‘This landmark book reveals how much our understanding of children’s right to participate has grown in the twenty years since the launch of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is a basic resource for anyone who believes in children's rights and capacities as citizens.' - Roger A. Hart, City University of New York, USA
The Handbook will be an essential resource for anyone embarking on a child participation initiative as well as for students and scholars in childhood research and children’s rights.' - Martin Woodhead, Open University, UK
'The contributors to this ambitious and extremely accessible volume on children’s participation are to be congratulated for their ground-breaking work...The Handbook is an essential read for scholars, policy-makers, practitioners and children's rights advocates.' - Jo Boyden, University of Oxford, UK
"I found this volume very informative and intellectually stimulating. The phenomena described and the issues debated are indeed familiar. This Handbook is well worth a careful reading, and I recommend it with enthusiasm."―Social Work with Groups
From the Publisher
Barry Percy-Smith is Reader in Childhood and Participatory Practice at the SOLAR Action Research Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. He has extensive experience using participatory and ‘whole system’ action inquiry approaches in research, evaluation and development projects with children, young people, practitioners and policy makers. He is Coordinator of the Children’s Participation Learning Network, an international forum for critical debate about children and young people’s participation, and has published and presented numerous papers on the subject.
Nigel Thomas is Professor of Childhood and Youth Research at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, and Co-Director of The Centre, which exists to promote and research children and young people’s participation, inclusion and empowerment. He has twenty years’ experience of social work practice and has taught and researched extensively in the field of children’s welfare, rights and participation.
About the Author
Barry Percy-Smith is Professor of Childhood, Youth and Participatory Practice and Director of the Centre for Applied Child, Youth and Family Research at the University of Huddersfield, UK. He has extensive experience as a participatory action researcher in research, evaluation and development projects with children, young people and practitioners in a wide range of organisational, public sector and community contexts. He has undertaken numerous studies concerning the theory and practice of child and youth participation and youth transitions for national and international partners including Evaluation of children’s participation across all EU member states, EU H2020 PARTISPACE project (with Thomas) and projects for UNICEF and World Bank. He has published widely on these issues including the first edition of A Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation: Perspectives from Theory and Practice (co-edited with Nigel Patrick Thomas, Routledge 2010). Nigel Patrick Thomas is Professor Emeritus of Childhood and Youth at the University of Central Lancashire, and Associate Director of The Centre for Children and Young People’s Participation. Since publication of the first edition he has authored or co-authored 30 articles in peer reviewed journals and 10 book chapters, most of them on aspects of children and young people’s participation, and one book (Westwood et al., Participation, Citizenship and Intergenerational Relations in Children and Young People’s Lives, Palgrave Macmillan 2014). During this period he has also worked on three major projects led by Southern Cross University and funded by the Australian Research Council, and one (together with Percy-Smith) led by the Goethe University in Frankfurt and funded by the European Commission, as well as leading two projects for the Children’s Commissioner for England and a major international conference for the International Childhood and Youth Research Network. He is an editor of the Palgrave series Studies in Childhood and Youth, and chairs the Editorial Board of the the journal Children & Society.
