Funded by the UK’s Economic and Research Council (ESRC) and based in Wales, the research tackles the ongoing challenge of transitioning children’s participative rights, as recognised in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), into educational practice. Embedding the participative rights of young children in the pedagogical practices of early years education is recognized globally as being challenging (Correia et al. 2019, Koran and Avci, 2017, Vanner 2023). There is evidence of ‘bounded’ participation (Murphy et al., 2022), where teachers report that the voice and agency of young children might only be enabled at specified times, in specified spaces, for specified reasons, or when children are perceived to have the necessary capacity (Murphy et al., 2022).

Drawing upon a socio-cultural approach (Rogoff, 2003) a conceptual framework of agency (James and Prout, 1997) is employed to explore how children’s participative rights are understood and shaped by the children and adults who design, utilise and ‘live’ in the spaces in which children are educated.  Central to the project is a construction of young children as capable and agentic meaning-makers, who make sense of their worlds through their social experiences within it (James, 1998). This approach is interconnected with the conceptual framework of agency is a rights-based approach drawing on the UNCRC (UNICEF, 1989) Article 12, within which all children have a right to participate in decisions that affect them, so these two provide the lenses for this research.

This paper focuses the research question “How do primary teachers in Wales conceptualise and support young children’s participative rights and what are perceived enablers and barriers to practice?”.  The paper explores how in-service primary school teachers in Wales conceptualise and experience children’s participative rights, and the perceived barriers and enablers to supporting the enactment of those rights in early years education in Wales. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with the teachers (n=14) before they took part in a series of participatory workshops. Reggio Emilia pedagogical approaches were explored to provoke reflections on how children’s participative rights can be supported and enacted in practice. Group discussions and creative activities enabled participants to consider understandings of children’s participative rights and to surface the possible barriers and enablers to these rights being enacted in young children’s classrooms in Wales. Participants were supported to develop participatory projects with children in their class and creative research methods were employed to explicate young children's perceptions of their participative rights in classroom settings, and how they would like these to be developed. There will be post interviews with the teacher participants conducted after their class projects are completed.  Reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2019, 2020, 2022) is being used to analyse the data generated from the teachers’ and children’s’ engagement.

Data analysis is currently on-going and detailed findings will be presented at the conference, however initial themes from practitioners’ pre-interviews include constructions of children, teachers and schools; differing pedagogical approaches; understandings of children’s voice and participation; and differing school and local contexts. A range of barriers and enablers to young children’s participative rights were also surfaced during the data collection and analysis. How teachers’ perceptions evolved during the research process, and the implications of these perceptions for participatory pedagogies with young children will be presented.

The research runs from December 2022 until December 2025, with the component for this paper being undertaken between September 2023 and July 2024. For the research presented here, the teacher participants (n=14) were based in two Welsh speaking and seven English-speaking schools across Wales. They were all female (this reflects a predominantly female workforce) and working with children aged three to seven years. Class sizes range from 9 to 30 students, and school sizes range from 45 to 633 students. The teacher participated in one-to-one semi-structured interview pre and post and ‘intervention’. There are three stages to this data gathering, 1) pre-interviews, 2) Workshops and project work (intervention) 3) post-interviews. The pre-interview (stage 1) focused on teachers understanding and their experience of young children’s participative rights in their classroom and their school, and the perceived barriers and enablers to enabling young children to enact their participative rights in school. The interviews were video recorded and transcribed. Following these interviews the teachers took part in five face-to-face workshops (stage 2), which drew on Reggio Emilia ideas and were supported by an artist consultant. These workshops, based on a participatory approach, were an opportunity for the teachers involved to consider education ‘about’, ‘through’, and ‘for’ human rights (United Nations, 2011). Reggio Emilia's principles and pedagogy served as an example and a provocation to their way of teaching, and to increase their knowledge about the participative rights of children in education. The teachers then developed projects in their class (stage 2) to enable children to explore their understandings and experiences of participative rights in school. The second post intervention semi-structured interviews (stage 3) with teachers explores in detail their reflections on their involvement in the research, their projects with the children, and any changes to their pedagogic practice. NVivo data analysis software was used implement Reflective Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019, 2020, 2022) with the data. The identification of initial codes generated from data, was the product of a process of collaborative data coding. Each interview was coded by at least two members of the research team, the interviewer and another member of the research team, first separately and then discussed together. Subsequently, the research team met several times to generate initial themes and then develop, review, and define themes. These themes were the effect of the continuous and systematic process of reflective dialogue and collaborative discussion.

Final conclusions are not yet possible due to the incomplete nature of the research at the point of abstract submission. However, indicative findings can be drawn teachers perceptions of barriers and enablers to the enactment of children’s participative rights in lower primary school classrooms. It should be noted that the below conclusions are drawn from the pre-interviews (stage 1) only. Taking the socio-cultural approach (Rogoff 2003) and a conceptual framework of agency (Prout and James 1997) in our approach to and of the analysis we found that teachers perceived barriers to enabling participation in their classrooms at a ‘personal’ level and an ‘organisational’ level. In terms of ‘personal’ our analysis surfaced teachers’ social constructions of children, of teachers and of learning itself. For some these constructions were acting as barriers to being able to embed participative rights in classrooms, whereas for others these constructions were perceived as enablers. This seemingly depended on if the pedagogical position was in-line with children’s participative rights. The participants also reported experiencing ‘organisational’ barriers. For example, if the school ethos was reflective of children’s participative rights, the pressure of other outcomes such as literacy and numeracy, and the autonomy and flexibility teachers were afforded in developing their curricula and their pedagogical approaches. Another theme which emerged during our analysis was understandings and perceptions of the concepts of child ‘voice’, and how this aligns with notions of human rights education, participative rights, and classroom and school activities that constitute participation. Therefore we argue that for teachers to overcome the challenges of transitioning children’s participative rights from policy into practice, that teachers have the space and capacity to review their own pedagogical position and the relationship with their practice.

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