CBCity Children's Summit Report 2023 Overview
Objectives
Background
The CBCity Children’s Summit was designed to provide a meaningful opportunity to hear children’s voices and enable them to participate in conversations about issues affecting them.
The CBCity Children’s Summit offered creative opportunities for older primary school students to:
Understanding children’s perspectives will support Council and other local services in designing new initiatives and influencing existing practices to better suit children’s needs. There was no prerequisite for how students were selected to attend, with children reflecting a range of different opinions and backgrounds.
• Better understand their place and impact in CBCity;
To support the Child Safe Standards Bill, passed in November 2021 by the NSW Parliament, the Child Safe Scheme was introduced. It’s a key recommendation of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
• Create a space for their ideas and comments to be heard, captured and validated;
• Discuss children’s rights and safeguards, in theory and in practice, as they relate directly to them; • Brainstorm ways in which challenges are opportunities; • Explore “in a perfect world” and “what if” scenarios
This morning was fun because we got to play bingo with other schools and I got to meet new people.
The Scheme provides a standard for how organisations can protect children by creating and maintaining child-safe cultures, operations and environments. One of the ten-point Child Safe Standards is: Children participate in decisions affecting them and are taken seriously. To meet this Standard, the CBCity Children’s Summit explored ways of supporting meaningful engagement with children and informing them of their rights. Council’s Child-Friendly Cities Action Plan guides this work with Canterbury-Bankstown children and young people by; • 5.4 Participation - education ⚬ Educate all children and young people about
their rights through the provision of information and programs at education and care centres, youth centres and community facilities such as libraries. • 5.6 Belonging – inclusivity ⚬ Partner with local organisations, to develop a
variety of creative and social programs, that enable culturally diverse young people to share their stories, celebrate their culture and contribute to the richness of the CanterburyBankstown community.
Digital engagement Those who couldn’t attend the summit were given the opportunity to take part on the Have Your Say webpage by providing drawings, videos or short notes.
24 schools
took part on the Have Your Say webpage. We received
459 contributions 48.55% said they liked playgrounds the most in their area
47.83%
said they liked the shopping centres