Co-Design & Youth Panels
Recognised thought-leaders in co-creation and strategic partnership-working with young people — tailored to context, building consensus, and embedding youth voice in decisionmaking.
We support public bodies, community organisations, and national agencies to integrate children and young people’s views, needs and imagination meaningfully into strategy, service design, and decision-making.
As recognised thought-leaders in co-design and consensus-building approaches, we create inclusive, creative processes that centre lived experience and generate practical, rights-based solutions. Our methods empower diverse groups—including voices seldom-heard or challenging to engage—to shape places, services, and policies that reflect their realities. From national charters and youth panels to neighbourhood festivals and service redesign, we facilitate safe, adaptive, and strategic participation.
Our expertise spans rights-based facilitation, trauma-informed practice, child-led pedagogies, inclusive toolkit development, and collaborative systems design and intervention. We translate children and young people’s insight into actionable outputs that align with statutory duties, children’s rights and strategic goals—building capacity, confidence, and legitimacy across sectors and stakeholder perspectives.
National Guidance
Children’s Charter for School Age Childcare (Scottish Government)
This project set out to co-create a national children’s charter to guide the future of school age childcare in Scotland. Commissioned by the Scottish Government, we worked with 125 primary schoolchildren aged 4–12 across six diverse urban and rural schools —from Lowlands to the Highlands and Islands—to understand what high-quality Out-of-School Clubs should look like in their communities.
Each group explored the ‘Where’, ‘Who’, ‘How’, ‘Why’, and ‘What’ of ideal provision and co-developed local charters, which were refined and validated by the children themselves. The groups from each location then came together at a national workshop in Dundee to synthesise shared principles and finalise the National Charter.
The resulting Charter reflects children’s lived realities and aspirations and is being used to directly shape national policy. Its guiding principles have become a visible touchstone in schools across Scotland—pinning children’s voices at the heart of system design.
Watch a short film celebrating the project and national workshop.
Bespoke Youth-Panels
Audit Scotland Youth Advisory Panel (Audit Scotland)
This two-year project embeds young people’s voices in national audit processes—ensuring public service scrutiny reflects their lived realities. APiC leads recruitment and facilitation of a diverse panel of Youth Advisers aged 11–20, drawn from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Falkirk, and rural Stirlingshire. Meeting regularly, the panel contributes to all stages of key audits—including high-profile reviews on Drugs and Alcohol and Sustainable Transport.
Through co-creation workshops, reflective activities, and creative media, they share lived expertise and co-develop grounded ideas for better national policy and practice. They’ve surfaced priorities often missed in adult-led scrutiny—like prevention, stigma, and rural service gaps—shaping audit focus, content, and communication. The model has strengthened skills, confidence and connection among Youth Advisers.
National Tools
CYP Place Standard Tool (Scottish Government; Play Scotland)
Partnering with Play Scotland, we led and facilitated the on-the-ground co-creation phase of two new versions of the Place Standard Tool, tailored for 5–12 and 13–18 year-olds.
The project was commissioned by the Scottish Government Place Standard Implementation Partnership. These tools enable structured, age-appropriate conversations about the physical and social qualities of places, using playful formats, simplified language, tailored scoring, illustrations, and facilitator guidance.
We developed supporting materials aligning with UNCRC principles, the Curriculum for Excellence, and Getting It Right for Every Child, enhancing capacity for rights-based youth participation in place assessment. They also advised on inclusive communication resources and facilitated engagement methods to ensure accessibility.
This work is demonstrative of our expertise in co-design, children’s facilitation, policy alignment, and creating practical tools that empower professionals to centre young people’s voices in placemaking.
Seldom-Heard Groups
Engaging & Co-Designing with Marginalised Young People (Various)
Targeted or as part of wider engagement programmes, we work directly with marginalised children and young people or those who often face barriers to participation — including those supported by Learning and Support Hubs, Enhanced Nurture Provision, and youth groups for young people who do not attend or struggle to attend school. Using our inclusive and creative co-design methods, we create safe, adaptive spaces that meet varied needs and abilities, ensuring every young person can meaningfully contribute to shaping places and services that affect them.
