Children and Young People’s Promise to be refreshed with Arts Council England funding

We’ve been awarded funding from Arts Council England to review and redesign the Children and Young People’s Promise, including the Children’s Library Journey and its self-assessment tool.

The project will run until early 2027 and will bring children, young people, families, library staff and creative practitioners together to help shape what the Promise and Journey look like for the future.

The Children and Young People’s Promise is a framework that supports public libraries to deliver great services, spaces and programmes for children and young people.

The Children’s Library Journey maps key stages of a child’s development and explores how libraries can support children and their families at each stage, across a diverse range of lived experiences.

Why are we refreshing the Promise?

The Children and Young People’s Promise was created in 2013, followed by the Children’s Library Journey in 2015. Since then a lot has changed. The digital landscape has transformed, the pandemic has reshaped children’s relationship with public spaces, and the expectations placed on libraries have grown enormously.

Having not been revisited for almost a decade, it’s time to refresh the Promise and the Journey, and importantly, to include children and young people in these conversations.

Children and young people to shape the refresh

A key part of the project will be co-creation. Rather than simply reviewing the existing tools, we want to hear directly from the children, young people and families who experience library services, as well as the people working in libraries.

Through conversations, surveys, co-creation activities and creative engagement, we’ll explore what matters to children and young people, what they value about libraries, what they would like to see change and how libraries can best support them.

We’ll also work with commissioned creative practitioners to explore children and young people’s experiences and ideas in more depth, helping to bring their voices and perspectives into the refreshed Promise and Journey.

The aim is to create a Promise and Journey that reflect children and young people’s experiences today, while remaining useful and realistic for libraries to use.

Get involved

The refresh will take place over the coming months, with opportunities for children, young people, families, library staff and others to contribute throughout the project.

The first stage will focus on understanding how the Promise, Children’s Library Journey and self-assessment tool are currently being used, alongside hearing from children, young people and families about their experiences of libraries.

This will help shape the next stages of the project and ensure that the refreshed tools are informed by a wide range of experiences and perspectives.

Our Chief Executive Tabitha said,

We’re really excited to have secured funding from Arts Council England to refresh the Children and Young People’s Promise. After almost a decade, we have a real opportunity to look at the Promise again and make sure it reflects the experiences and needs of children and young people today. The funding means we can involve children, young people and families in a meaningful way, giving them a real say in the process and making sure we hear from them about what they think, what matters to them and what they want from their libraries. We’re really looking forward to working with them to co-create what comes next.

We’re looking forward to hearing from children, young people, families and library staff and bringing their ideas and experiences into the refresh, supported by funding from Arts Council England and will be sharing more information about opportunities to get involved as the project develops.