Supporting Young People to Make Their Mark

The driving motivation of the Centre for Youth Impact is the belief that all young people should have access to high-quality youth provision. To build such provision, we need to understand young people's views, wishes, and experiences. By listening to young people and reflecting on their perspectives, we can develop better, more youth-centred services and activities. 

While there are many youth voice initiatives in the UK, the biggest is Make Your Mark: the opportunity for young people to vote on the key issues they want the UK Youth Parliament to campaign for on their behalf. Each year, up to one million young people vote through their school, college or youth group on what really matters to them. 

This year, the Centre has collaborated with the British Youth Council (BYC) to create the opportunity for all young people to vote individually, online. With a small team of young people, we have developed a young person-informed voting platform that allows anyone aged 11-18 to easily cast their vote from their phone, tablet or laptop. This marks a step-change from the traditional ballot paper, and the intention is to enable more young people to have their voices heard. Where schools, colleges, youth clubs or local authorities haven't signed up to be part of Make Your Mark, young people won't be denied the opportunity to cast their vote.

At the Centre, we also needed to listen to young people to develop this voting platform. We ran two user-needs workshops with young people from our own and BYC's networks, capturing their views on the voting platform's format, layout, and design. We needed to ensure we understood their needs and created something appealing and accessible for young people. We incorporated young people's ideas and feedback into the building of the platform and then shared it back with them for testing. 

We have also created a new data entry point for schools, colleges and youth groups, streamlining the process of results input and analysis.

Perhaps most excitingly, from a data and insight perspective, we've built the option into the platform for young people to tell us a bit more about who they are - such as their gender, ethnicity or if they consider themselves to have a disability - at the same time as casting their vote. Designed with young people to ensure the language and framing feels appropriate, the platform provides the opportunity to gather data that Make Youth Mark has never had before, specifically focused on the diversity of young people taking part. The development of the online voting platform will hopefully increase the absolute number of young people participating, alongside offering a much more detailed picture of who takes part. 

With more young people heard, and a deeper understanding of who took part, Members of Youth Parliament will be able to speak out and campaign for young people. This will also enable youth providers - and Government - to consider how they are responding to young people’s priorities.

Our work on the Make Your Mark platform is part of our new project, Maximising Young People's Voice and Power, a collaborative initiative between Paul Hamlyn Foundation, BBC Children in Need and The National Lottery Community Fund. The project seeks to better understand how young people’s voices are heard, which young people are less likely (to be able) to engage in youth voice activities, and how we can increase the reach of these activities to seldom heard groups. The data gathered through Make Your Mark, alongside practitioner data collected through this project - will be at the core of understanding current youth voice activity across the UK.

Thanks so much to the young people who took part in our user-needs workshops - and if you're 11-18, don't forget to cast your vote!

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If you would like more information about this project please get in touch with Jo (jo.hickmandunne@youthimpact.uk).