investments in future.

The town hall and civic chambers, on the other hand, are part of the political realm, part ofthe adult world from which children have been hitherto excluded. Unlike the school there isno pre-existing structure that locates children as a majority if subordinate population. Chil-dren within the civic realm are interlopers and despite the commitments to voice and partici-pation from the adults working with children within this realm, there is a problem inlocating children within this sphere. The civic councils discussed in this article inhabit local-ised political realms that are neither children’s places nor spaces for children. Adult advisorshave adapted to these anomalous ‘spaces’ in distinctive ways that reflect the differencesbetween the councils in terms of structure, style and in relation to their social geographicallocation.

Broadly speaking, there were two approaches to this anomalous status. First, the shadowcivic councils came into close contact with the adult council. As a consequence there wereimportant political boundaries being expressed by the adults as their commitments to bothadult and ‘youth’ councils marked the latter off as political actors-in-waiting, rather than fullpolitical participants. The actor-in-waiting construct generated two themes from the inter-views with the advisors: one that emphasised a political skills element, with the civic councilas a vehicle for the development of the craft of politics. The second theme constructed ‘poli-tics’ in a formal party political sense thus separating the young councillors from the politicalworld. The young councillors in this sense were construed as children in need of protectionfrom the undue influence of ‘adult’ political ideologies.

Secondly, Jubilee youth councillors were also interlopers attempting to occupy adult spaces.However, unlike some of the ‘shadow’ advisors, the adults at Jubilee had no problems withthe ‘politicisation’ of civic councillors, confident that the young councillors were astute




enough to know when they were being ‘fed a political line’. The city youth councillors hadlimited involvement with the city’s adult structures, developing a more ‘youth’-orientedapproach to political participation and representation. The adults supported this extra-politi-cal approach whilst at the same time taking a pragmatic stance towards the politicalmainstream with respect to the youngsters gaining voice and influence.

The adults at Jubilee also referred to the problems that their civic councillors occasionallyencountered when working with other adults not directly involved with the youth council.Here instead of the association made by the shadow advisors between the ‘child’ councillorsand protection from ‘political’ influence, the young civic councillors were constructed as‘deviant’ children with their confident articulate demeanour being construed as precocity.The young councillors here were conceptually out of place in that their presence often threa-tened the ideas that others had of children as a subordinate semi-silent sector of the popula-tion. They came close to the Stainton-Rogers and Stainton-Rogers, (1992) notion of thepolitical child as the ‘unchild’ — a counter-stereotypical construct of childhood.

Conclusion

While the idea of children’s participation aligns itself with the concept of space, in somerespects it also acts as a bridge between children’s places and spaces. In the former, struc-tures and institutional priorities effectively exclude children as social agents, defining theirstatus as citizens or political actors-in-waiting. Moss and Petrie’s (2002) notion of space onthe other hand promises a new field of interaction and practice where children have a degreeof autonomy and recognition, where children enjoy the status of participants. However, adultinvolvement of children and young people’s participation attempts a reconciliation of placesand spaces in balancing a number of conflicting political and institutional imperatives. Onthe one hand, adults were trying to ensure that the pupil and civic councils were effectiveand had some influence within structures that on the whole marginalised the position ofchildren and young people. On the other hand, the adults also had to connect with the insti-tutional priorities of these adult structures, which often acted as barriers to children andyoung people’s full participation. Adult involvement in children’s participation was thus acomplex process of supporting children and young people’s attempts at articulating theirinterests, and in many instances trying to re-articulate these interests and bring them in linewith the relevant dominant adult agendas.

Adult involvement took a number of different forms that reflected the differences betweenthe educational and civic realms in terms of institutional structures and priorities. At thesame time a comparative empirical approach highlighted less obvious differences thatconnected with differing conceptions of political participation.

Despite the institutional differences between educational and civic realms, the dominant viewwithin both realms construes politics in the conventional sense as a formalised grown uppursuit. Children’s places are affirmed in the way that children’s ‘political’ involvement isheavily regulated as a preparation for later adult life within mainstream politics. One notableexception was Jubilee city youth council. Both adults and young people were sceptical ofmainstream structures and conventional politics arguing that children and young people’sinterests would be most effectively expressed within their own political space. At the same

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time the adults here were trying to reconcile ‘adult’ and ‘youth’ forms of politics and partici-pation as a necessary but pragmatic means to an end.

In many ways the data highlighted a number of challenges for adults working within thefield of children’s participation. For the data generated distinctive modes of participation,and by implication a much broader conception of politics. A dominant political imperative isto tackle the ‘democratic deficit’, which identifies the limited appeal of party politics tonewly graduated political ‘consumers’ in the UK and US (Craig and Earl Bennett, 1997; Eco-nomic and Social Research Council (ESRC), 2001). Adults working in the field of children’sparticipation are inevitably trying to connect children and young people to the politicalworld with a view to their future political commitments as adults (Kerr and Cleaver, 2004).However, the data also provide at least one model of children’s political commitments in thehere and now, linking them to social movements and issues outside mainstream ‘adult’ poli-tics. In many respects the model of children’s political participation provided by the cityyouth council provided a cogent expression of children’s spaces.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Pia Christensen for reading an early draft of the paper.

Notes

1. For the sake of brevity, I refer to ‘children’ instead of ‘children and young people’.2. The project, ‘Young people, citizenship and political participation’, was funded by the Brit-ish Academy, project no: SG 31775. Anonymity of the respondents is maintained throughoutthe article with the names of locations and participants changed.3. These differences are discussed elsewhere. See Wyness (2001).

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Correspondence to: Michael Wyness, Institute of Education, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK, Tel.:

024 765 22838, Fax: 024 765 24177. E-mail: [email protected]

Accepted for publication 12 June 2008

Contributor’s details

Michael Wyness is an associate professor in childhood studies in the Institute of Education at WarwickUniversity. His background is in the sociologies of childhood and education.

406 Michael Wyness



adult’s involvement in children’s participation: juggling children’s places and spaces

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