ARU Final Report

Full Report – March 2021 13 voices are heard, and provides an important way for young people to retain choice and control over key aspects of their lives. We must develop enabling environments for relationship-based practice to flourish and ensure that positive approaches developed in response to COVID-19 are supported to continue. These approaches are particularly important for care leavers who live with additional complexities in their life and face a range of situations where others may make decisions on their behalf, such as young people with disabilities and care support, or young people in the justice system.” (SCLC, 2020, p.12) Participatory research online, which actively involved care leavers and the staff supporting them from the six local authorities, underpinned this research. It was paramount to all of those involved in the research that care leavers were provided with opportunities to shape the research and indeed the reported outcomes. Niamh O’Brien and Anna Dadswell, the ARU researchers, have previously conducted participatory research with young people who had self-excluded from school due to severe bullying. This work demonstrated the wealth of knowledge generated as a result of this type of collaborative working: from the lived experiences of young people, the practical knowledge of the staff supporting them, and the academic knowledge of the researchers leading the study (O’Brien and Dadswell, 2020). This appreciation of knowledge contributions inadvertently enables power dynamics to be perceived as fluid and constantly changing as the study evolves (O’Brien, Moules and Munn-Giddings, 2018). In addition, O’Brien and Dadswell (2020) recognised that during participatory research projects, young people have competing priorities, which in some cases might result in them choosing not to participate or only participating in certain aspects of the project. Furthermore, this participatory approach to research creates opportunities for partnership development with services through the staff supporting young people and facilitating their involvement in the research process. The current research draws and builds on this work, and due to Covid-19, it also incorporates the new opportunities and challenges for conducting participatory research online.