Architecture for kids podcast with Lee Patterson lead officer between Cardiff Council and UNICEF

One of the priorities for Child Friendly Cardiff over the next 3 years is urban design and planning.  Cardiff is one of the fastest growing cities in the UK, it is important for a capital city to build the needs of children and young people into the city.                 Building the needs of children into urban design and planning is about spatial justice and a child rights approach. 

Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

you

SPEAKER_00: 0:09

Hello and welcome to another episode of Architecture for Kids podcast. I'm your host, António Cablón. I'm a trained architect, an architectural educator and founding director of award-winning Architecture for Kids CIC. In this podcast, I'm going to talk to practitioners and creatives that share the same passion as I do, to inspire and to engage children and young people to shape their built environment and the creative industries. The podcast is brought to you in collaboration with the Built Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust and the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. My guest today is Lee Paterson. Lee is a lead officer for the partnership between Cardiff Council and UNICEF as part of the Child Friendly City Programme. He's a social pedagogy with experience of working with children and young people for over 30 years, both in the UK and overseas. He has worked in both formal and non-formal settings, including local government, schools, youth centres, play services, community work and specialises in embedding children's rights into policy and practice. Lee, congratulations on Cardiff becoming the first UK child-friendly city with UNICEF status. Thank you for coming to talk to me today and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

SPEAKER_01: 1:35

Thank you very much. It's been a long and exciting journey and I'm really pleased that UNICEF have recognised Cardiff for for all the work it's done since 2018. Hopefully we'll have lots more UK cities joining the programme and embedding children's rights to the level that Cardiff has. And I'm really pleased that the wider public services, not just local government, are being recognised as part of the assessment. So it's really good news for everybody.

SPEAKER_00: 2:02

Lee, one of the questions I asked all my guests to begin with is what subjects were you good at school and what subjects did you enjoy most?

SPEAKER_01: 2:11

I liked geography most. Two reasons. The subject was interesting, but the teacher was fantastic. I was inspirational, funny and engaging. And I enjoyed learning about physical geography, human geography. And I never did anything really meaningful after leaving school with geography,

SPEAKER_00: 2:26

which is sometimes the case. You just ended up as a social pedagogy. How was that tragedy developed?

SPEAKER_01: 2:32

As most things, by accident. I left the country. I grew up in the UK. Had some experiences when I was a teenager of going overseas. And I saw the The world is a bigger place than when I immediately grew up. So I ended up spending the summer in Hong Kong when I was 13. And I knew that as soon as I could, that I wanted to go and move around the planet a little bit more. So I did that for quite a long time. And then I came back to the UK after a few years, and I decided that I wanted to work with children and young people in some way. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I know that I wanted to work with children and young people. I was good with them. I was interested in their lives. And so I ended up doing play work, as we called it in the United Kingdom. them. And so running play schemes and holiday school programs. I ended up running those sort of programs. And then I found that there was youth work. And so then I went to university and I've got a full-time job. I'm a professional youth and community worker. That meant that I had buildings and keys and responsibility, but I also had some influence and some budget to work with children and young people. And central to what we do in youth work is we're going to listen to children and young people. And we have to put them at the center of what we do and build our programs of work. So that's how it all started.

SPEAKER_00: 3:45

And that moment where you realized that you wanted to work with children and young people, was there a particular thing that happened?

SPEAKER_01: 3:51

I don't think there was one particular time. However, I do think that over a period of years, I spent more and more time visiting schools overseas in Africa and India and Southeast Asia. I spent more time with organizations and NGOs, volunteered in some camps where people were being resettled. And as a result of that, I just... I just found that it was quite an interesting, worthwhile way to spend your day, working and encouraging and educating children to do certain things, get better at certain things, learn new skills, find their way in the world. So it was more over a period of time, really, by and large. One of the

SPEAKER_00: 4:27

things that I'm interested in talking to you about is this child-friendly city program that you are developing here in Wales. How did that come about? And let's talk about the program as well.