This approach has empowered disabled and seldom heard young people to inform the design for “The Pivvie” -a new Youth Hub in Banff and Macduff, Aberdeenshire- and the redesign of Jack Kane Park and Centre in Edinburgh, ensuring these spaces reflect their rights, experiences, and priorities. In another project, we worked with care-experienced young people from 5 Scottish high schools to explore how they perceive and experience support in education. Through trauma-informed trust-building co-creative practice, we surfaced sensitive common issues and co-developed recommendations for systems change: including needs for safe, quiet spaces, flexible support, group connection, and greater empathy from professionals.
Events & Festivals
Children’s Neighbourhood Festival, Falkirk (Paths for All, Falkirk Council)
In September 2024, A Place in Childhood (APiC) collaborated with local children and teenagers from Langlees and Bainsford, Falkirk to co-create the Children’s Neighbourhood Festival. Born from a neighbourhood planning process with local schools, the event aimed to celebrate positive aspects of the community while promoting play, walking, cycling, and environmental awareness.
Young people led on event planning—designing posters, organising activities, and building skills in teamwork, creative thinking, and event management. Held at Langlees Primary School and the Dawson Centre on 6 September 2024, the festival featured inflatables, creative arts, Fire Brigade, Police, Falkirk Football Club, exotic animals, climate action initiatives, and free food—all designed by children and young people, and for the whole community.
The event successfully united residents and empowered young people, demonstrating how youth-led co-creation can spark lasting community engagement through prioritising joy.
Curriculum & Pedagogy
Play Pedagogy Award (Play Scotland; Education Scotland)
This collaborative project co-created the national Play Pedagogy Award—a structured, rights-based improvement framework for Scottish primary schools. Commissioned by Play Scotland, who worked closely with Education Scotland, APiC facilitated workshops with teachers, leaders, and play experts to co-design an award framework, assessment criteria, guidance, and toolkit which aligned with the realities of everyday school life . Grounded in child-centred pedagogy and child developmental theory, the Award spans five key strands—leadership, pedagogy, environment, community, and professional learning—and adopts a three-phase improvement journey.
Since its launch in 2023, early adopters have reported transformation in how play is embedded in learning. APiC’s analytical insights were shared at the International Play Association World Conference in Glasgow in June 2023, and are to underpin a forthcoming book chapter on play pedagogy. This work demonstrates our expertise in co-design, developmental psychology, child-led pedagogy, and strategic systems-level change.
APiC are experts at delivering quality work to high-level organisational and project objectives, without ever compromising their core values or commitment to faithfully representing children and young people’s rights, needs and voices.
APiC work with young people entirely on their own terms, showing deep respect for who they are and what they have to say. Many of the pupils involved in our collaboration had additional support needs, learning challenges, minority backgrounds, or were associated with withdrawn or antisocial behaviour—groups often unseen or undervalued. But APiC saw what I see: thoughtful, creative young people with a huge amount to contribute. The sophistication of what they co-produced together —a concept entirely their own—speaks volumes. Too frequently, people approach school engagement with their own agenda, which often makes things worse for pupils and staff. APiC are different – they truly listen and centre the young people’s perspective. This makes a material difference for them and for the school.
We are incredibly grateful to APiC for their invaluable support with our Mindset in Care (in Education) programme. They are masters in place-based work, and it showed. Their thoughtful and engaging sessions created a safe space for care experienced young people and their peers to share their views on their school and the wider community—what’s working well, what could be improved—and helped care experienced young people reflect meaningfully on the support they currently receive in school, who they feel they can turn to, where any gaps are, and what could be put in place to enhance their experience at school. APiC’s contribution enriched the programme and empowered the young people to have their voices heard.
We’re here for all who believe in and invest in young people—championing their right to flourish and contribute as equal stewards of today and tomorrow, on their terms.
We support policymakers, researchers, planners, practitioners, educators, architects, third-sector leaders and philanthropists who know we can -and must- do better for young people—and understand that reintegrating their wisdom, creativity, and potential into society will build a better world and future for everyone.
Our services are fully bespoke—shaped around your goals, constraints, and context. Integrating research, placemaking, co-design, and training, and grounded in shared values of youth leadership, capacity-building, and rights, we bring the skill and experience to make your ideas work.
If you’re ready to act, we’d love to work with you – get in touch to start the conversation.
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© A Place in Childhood CIC is a Community Interest Company operating under the trade name of A Place in Childhood. Company number: SC735696. Registered address: 5 South Charlotte Street, Edinburgh, EH2 4AN. Website design by Sean Peacock