While the importance of enhancing children’s agency - those actions made by children that are not simply reactions to adults’ inputs (Baraldi, 2022) - is increasingly becoming a central part of education (OECD, 2018), studies show that traditional education keeps promoting children’s conformity minimising experimentation and risk-taking (Kirby, 2020). On a similar note, traditional narratives about children describe them as incompetent and unreliable (Baraldi, 2014). This tendency is confirmed by research studies that show that children have the feeling that their opinions  are not considered seriously and specific groups of children do not have the opportunity to raise their voices as loudly as others and remain excluded (European Commission, et.al., 2021). At school, 16,7% of children feel adults never listen to their opinions when making policy decisions (Unicef & Eurochild, 2019). Moreover, even when participatory activities, like children’s councils, are promoted, they often suffer from issues of sustainability and continuity, as guaranteeing staff capacity and training is a challenge. The project GOTALK challenges this trend and complies with the idea that children have the right to share their opinions and adults should take those opinions into account when they take decisions that affect children. To do so, the GOTALK project proposes an innovative participatory creation and implementation of youths’ councils in two contexts, Italy and Belgium. In the framework of the project,  three schools and one youth center embarked on the GOTALK journey towards more inclusive and sustainable councils that would also lead to effective  policy impact. The trajectory was inspired by insights on living wall, pedagogical documentation and the mosaic approach (Bjartveit et.al., 2019; Clark & Moss, 2011). The analysis was done together with the members of the children’s and youth’s councils and will be discussed with other children from the schools to ensure they also recognize themselves in the analysis, aiming at the inclusiveness of the analysis and saturation of the data . In order to ensure the sustainability of the insights, the GOTALK project focuses on one policy theme for the entire school year:  in Belgium children’s councils will discuss the topic of   out-of-school care and activities (following up on the Decree BOA, 2019), while in Italy, also following the introduction of the new law on civic education (Law 92/2019), citizenship education related topics will be at the pipeline of the children’s activities.  

As the credibility of the actions is a key issue to ensure that youths and children feel heard and entrusted, sustainability is also a fundamental aspect of the children councils.  In this regard, the GOTALK team supports schools and youth organizations in ensuring the continuity of the councils by raising awareness and appreciation of the student councils inside and outside the school or organization. Ensuring policy impact is guaranteed by engaging with policy makers in a discussion on the boundaries of the policy impact that children councils can have and by facilitating the direct dialogue between children and policy makers.

The GOTALK research aims at strengthening children’s participation by enhancing it’s inclusiveness, policy impact and sustainability. In this research we focus on two questions: (1) How do children between 10 and 18 in children’s councils attribute meaning to the concepts of inclusiveness, sustainability and policy impact? And (2) How can we build upon these meanings in order to cocreate an inclusive, sustainable trajectory with policy impact at the children’s councils?

The method of this research includes action research in primary and secondary schools and youth organizations combined with narrative analysis of children’s voices about inclusiveness, sustainability and policy impact. The voices of children and youth are gathered during various council meetings and in individual peer-to-peer interviews with children. Besides that, the data involves the pedagogical documentation that is done within the children’s and youth’s councils on the participation trajectories. During the narrative analysis, the different formats in which we can hear and read the voices of the children are gathered in NVivo software and analysis. The three main focus points of the GOTALK approach: inclusiveness, sustainability and policy impact are used as structuring principles in the distillation of meanings from the voices from children’s and youth’s councils. Analysis is done separately for Italian and Belgian data, as children have different experiences with councils and work on different policy themes but were periodically compared in the GOTALK research team. The cocreation and development of the trajectories has been documented during meetings inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach to Early Childhood Education (Edwards et.al., 1993). During these meetings, the children’s and youth’s councils and the joint analysis considered. Researchers considered the voices heard in order to use these as the most important element for the design of the further trajectory in the schools and youth center. Important turning points and insights from these meetings are used to make explicit how the trajectories have been built.

The meaning attributed to inclusiveness, sustainability and policy impact are various. For what concerns inclusiveness, children stress the inclusion of various voices. Children involved in the councils showed awareness and understanding of who is not included in the councils (such as younger children and children that are rather silent). They showed the willingness and need to include their excluded peers, but also expressed some children are hard to reach, also for them, as peers. Children tend to feel more confident when asking younger children or multilingual children about their stance on the policy topics, than children who show aggressive behavior. Considering sustainability, children feel the councils should not only be continued over time, but a very important aspect of sustainability is also how the council is embedded at school. Some children express their concerns about the image of the council with children and teachers that do not take part in it. Policy impact has been a topic along the trajectory. Throughout this first phase of the research, it appeared that children are not used to reflect upon a “policy” topic for a long period of time, which would include several meetings and activities. This is related to the fact that schools as institutions involve children in the decision-making process only for a short period of time, providing them fast and unsustainable solutions to their enquiries. Instead, sustainable change requires time and energy: it is notable that despite feelings of demotivation, children express their appreciation towards a long-term perspective, as they feel more informed about the policy topic before being expected to express their arguments and suggestions. One of the adjustments so far is to slow down the trajectory and adopt a more flexible preparation for the councils as children expressed they felt too little space to discuss topics in depth.

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