Legal & Policy

Our Aims

• To change public policy and external practice on issues central to the achievement of child-centred care for children in the care of the state and in need to enhance their emotional wellbeing and life chances.
• To reflect in all our objectives the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
• To promote collaboration with other agencies including the coordination of the Alliance for Child-Centred Care and the dissemination of Blueprint messages and child-centred practice.

Achieving our Aims

• We influence, lobby and engage at national and local level by developing and promoting children’s rights and child-centred practice.
• We respond to government consultations promoting the rights of children and young people, child-centred care and any gaps in the law.
• We provide advice and information on policy and legal issues ensuring that children’s rights and child-centred practice is disseminated at all levels.
• We collaborate with partners and colleagues in the sector with the aim of strengthening partnership work, in particular by providing leadership through the Alliance for Child-Centred Care and the National Children’s Advocacy Consortium.
• We work in partnership with other agencies concerned with youth justice to promote child-centred practice in secure settings, and in particular by promoting a child-centred approach to resettlement.
• We provide legal advice and information, as well as knowledge and expertise by contributing to the training of staff and freelance workers within Voice and from other agencies.

All of our policy work is informed directly from children and young people with care experience as well as indirectly from case studies highlighting the issues that arise for children and young people from our advocacy and other service provision.

Please click here to browse Voice's responses to government consultations.

For further information about the work of the Legal and Policy Unit please get in touch:
Shireen Davy, Information Officer - shireen.davy@voiceyp.org or 020 7520 3799
Nicola Wyld, Principal Legal and Policy Adviser – nicola.wyld@voiceyp.org or 020 7520 3777
Wendy Banks, Director of Policy – wendy.banks@voiceyp.org or 020 7014 9584.