The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and General Comment No.12 of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (2009) affirm that children have the right to participate in all decisions that affect them and call for giving their views full attention in all spheres of life. Such participation entails the construction of learning experiences in which an authentic dialogue between adults, young people and children, and diversity amongst generations, roles and perspectives are key aspects. 

The right to be heard is protected in official proceedings before the judicial authority, albeit in a variety of ways (UN General Assembly 2010). At the same time, there are still a number of complex aspects to involvement in the child protection system (Biffi & Montà, 2020). In this situation, the social service and the court are two institutional actors that mediate participation. Therefore, constructing a participatory process and making sense of it becomes a primary educational objective of the services part of the protection system.  Moreover, since these educational settings are concerned with more vulnerable children, they can be considered as a sort of “field test” or “magnifying glass” on how the progress in striving to the implementation of children’s rights, as enshrined by policies, is proceeding. Mechanisms to ensure children’s participation in the protection system have been implemented (CoE, 2011) but there seems to be a gap between what is declared and its implementation. Children feel their voices are not being taken into account (Munro, 2011) and this view seems to be also shared by workers, especially when referring to young children (Kriz & Skiveness, 2015; Van Bijleveld et al., 2014).

Consequently, in such a peculiar context, it is essential to investigate the meanings and educational practices that promote children’s participatory rights in decision-making processes. To this end, participatory research  in daycare centres for children in a metropolitan area in Northern Italy will be presented.  Day care centres for minors are part of Socio-Educational Projects, i.e. those services where access is mediated by the Family Social Service, where there is a mix of social and educational functions and a strong integration with the territory. 

Within a larger study exploring the reality of Daycare centres and the participatory practices that are adopted, gathering the meanings that children and practitioners attribute to them, the present contribution will focus on answering the following research question: What does child participation in decision-making processes within Day care centres mean and how is it experienced by the children who attend them?

With a view to exploring the meanings attributed by the children, the research project is embedded within a qualitative research framework (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011). It was designed following the epistemic principles of the phenomenological-hermeneutic approach (Van Manen, 1990; Mortari, 2007) and adopted a participatory method (O’Kane, 2008; Welty & Lundy, 2013; Christensen & James, 2017). The study followed the guidelines suggested by the ethical code of the Italian Society of Pedagogy (SIPED, 2020) and by the Declaration of Helsinki (World Medical Association, 2001). The research question was explored in five Day care centres in a metropolitan area in Northern Italy. The children were admitted to the services by decree of the juvenile court and first-level referral by the social service. The participants were selected on a voluntary basis. The group consisted of seven boys and three girls. In order to foster the construction of an appropriate climate of trust, and to encourage the sharing of views, the collage inquiry approach (Butler-Kisber, 2010) was used to explore the meaning attributed by the involved children to participation in decision-making at the Day care centre. Among the reasons for choosing this approach are (Biffi & Zuccoli, 2015): the possibility of sharing thoughts through a non-verbal channel, which allows one to go beyond the possible limit of language; group sharing of the realised products, which facilitates a process of mutual recognition and the possibility of experimenting reflection on one's own representations. The aim of the analysis of the collected data was the understanding of the investigated experience. For this, reference was made to the model proposed by Max Van Manen (1999) who suggests a procedure based on the search for the structuring themes of the explored experience. The collages were archived on a collaborative online platform in the form of a digital blackboard. This enabled the integrated analysis of the collages and their accompanying narratives, through the identification of individual narrative segments and their correspondence with the images in the composition. The research team proceeded following a specific protocol (Butler & Kisber, 2010) that consisted in the repeated and in-depth reading of all the collected materials, with the aim of achieving an initial understanding of the studied experiences, which was necessary in order to be able to then highlight the structuring themes. Subsequently, the central and fundamental themes in the material were identified concerning the research question and its significance.

Four key findings emerged from the data analysis process: 1) the characteristics that participation in decision-making at the Day care centres has; 2) how participation is built throughout activities at the Day care centres; 3) participation is framed as a process that involves oscillating between the self and the group of peers and practitioners; 4) participation is framed as a dialogical process, where power dynamics and conflict are thematised. Furthermore, the data analysis process was able to highlight the characteristics that successful participatory processes, according to the participants' perspectives, have. Moreover, a key aspect that emerged concerns what children learn through participation in decision-making processes in Day care centres. Finally, the analysis is able to suggest possible directions for improvement, so for enhancing the quality of educational services and the protection system, when it comes to promoting participatory rights.

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