Embedding creative consultation

With participation high on the agenda and new policies such as ‘The Youth Offer’, ‘The Cultural Offer’ and programmes like ‘Find Your Talent’ emerging, there is now a very clear message for anyone working with young people in the UK: ensure you give them the platform to engage with creative activities and access to high quality cultural experiences. Being given the platform is one thing, having the experience is another: but what we do need to ensure is that young people can exercise their right to influence projects that are taking place. Arts Council England outlines why we as a sector need to continue to consult with young people: “Young people are customers of the arts, the arts sector frequently engages children and young people as audiences, participants and makers… The arts sector needs to be clear about the aspirations and expectations of those young people… clarity comes best through consultation… involvement and evaluation, and through evaluation comes improvement.”

Last year ENYAN (English National Youth Arts Network) launched its first annual campaign called ‘What Do You Think?’. The campaign involved researching the uptake and use of the arts as a tool for consultation among ENYAN members, Regional Advisory Panel members, National Steering Group members, the wider youth arts sector and young people. The purpose of the campaign was to raise the profile of the arts as a tool for consulting with young people. The feedback was overwhelming, with organisations submitting case studies of inspiring youth-led consultations, details of new multi-layered partnership approaches, innovative use of artforms to encourage participation and the unearthing of fresh and inspiring tools being used to train young people as consultants and mentors.

Not surprisingly, the findings of the research showed that organisations are embracing the arts an effective tool for consulting, and that engaging with young people creatively can draw out a wide variety of responses that might otherwise have been missed. One example of this is a young person’s response to the ‘Sparks’ consultation project at QUAD in Derby: “It was rewarding and gave an experience of art outside school… I learnt that my opinions were neither right nor wrong because everyone’s views are different… it was also a place where I could express my opinions without getting stereotyped”.

In addition to using some very well- established consultation methods, such as the ‘Hear by Right’ framework developed by the National Youth Agency and Roger Hart’s ‘Ladder of Participation’, the ENYAN research demonstrated some inspiring creative tools in use and for the most part, those that connected best with youth culture produced the more profound results. To give you a flavour, the examples include graffiti walls/arty murals, freeze-frame exercises, lifeline drawing, peer to peer interviews, interactive surveys, diary-room recordings, creative PowerPoint presentations and model making. As well as the case studies submitted, contributors to ENYAN’s regional event on Creative Youth Consultation and Participation, held in the North East last year, spoke of how young people responded best to creative activities, which inadvertently encouraged sustained attendance and therefore improved the quality of the consultation.

During the campaign, some obvious problems with consultation continued to emerge: avoiding tokenism; achieving inclusivity; managing expectations; maintaining regular attendance and consistency; and covering the costs. To explore these issues further, ENYAN decided to compile the research into a toolkit, and our Continuing Professional Development department, Artsplan, has also developed the one-day training course ‘Creative Consultation’ to support anyone looking to develop a youth consultation activity or imbed and sustain creative consultation into projects.