Making Southampton a Child Friendly City
Date Created: 27th Jun 2022
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On the 28th of April, the Child Friendly Steering Conference was held at Southampton City Art Gallery, with guest speaker Jessica Crews from UNICEF UK. Attended by Ambassador organisations, including Artswork, as well as steering group members, this was the first in-person meeting to discuss how Southampton can be a Child Friendly City. Jessica explained the importance of being a child friendly city to attendees, and how we can implement this in Southampton.
What is the Child Friendly Cities Programme?
The Child Friendly Cities programme works with councils around the UK to ensure they are showing a commitment and dedication to children’s rights, and that these are practically and meaningfully embedded in their work.
Southampton officially joined the Child Friendly initiative, in partnership with UNICEF UK, in February 2022. The city is now part of a global network in the Child Friendly Cities Initiative, which is currently working with up to 30 million children in just under 50 countries.
What are the key phases in the Child Friendly City programme?
The 3 to 5 year long programme is split into 4 key phases. Southampton has currently entered the “Discovery Phase”. The Discovery Phase ideally takes around 6 months, and it is an opportunity as a city to really look within ourselves.
As Jessica Crew elaborates;
“Discovery enables you to build certain key structures and mechanisms that are necessary and will be useful for the rest of the programme. For example; setting up governing structures. It will enable you to look within.”
The 4 key phases of the Child Friendly City programme.
A main aspect of the Discovery phase is engaging, and running a series of consultations, with a representative group of children and young people from across the city to gather information on what they care about, and what they see as priority areas. The priority focus areas for a Child Friendly City are referred to as “badges”.
What are the badges?
Each participating local authority in the programme will work towards the 3 foundational badges (allocated in yellow) and, based on their consultation and engagement with children and young people in the Discovery phase, they will select an additional 3 badges from the choice of 10 (allocated in blue).
These badges will help Southampton to set priorities based on local feedback, and work on improvements and an action plan to implement the selected badges in the city.
Strategic and operational governance
Setting up strategic and operational governance plays a critical role in the Child Friendly Cities programme. Southampton already has a Steering Group in place to lead on operational governance and the group got across council representation of senior leadership.
Southampton also has an ambassadors and champions network, which Artswork is considered as a child friendly ambassador organisation. As the Child Friendly Project Officer, Sally White, briefly explains to Lucy Marder, one of our strategic managers who attended the event, a question about champions and ambassadors;
“So within your example, Artswork would be the ambassador organisation and you Lucy are the champion for Artswork. Another example would be, No Limits. No Limits are our ambassador organisation and someone with a responsibility to hold child friendly in their portfolio would be the champion for that organisation.”
What are the current plans for the future?
Southampton City Council will focus on these 8 key areas through its Children & Young People Strategy:
Source: Southampton City Council
The strategy framework was already in place before Southampton officially joined the UNICEF UK’s Child Friendly City programme. Currently the city is looking at a 5 year-plan, from 2022 until 2027, to implement their Children & Young people Strategy through the outlined areas.
To collect feedback from children and young people, Southampton City Council are now conducting a survey to understand what it is like to be a child or young person in the city.
They are interested in hearing the views from any child or young person that lives, visits, is in education or works in Southampton.
If you know are a young person, or know of any children and young people that are interested in being part of this consultation, help Southampton to become a Child Friendly City by completing the survey below. The closing date is 31st of July 2022.
Child Friendly City Survey
Additional resources on Child Friendly Southampton:
Southampton Children and Young People’s Strategy
Prevention & Early Intervention Plan
Our Together Plan: Southampton’s Corporate Parenting Strategic Plan
Tags:
Child Friendly City Southampton Southampton Child Friendly City UNICEF