SPEAKER_01: 4:38

I think it's fair to say that a number of years ago, talking about seven, eight years ago, Cardiff had some challenges in some of its service areas. Education and children's services, particularly, were on an improvement journey. And they were looking outwards. Decision makers at the senior level, senior politicians, were looking out across the UK and further afield around what other communities and cities were doing as part of their improvement journey. And they come across the programme of work, which was at that stage in a pilot phase. So UNICEF were running a pilot in the UK. They'd run a programme called Child Friendly Cities and Communities for 20 years globally, but never in the UK. And as part of this exercise where they were looking outwards, they were interested in the difference it was making in the five pilot areas that were chosen in the UK. And at that time, the pilots had just come to a complete stop. They were looking at rolling out the program. And after a period of reflection, the leaders of the city of Cardiff decided that we would be the first city to express an interest to being part of that program. And the program broadly sets out to recognize children's rights and put them at the heart of decision-making in the city. So I can talk a little bit more about that. But that's the overarching aim, improving the lives of children and young people by recognizing and prioritizing their children's rights. Let's now talk a little bit about that. So in Cardiff, we identified three key areas over the last five years that we wanted to improve as part of the program. We know that you can't just change everything and improve everything. It's not realistic. UNICEF challenges the city to make sure that they listen to children and young people directly. They look at the analysis of data. They speak to the adults in the workforce that work with children and young people and identify their pornography areas. For us, it was education, health, that's both physical and emotional health, and family services. They were looked at through the lens of being particularly for the most vulnerable children in the city. Some children were doing very well in terms of their family, education, and health, but we know there were certain groups of people that really were struggling, and we wanted to make sure that we considered Charles Wright's approach in improving those services and improving the city as a whole. So we've been working through that for the last four years and we're just coming to the end of that period and now we're looking at the next three years of what those priorities would be. How do you put that into practice? I'll give you some examples. Through health we were looking at people moving around the city in a much more sustainable way, making sure that they were safe and trained and felt confident to be able to move around either by scooting, cycling, walking and we know that there's a particular challenge not just in this community but across the world at the beginning and end of the school day. We know that people have to get to one point quite quickly, and it can become quite an intense thing. And if you're in cars, it makes it even worse. So we were trying to encourage people out of their cars, onto public transport, or even better, into healthy modes of transport like scooting, walking. To do that, we've invested heavily in five superhighways. Those superhighways won't help everybody get to school, but you might use part of that network to maybe go part of your journey. We invested heavily in training young people and children to be comfortable in using bikes and riding. One of the things that children told us is we'd love to ride but our parents won't let us because they don't think it's safe. We also did a lot of work in the immediate area around schools so we know that with a lot of cars moving around some parents were right it wasn't the safest environment for children to congregate particularly en masse. So we now have a series of programs including cameras outside schools and road closures to make sure that the period of time before and after school is completely car free and it may it far more comfortable for everybody arriving at the school gate. So that's just one or two examples of what we did in that particular uniform.

SPEAKER_00: 8:18

When you identify those aspects that you have been working on, how did you identify them? That's a good question. So

SPEAKER_01: 8:25

UNICEF referred to that period of time as a discovery phase. So through our discovery phase, we built on, we're very fortunate in Cardiff that we've got a long history of engaging meaningfully with children and young people in healthy, really creative ways. So we built on that nearly eight months, running large-scale workshops, activities, listening exercises in communities, in the city centre, bringing large groups of people together. The first thing we did is we asked Cardiff kids, do you think we're child-friendly? Because if we were, then there's no point in moving forwards. They told us that we weren't, and they told us some areas that they wanted to improve. We then took that across the next several months, and we tested that idea, those priorities, those concerns, with different groups, and over time, we've got a better understanding of the lived experiences of children in Cardiff. And then we presented some of the data to children and young people. We did a similar parallel process with adult workforce. So people from health, youth justice, education, communities and housing, libraries. And we asked them, do you think we're child friendly? If not, why not? Where do you think we could have the most impact, particularly for the most vulnerable? And at the end of the seven months, we brought the children and the adults together and we asked them to choose, are you yourself refer to a series of badges. They ask you to choose three badges. And so the first two were easy. Children and adults both chose education and health as a priority area. The third one was a bit of an arm wrestle, a bit of an argument, Antonio. So through a period of a day in refining thinking, we eventually chose family and belonging as the badges referred to. And we've been delivering against those actions. So situational analysis, listening, and working together for seven months or so.

SPEAKER_00: 10:10

Now I'm curious to know what was the other badges

SPEAKER_01: 10:12

yeah so they have this the fourth one was equal and included so it's dealing with inequality in the city and interestingly we've picked that up for this next three year period so we didn't forget about that we went back and did another discovery we're in the middle of that period now but equal and included which is dealing with inequality particularly through a lens of youth justice and gender that's one of our priority areas going forward for the next three years so we didn't forget our new following some kind of precedent? Working with children and young people in creative ways to listen to them is a strength in the city. What we haven't done is done that systematically across the organisation in local government. What I can say now after four and a half years is that we're doing that far, far more and the quality is better and we have a commitment not just to listen to children and young people but to take action where appropriate and to tell the children and young people what's happened as a result. So that feedback loop and that whole process of getting better across the organization is really key. And it's not just about the listening. You've got to roll your sleeves up and do these things as well. You've got to make the changes, improve the services. People sometimes are patronizing just because human beings haven't been on the planet longer than somebody else. We have that sort of paternalistic, sometimes patronizing view. You sit down and listen to some children at the age of 8, 11, 14, and they're outstanding. They know what they want. They understand the world around them. They are experts in their own lives. And we would recommend recognizing that as well as we could have done across the whole of local government

SPEAKER_00: 11:45

in the past. Is it correct for me to say that it's about bringing agency to children? Exactly. And why do you think it's important for children to have agency?

SPEAKER_01: 11:54

If we see them as passive recipients of a service, we're doing them a disservice. If we're providing them with the services that they require, that they need, either because it keeps them safe, it educates them, it keeps them healthy, keeps them motivated, then treating them as passive recipients, it's not the way forward. It needs to be engaging and it needs to be meaningful and you need to find out if it meets their needs. So I just think it's ignorant for adults. And if people work with children and young people, and if you as maybe you're a parent or a caregiver, you understand that they're quite surprising. And they're not citizens-in-waiting, Antonio. They're non-citizens-in-waiting. They're citizens now with intrinsic human rights. And it's as duty bearers as the technical So people that should make sure that these kids have their rights met. It's a legal obligation. We shouldn't just be doing it because we're told to. We should see the benefits of it. It should be co-producing things, working together, understanding what's needed, refining things to get better. And that could be everything from planning a whole community, developing a park, starting up a new project or service. When politicians make a decision, they understand what children's rights are and what the impact of their decisions are, how money is being spent. And it doesn't need to be boring. Politics sometimes is really boring. But actually, if you bring it to life and if you put kids in the middle of it all, all of a sudden it gets interesting. The dynamic changes. It becomes more real.

SPEAKER_00: 13:23

What is the impact in general of a child-friendly city? Because I don't think that will impact just the children.

SPEAKER_01: 13:29

No, no. If we stick with our next priority, well, as I said, it's about equality. The second priority is about place. It's about urban planning and design and meeting the needs of children. and involve them in the designing of their own communities. Our city planners here in Cardiff, and we're very lucky to have quite progressive teams that are really interested in working with children and young people to design their communities with them. If they're designing for an eight-year-old called Mark, then quite often the design that the child wants is the same as an 88-year-old called Vera, because mobility is an issue, because the way that they use the urban design and the planning elements of our city. It's quite similar. Not everybody can move across a very large arterial road quickly. Not everybody can walk long distances. Everybody needs a place to sit and dwell. We all benefit from green spaces and blue infrastructure like lakes and rivers. Nature enhances us. It's all. So again, it's ignorant to think that actually by planning for children, you're planning other parts of our civic society and of

SPEAKER_00: 14:39

that community. It's complementary, quite I'm thinking about families that had a great number of children. That was that intergenerational lifestyle within the family that several generations lived together and they helped each other and complement each other's lives.

SPEAKER_01: 14:51

Some parts of our society in different countries, we've lost that element to some extent, that intergenerational. I mean, fortunately in Cardiff, we're a very rich, diverse community. So we've still got a lot of groups of families that live together, three generations in a household. And you see some of our parks being used you'll have an 80, 90 year old cluster of people sitting down talking on benches while families are playing in the background and having a picnic and teenagers are bedwelling. We're very fortunate to have that in Cardiff and we want to build on that and we want to make sure that

SPEAKER_00: 15:22

everybody is welcome in those spaces. Within the programme, how much work do you have until you implement a lot of these ideas you've been working

SPEAKER_01: 15:30

on? We've been working since 2018 when our strategy was launched. So we're coming up to nearly five years. We're now in an evaluation period where we're reflecting on our success, what we've And we're setting out an action plan in March 2024 that will set out exactly what we're trying to achieve for 23 to 26. We've still got work to do in terms of internal processes around how we involve children and young people in budget setting, how we involve children and young people in training and evaluating some staff and developing new services. I don't think we'll ever get that perfect. There's always work to be done. But we are looking outward. at the other priorities, which I said is about making sure that we've got Cardiff as a fair and equal city as much as possible. And that our planning understands children's needs and respects their rights. What has been most

SPEAKER_00: 16:23

successful in all this

SPEAKER_01: 16:25

work? I think there's some tangible things that have changed. One of the first things that children and young people consistently told us was that we don't know about our rights and we're not taught about our rights. And so when we talk about rights, some people get really It's a legal framework. But actually, when I speak to moms and dads and foster carers and children themselves, it's just things that help you keep you happy, safe, you're not discriminated against, and you're able to flourish and be the best that you can be. That's it. It's as simple as that. It's a set of rules that the adults need to do. And adults even have their own rights. They got human rights, but actually children need extra protection because they're extra vulnerable, so they get an extra set of rights, which we call children's rights. It's not rocket science. They told us, you need to teach us better and you need to teach us earlier. So in Cardiff, one of the tangible things that we've seen is UNICEF run another program of work called Rights Respecting Schools. And we wanted to sort of have a framework where we could take something off the shelves and deliver it in Cardiff and do it as well as we could. So we decided to try to get all of our schools to be part of this UNICEF program, which is called Rights Respecting Schools, which is not just about putting a poster up or running an assembly about children's rights. It's about teaching through rights, not just about rights, through rights. So if you're learning about geography, learning about architecture, learning about civil rights, learning about history, you use the lens of children's rights. So people become experts in it. And it's not just the children, it's the staff, it's the non-teaching staff, it's the governors and parents. Well, I'm pleased to say we did have 15 schools that were active in that program and we now have 111 schools. So every day people are immersed in talking about children's rights and we started as early as we can because that's what children told us so in our primary school so from four upwards so I think over the period of four years that's a lot of children's rights education and so I think we've got much more of a group of pupils that are more comfortable skilled and confident about what their rights are and then they're hopefully they'll be empowered to challenge adults maybe when they don't understand their rights and I think that makes a difference throughout their life not just in school You know, part of the role is to go and talk to your parents and caregivers about those sort of issues as well. So that's something quite tangible. The other thing, for example, is Cardiff is a dispersal area. So we're very proud of the fact that we can host people that are coming into the UK for the first time. Now, unfortunately, a few years back, those children, if they're coming with families, weren't entitled to go to a school place while they were being resettled. It was a process. It was quite a technical process. Cardiff, you know, used a rights-based argument to say that we were concerned about their safety and their well-being because what were they doing if they weren't in school maybe they were in temporary housing they weren't engaged in positive activity were they being exploited so we used that argument to first of all to be able to give them some sort of education in the community and then we argued with the home office that the school is the best place so from now on for a number of for two years now new new coming families their children immediately get offered a school place. So they're straight away involved. And so they're surrounded by professionals. If they've got any concerns, they can raise those concerns. And of course, they're getting educated and socialized in their

SPEAKER_00: 19:51

new home. How do you balance this relationship between the kids make their own choices, engaging in the conversation with adults? How does that work? Sometimes there are tensions.

SPEAKER_01: 20:00

What we have to do is make sure that we protect the well-being of the children, young people that are engaging in the process. So our duty is to them first and foremost. So So that involves making sure that they know what they're getting involved in, understanding that they can withdraw at any time, making sure any information that's given to them is given to them beforehand and it's in an accessible format so they can understand it. Because we work with quite young children. How young? We definitely work with eight plus, but we are challenging ourselves to drop down. We would like to do some work with much younger children. There are examples where organizations are working with under fours to actually sort of capture their views and shape services. We don't do that very well currently, but we are definitely, it's part of our plan. And so that preparation, knowing that you can withdraw at any time and managing their expectations is really important. So I have a whole team of people that are specialized in doing exactly that, engaging with young people and children. preparing them preparing the adults making sure the adults understand you can't just stand there and do a slide deck of a powerpoint with 15 slides because it's not the way to do it to adults and certainly you can't do that with children we advise on methods we make sure it's fun and that the young people and the children get something out of it it has to be engaging has to be fun they have to understand just by taking part it's helping the city to be better and they like it they understand that it is great and they feel a sense of value and they sense a belonging. You are a Cardiff kid. You're important because you live in Cardiff. You know, and that in and of itself

SPEAKER_00: 21:49

is important enough. I've been working with children and people almost all your adult life. How much have things changed and when do you think if there was a shift, if there was one, and why do you think? I think

SPEAKER_01: 22:05

it's not, it doesn't go in one direction. I think it ebbs and flows and I think nationally? Well, first of all, there are global things which alter people's perspective and priorities. And we've seen that in recent times with pandemic. However, if you go back just another five, eight, 10 years, it was about, it was austerity measures, the global financial crisis. That has a direct impact on national and local government and has to change the way they work. And for us, a really good example was, for me, it was a it was a test it was a test of we've been doing child-friendly program of work for a number of years and then we had a pandemic how are we going to respond during a crisis And I was pleased to say that we responded with children's rights at the heart of our thinking. So for example, I saw 1,000, there was 1,000, sorry, 10,000 devices were purchased and delivered directly to children and young people to make sure they had a device when the schools closed. So free, free, it was given to them. It was on loan, permanent loan, because we know that that's how they were going to communicate. They weren't going to be, I They were going to get elements of education. They were going to get news. That device was almost like seeing like utilities, like water, electricity, gas. It was communication and it was a really good response. Another example how things have changed for us in Cardiff particularly was around what happens when you open up after a crisis. Well, we know that people were very fearful to come together. They lacked confidence. They weren't socialized at times. So rather than put pressure on the children and young people, the decision makers at the senior level said, we must not talk about educational catch-up being the only priority. We know that that's important, but it's about the well-being of our children and young people. And so we ran a whole series of three years' worth of well-being programs and festivals for children and young people to celebrate them, to say thank you to them for the sacrifices that they made in their short lives. and to give them the confidence to come together. And the only outcome, the only thing that we were counting at the end of our first summer festival was, we called it the Summer of Smiles, was how many smiles did we generate? That's the only outcome. We weren't asking them to fill out forms. It was how many smiles did we have? And so for me, that's a change. There's an element of risk there. So when you have a big fundamental shift in how funding is allocated and the priorities that was different to how we reacted when we had the banking and the financial crisis we reprioritized and had another lens to look through because unfortunately we were closing services for children and young people we took away elements of play or youth centers and some leisure centers and libraries and hubs and those sort of things where people spend time um so yeah i don't think i don't think that there is a seismic moment where the everything is shifted and put into one place and that was the moment. And in fact, I go as far to say some children and young people in different parts of the UK and wider are still not being prioritized. There really are some poor examples of practice and policy making and people in charge not necessarily. There is a tension. Some people see it. It's like when you say to your children I don't have a favorite, although some people might have a favorite. I don't have a favorite. I've got I've got enough love to go around. And it's the same. It's the same for a local government. Just because you're prioritizing a five-year-old doesn't mean to say an 85-year-old is going to miss out. You know, you just need to just make sure that we sort of work together to make sure that whatever it is we're trying to achieve,

SPEAKER_00: 26:11

you know, meets the needs of all the individuals. Talked about the need to reach out to other kids that's being forgotten. Is this part of your ambition of the project you're doing here of this program?

