The foundation of an impactful youth voice

As we work alongside partners in Uniting the Movement, we have been deeply inspired by the brilliant youth voice initiatives across the sector that are supporting young people to make themselves heard. 

At the Leadership Skills Foundation, our own youth-voice journey is about reinforcing a core belief: that every young person can lead change if given the opportunity to develop their skills and confidence.  

Overcoming obstacles through communication

As part of our role as a Sport England system partner, we’ve been building understanding of the barriers young people face to accessing leadership opportunities and progressing into the sector's workforce. 

Youth voice has been an important part of this process and we’ve been testing a new accredited learning programme to empower young people to lead the conversation. 

The Speak Up Challenge aims to build young people’s skills and confidence through creative, participatory activities in classrooms, sports halls and youth clubs. 

Based on the Lundy model for youth participation, it gives young people a platform to communicate their views to influential professionals and policy-makers – all while also receiving feedback to help them understand the potential impact of their insights. 

As part of our pilot, colleagues at Sport England kindly agreed to listen and to provide video feedback as young people shared their perspectives on the barriers into sports volunteering and worked together to reimagine pathways into employment. 

Their ideas spanned transport difficulties, prohibitive costs, lack of role models, low confidence and negative perceptions of careers in sport. 

We’ve taken all the insights and created a summary for everybody to access and this is available on the Challenge page too. 

Our journey so far  

Inspired by Sport England’s Youth Voice Innovation Storybook, we began by running co-design and consultation sessions in a variety of community and academic settings.

The young people we worked with were both energised by the opportunity to lead change and motivated by the potential to earn accredited recognition for their participation, but they also shared their concerns: 

• Lack of time to commit to ongoing youth-voice activities. 
• Worries about standing out amongst their peers or being visible online. 
• Concerns around lacking the skills and confidence to make a difference. 

These insights helped form our core design principles: prioritise confidence-building, avoid long-term commitments, foster peer collaboration, protect privacy and recognise skill development through accreditation. 

We planned a small, iterative pilot to test and adapt as we learned during the first phase, and we were blown away by the depth of insights shared and the level of creativity displayed.

However, some less confident participants, particularly those from special educational needs and disability (SEND) and neurodivergent backgrounds, felt overly vulnerable and struggled to express their views.

Delivery staff reflected that participants needed more time to build trust and grow into the activities. 

Our second iteration focused more on building this base of skills and team rapport.

By improving scaffolding for mixed abilities, we saw positive signs that the programme was becoming more accessible and inclusive.  

Overall, our internal evaluation showed that 87% of participants believed the pilot helped them build skills to speak up for change, and the same percentage said they are now more confident speaking in front of others. 

These results reinforced our belief that the ability to form a viewpoint and effectively share it is a leadership skill that can be practiced, improved and recognised.  

Encouraging impact 

This project has strengthened our understanding of young people’s lived experiences and is informing how we design and deliver programmes for underrepresented groups. 

Participation has also had a meaningful impact on those involved.

It was a real joy to witness a room of boisterous 15-year-olds fall silent and react with smiles as they watched their views being addressed by colleagues from Sport England.

When we surveyed how they felt about the feedback, the overwhelming majority indicated they “definitely felt heard”.  

They were proud that their insights were taken seriously and this validation has acted as a springboard into other opportunities.

Following the challenge, we’ve seen participants inspired to launch online petitions for their MPs, to create new youth-led school clubs and to seek out other youth advocacy initiatives. 

Looking ahead 

As we move into the next phase of our development, we know we’ve still got some way to go, but we are excited to collaborate with other system partners to build on our learning and to support other related work from across the sector.  

Together we can make sure that every young person – regardless of background or circumstance – is able to lead positive change, so if you’d like to discuss our findings or how we can work together to empower young leaders to speak up, please contact us.  

We’re excited about continuing to grow together.