About
Children and young people should have the best health care possible. Under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, they have the right to influence decisions affecting their care and to be supported to be healthy, happy and well.
At RCPCH we embed children and young people's perspectives in everything we do. The Children and Young People's Engagement team at RCPCH includes children, young people, young adults and family experts-by-experience with staff who have backgrounds in lived experience, clinical expertise, health services, education, youth & community work.
We work with ages 0-25 years old directly through RCPCH &Us, the children, young people and family network for RCPCH. We also work with parents, carers, families, advocates and wider community members. You can find out more about the volunteering and projects on our RCPCH &Us website or by reading the winter 2025 issue of Milestones, our member magazine, which has been taken over by young people!
The RCPCH Engagement Academy supports child health services in engagement planning, age-appropriate projects, training/development programmes, engagement support including patient and public involvement. Topics we support may include long term conditions, service evaluation and transition to adult care.
Tailored support from RCPCH Engagement Academy
We are experts in engagement and children and young people's voice, offering practical, friendly support to help you involve children, young people, and families in shaping safer, more effective services.
Through our information, advice and guidance signposting or through commissioned projects, we can help:
- design age and stage appropriate engagement activities
- plan and deliver sessions with children, young people and families
- embed inclusive approaches and diverse voices
- support your thinking on safer working practices and safeguarding
- share tools, templates and top tips to get you started
- link you with local community services and network.
Benefits of engaging with children and young people
Engagement is a statutory duty for health services. It can support you to develop and consider changes which, if implemented, would have an impact on the manner or range of services.
The benefits of engagement include:
- improved health outcomes
- skills for life for children and young people
- increased self-esteem and confidence for participants
- increased health literacy
- value for money
- better decision-making
- improved quality of services
- accountability and transparency
- meet legal duties
- address health inequalities.
To me, RCPCH &Us is a fantastic organisation which has given me opportunities to share my views and opinions and inspired me to participate in projects. I feel valued as an individual and as a volunteer
How we can help
RCPCH Engagement Academy can:
- support your role as duty bearer under the United Nation Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989)
- support your public involvement legal duties within Working in Partnership with People and Communities (2022)
- support your ICB annual reporting, where NHS commissioning organisations have a legal duty under section 14Z45 of the NHS Act 2006 to ‘make arrangements’ to secure that individuals to whom services are being or may be provided and their carers/representatives are involved when commissioning services for NHS patients
- provide information, advice and guidance on patient and public engagement to support regulatory visits and inspections
- provide insights to support Core20PLUS5 programmes to reduce health inequalities
- increase accessibility and inclusion of 0-25 year olds within health services engagement under the Health and Care Act 2022 Triple Aim Duty.
Examples of our services
- Engagement with children, young people, young adults and families
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- Capture insights, voices and views through a range of consultation methods
- Provide one-off events, taster sessions and creative problem solving group activities
- Deliver ongoing engagement projects online, in person or hybrid
- Give opportunities to children, young people and young adults to gain accreditations for their engagement
Check out our children, young people and family led projects on what matters to children and young people across the country in our Voice of the Nation Report (2025) as well as in projects looking at asthma, epilepsy, COVID-19 and hidden health experiences.
- Training for staff and volunteers
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We provide bespoke and ready-to-go training programmes for groups of 10-100 staff and volunteers. We look at the elements needed to work with people and communities within health services, settings and systems.
Our training can be tailored to places, systems, boards or partnerships or offered to units and neighbourhoods as part of a quality improvement programme.
Example training we've delivered:
- Engaging children and young people: A full day, in person and interactive course on how to do engagement with children and young people from different ages, backgrounds, stages and experiences. With theory and practical guidance, including how to apply legal frameworks.
- Talk, trust, treat: Getting adolescent and young adults' health right: A two-session course to understand the needs and barriers to care for adolescents and young adults. Gives you space to explore how you develop trust, manage risk and support young people’s rights within your service and individual practice. Led by Association for Young People’s health and is co-designed and co-delivered with young people with lived experience of health services and long term health conditions.
- Safer working practices for engagement: Provides the foundations for creating safe engagement activities, touching on consent, risk assessments, staff ratios and expertise, wellbeing assessments, information governance and how to create a meaningful and appropriate, rights based engagement space.
- Strategic planning for engagement: How to plan for engagement looking at vision and values for engagement, exploring the context, how you develop your offer to deliver and evaluate.
- Introduction to children's rights: Explore the United Nation Convention on the Rights of the Child in the context of engagement in improving child health services, looking at Article 12 (voice) and Article 24 (health) and their associated general comments, alongside emerging areas such as digital rights, the climate crisis and the interplay between rights.
- Addressing health inequalities amongst young people: Drawing on the latest data and young people’s experiences to provide you with expert knowledge. Delivered by the Association of Young People's Health.
- Engaging adolescents and young adults in your health research – ethical practice in action: For those leading research about young people’s health and keen to involve young people in your work but faced with some tricky dilemmas. Delivered by the Association of Young People's Health.
- Group facilitation for youth engagement: Sharpen up your workshop facilitation skills in this creative, two-day, in person course. Celivered by the Association of Young People's Health.
- Youth mental health first aid: This course trains you as an MHFAider® for an in-depth understanding of young people’s mental health and factors that affect wellbeing. Delivered by the Association of Young People's Health.
You can also see examples of the impact of our training with epilepsy and diabetes units.
More about our upcoming engagement courses
- Development for staff or volunteers
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- Access to our impact and influence of engagement resources (May 2025), engagement standards (due late November 2025) and Engagement Quality Assurance Programme
- Information, advice and guidance on engagement
- 1:1 or group coaching and mentoring
- Opportunities to shadow or access peer support when delivering your own engagement activities
Sign up to our Engagement Academy newsletter
Watch young people's tips for engagement: