Spot on Mike. Accountability to young stakeholders is crucial.
So often services for young people fail to recognise young people as their stakeholders and (for lack of better non-market terminology that gets at the point) their customers. Instead, they end up focussing on their accountability to funders, parents, local authority etc.
Those accountabilities are relevant - but its effectively being accountable to young people that will really lead to service improvement.
We started to explore some of the issues of how young people hold services to account when we ran consultations on the local offer last year - and it's a line of exploration that definitely needs to be taken further....
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So often services for young people fail to recognise young people as their stakeholders and (for lack of better non-market terminology that gets at the point) their customers. Instead, they end up focussing on their accountability to funders, parents, local authority etc.
Those accountabilities are relevant - but its effectively being accountable to young people that will really lead to service improvement.
We started to explore some of the issues of how young people hold services to account when we ran consultations on the local offer last year - and it's a line of exploration that definitely needs to be taken further....