Kids Advisory Panel
The Kids Advisory Panel (KAP) brings together young people with SEND to guide Kids’ strategic direction, ensuring young people’s voices help shape future plans, policies, and campaigns.
Kids Advisory Panel (KAP) exists to amplify the voices, experiences, and expertise of young people with SEND, ensuring they help shape the organisation’s direction and priorities. Inspired by the ethos of the Kids Collective, which empowers young people to be heard by decision-makers, the Panel adopts a similar approach, championing inclusive, meaningful participation.
Strategic influence and focus areas
Trustees will actively consider which topics and decisions would benefit most from the Panel’s insight. These include:
- Shaping the future of Kids: Contributing to the development of Kids’ next strategic plan (from 2027 onwards), and exploring bold, long-term questions such as “What should Kids look like by 2050?” .
- Speak up initiatives: Advising on policies and campaigns where Kids seeks to influence change, locally or nationally, on issues that matter to the communities we serve.
The Panel is a vital space for collaborative thinking, ensuring that lived experience and diverse perspectives inform the organisation’s most important work.
“It’s about actually including our voices, but also other young people’s voices and those lived experiences coming together to really empower that change”
– KAP member
“Being part of the Kids’ Advisory Panel has been hugely rewarding, both for me personally, and for our entire Board. The young people leading the group are full of energy, ideas and insight, and their contributions have been invaluable in helping shape how we work and what we do. The children and young people we serve are at the very heart of our purpose and vision, and so it goes without saying that they should be at the heart of our governance too.”
– Sara Willcocks, Kids Trustee
“I love attending the KAP meetings – the young people have so much energy, so many creative ideas and so much experience to contribute to Kids’ work. It’s great to be able to update the young people about trustees’ discussions, and feed the young people’s ideas back to the trustees’ meetings, so that the contributions from young people really are part of Kids’ governance.”
– Olivia Marks-Woldman OBE, Vice Chair of Kids Trustees
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Join KAP
If you would like to apply to join KAP click the button below.
Contact the Kids Advisory Panel
The best way to contact the Kids Advisory Panel team is to use the form below. Alternatively, you can reach us by email.
Email: takepart@kids.org.uk