SPEAKER_01: 26:21

It's a good question, DeMarcus. So, so Cardiff did it out of necessity. Cardiff needed to get better at their fundamental core services. But you don't need to wait until you're in crisis or there's a problem. There's a huge amount of benefits to actually prioritizing children and young people. People refer to children and young people as an indicator species. What that means to people like me on the street is if our kids are growing up and they're happy and healthy and they've got a good life, you know, wider society will also be healthy. You know, it's an indicator as things are going well. If your children and young people in your society are struggling, falling through the cracks, being exploited, not sort of getting educated or keeping healthy, that's an indictment. That's not a good thing for a community to be reflecting on. So in Wales, I know that the Children's Commission, for example, is really keen, not necessarily to work with UNICEF. You can take children and make them a priority and make sure that our politicians and the people that run the local councils and all the charities are thinking about children and their rights and their needs. And they've developed a set of guidance. And I think what we're going to see in the next year or so is people becoming more and more comfortable and confident of taking up these toolkits and these guides to give them advice and support. And maybe they might want to look to someone like Cardiff about their experiences. We certainly haven't got it perfect by any means but in the UK I think that we've got devolved so you know for those people that don't necessarily understand the UK is made up of four nations under the banner of the United Kingdom and they do things differently England and Scotland Ireland and Wales have slightly different approaches different powers so I think each counterpart is going to have to have

SPEAKER_00: 28:16

different approaches to make sure it works for them How much more do you think professions or practitioners in general could do to kind of help you to implement a lot of these ideas and a lot of the program that you're working on, as well as is the curriculum, how does it help with what you are doing? There are two really important

SPEAKER_01: 28:35

points that you're asking now. And firstly, you don't need a whole city. It's advantageous if the whole city ecosystem prioritizes children's rights, but we're in the real world, right? If you're in charge of a large organization like a public service such as the health board, you can make massive, massive impact by prioritizing children and young people in your work. If you're a health board, for example, we're very fortunate to have, again, a really strong partner in Cardiff with Cardiff and Vale, a university health board. And what they've done is they've taken children's rights in their context, so they're responsible for things like health services, in communities, hospitals, dentists, etc. And they've established a youth health board to help them make good decisions so they have young people that are trained to support them, make good decisions, help with recruitment, developing new ideas and policies and programs. They've taken children's rights and started to analyze the way that they do business and make improvements to keep children even more safe and listen to their voice and make sure their voice is centered. So you can do that organization by organization. And in terms of the curriculum, we're very lucky that we've got a Welsh government that prioritized in innovation in our curriculum. A number of years ago, I appointed Professor Donaldson to do a review. We're now seeing the new curriculum in Welsh schools being delivered. And I sit actually within education in the local authority. And what that means is that we are now, so half the teachers in our schools are very excited, Antonio. They're very excited because they can deliver education in a way that they probably thought they should have been done. They're innovative. They give us some freedom. There's another half which are a little bit fearful. I think a little bit full of jeopardy. Change is a pressured thing. It's a stressful thing. And so what we would like to do is try to help them. So what we're being expected in terms of education to deliver is an education which is relevant to the real world, which helps the kids develop skills and competencies that is measured in a different way. The fact that you might learn about geography, by going out and carrying out mapping exercises and integrating your lessons in the real world. We as a city like to try to provide real world challenges to our schools now. So if we are looking to improve urban planning and design, what we do is we work with teachers, give them the resources and say teach your pupils around this subject and get their views as part of their learning experience and then share the views with us, take those views, and then we can actually use them to inform our decision-making and our plans. So the education is actual, real, and visceral. So we've got a climate response to the climate emergency. It's called One Planet Cardiff. That is an education priority across all our schools. So our curriculum team have developed a suite of resources so teachers can actually engage the pupils in a real-world challenge that we can use in the coming years in our climate response,

SPEAKER_00: 31:52

for example. Is there a question I should have asked you that I haven't asked you? And what is that question?

SPEAKER_01: 31:58

Are we going to carry on making positive progress? Or is there a danger that things will stop or slow up? I think there is a danger that we do that. Recognized as the first UNICEF city in the UK to have this accreditation, there is always a danger you think the work is done. However, I don't think that that's the case because it was about culture change. And we've been working for five years to change the hearts and minds and build up the confidence of people making decisions in the city and to see the benefits of it. And I think we're so far down the line now that I think it's in the way that we do business. So I would hope that we continue in the right vein, continuing to make positive change for children. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 32:41

Thank you very much to my guests today, to all the listeners. And please subscribe to Architecture for Kids podcast and leave your rating and the review. Recommend us to your friends and to find out more about it visit our websites and follow us on and please join me again next week for another of Architecture for Kids podcast brought to you in collaboration with the Build Environment Trust, the Thornton Education Trust and the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University.