Listening to Young Children - Northamptonshire County Council

It aims to:
• Promote holistic approaches.
• Offers real opportunities for young
children to participate.
• Create an accessible environment
that enables children to express their
views, choices, concerns,
experiences and aspirations and to
take these seriously.
• Develop socially inclusive adult
- child relationships where young
children know they will be heard.
• Strengthens the listening skills and
attitudes of parents and practitioners.
It provides a framework that adults can
implement to support listening to
young children by:
Recognising a child’s many visual
and verbal languages
Assigning space for children’s
voices to be heard
Making time for children’s voices
Providing genuine choices
Subscribing to reflective practice
The aim of the eleven Shared
Experiences is to be inspirational and
flexible to enable parents and
practitioners to tune into young
children through observing their
responses to a range of shared
experiences such as: Likes and
Dislikes; Visual Walks, Tuning In,
Capturing Children’s Experience. A
spiral framework is provided to support
practitioners when using these shared
experiences – known as PPR which is
Preparation, Process and Reflection.
The PPR signposts issues to address
so that listening to and observing
what children are saying and doing
improves practice.
Ultimately the Listening to Young
Children Resources Pack offers an
ethical and practical framework and
demonstration of how listening to
young children can be implemented in
a meaningful way that promotes best
practice across all childcare settings, It
provides a springboard for fun,
creativity and fulfilling partnerships
between children and their key carers
for young children up to 8 years old.
These key principles can be adapted
for children beyond eight.
This Resource Pack is the core of a
successful training programme offered
within the Multi-Agency Training guide
and has been the springboard to
developing a number of ‘listening to
young children’ approaches in settings
across Northamptonshire. Some of
these are described in the appendices
of this booklet.
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