Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council was one of nine local authorities awarded Beacon status by the Government for its efforts in youth engagement.

Maureen McDaid, head of Wirral Youth Service, attributes its success to the commitment made by the council and its departments to giving young people a voice over the past three years.

Having worked in youth work for more than 25 years, McDaid has seen a lot of changes, but she says youth engagement is not a new phenomenon, despite its rise to national prominence: "Youth engagement and youth participation have always been bread-and-butter work for youth services."

Strategic leadership, political support and buy-in from a range of sectors including social services, housing departments, Connexions, schools and the voluntary sector have been crucial to the youth engagement process, she says, and helped it to include young people with learning difficulties, looked-after young people and homeless young people.

"We have many strategies to engage young people, both in the formal and informal sector, including youth forums, a youth advisory committee, the UK Youth Parliament, youth club sessions and school councils, which all feed into the citizenship agenda in schools," she says.

Some of the initiatives brought in as a direct response to young people's views include free swimming in the borough. Homeless young people helped set up a strategy to prevent homelessness, funded by the housing department.

"The homelessness prevention strategy involved a lot of peer education where a group of young people with experience of homelessness visited schools and youth clubs in the area to tell them what the reality of homelessness is like," says McDaid. "We've had young people tell us they would think twice about being homeless now."

Outreach workers from the youth service help to get vulnerable young people involved with the youth forums. "The My Ideal Social Worker video project that we ran helped shape social services by informing them of what looked-after young people really wanted from a social worker, such as just to turn up on time," says McDaid. "They are now involved in the recruitment of several social workers, and we have also worked with a number of local voluntary organisations to train young people to help with the recruitment of youth workers and carry out peer assessments on youth work facilities and sessions."

As well as informal consultation projects, Wirral has set up a formal engagement structure. "I chair a Children and Youth Voice subgroup, which reports to the Children and Young People's Strategic Partnership Board," she says. "The next step this year is to set up an executive Youth Voice group to mirror the adult board. This way we can have accountability through the system and young people know they have got a constituent group for them."

Four district youth forums, which meet quarterly and have upwards of 30 young people in each, have been the key to feeding young people's views to the children and youth voice subgroup. The forums will also be used as the basis for taking forward the Youth Capital Fund and the Youth Opportunity Fund when they kick off next month.

"There are still challenges, such as making sure we are engaging as wide a group of young people as possible so as not to stagnate the process," she says.

Getting a Beacon award will mean the youth service is expected to disseminate work to other authorities, and all nine winners are meeting on 6 April to decide how to use their share of a 3m fund (YPN, 22-28 March, p2).

FYI

- Maureen McDaid is married with three daughters; Catherine and Margaret, who are 11, and 10-year-old Isobel

- She was a youth worker in Belfast and Lisburn from 1979, and then worked in St Helens from 1986 to 1989, before moving to the Wirral

- She became head of Wirral Youth Service in 1995 - From 2000 to 2004 she was seconded to the Department of Education and Skills to work on the Transforming Youth Work agenda.