Introduction

Participation has become a word that everyone seems to use today to legitimise their programmes with groups that are considered in some way to be marginalised. This includes a wealth of discussions about the growth of ‘children's participation’ in society in line with the call of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). The phrase is used with people working within very different ideologies concerning the appropriate roles of children, but almost all of them write about children's programmed activities. In the UK, most of the emphasis seems to be on children's participation in decision making in formal settings with adults or consultation of children by adults, even though the rationale that is commonly given is the much broader goal of the promotion of citizenship. In this chapter I argue that the emphasis on children's decision making with adults and consultation by adults in formal settings is a much too narrow view of children's social participation for citizenship. We need to address not just children's voices in governance but also children's participation in civil society. I use the term children's social participation in this chapter to refer to all of those instances where children collaborate with other children or with adults, to make decisions or plan activities together from building a play house to organising a football game. If we are to reflect fully on how children are, and could be, involved in the processes of building a more participatory democratic society we need to simultaneously map out the formal changes in governance alongside the dramatic changes that have been taking place in children's everyday social lives with peers and their non-formal relations with adults in their communities. I believe that these have greater importance for the reproduction of a democratic civil society than that brought by any mandated, or formal, participation in the form of children's forums, councils and local government consultations, or from school citizenship curricula.

In this chapter I will begin to sketch out the range of domains of social participation of pre-adolescent children in the UK that I believe have been changing. While valuable research has begun on some of these domains there does not yet seem to be any recognition of the need to map these out comprehensively and in relation to one another.