CRAE is a founding partner of Participation Works, the online gateway to children and young people's participation, which enhances access to law, policy and practice, as well as regional and national networks.

We supported children and young people to run a major children's rights investigation and to report their views and experiences direct to the United Nations. Our three-year Get ready for Geneva project, supported by the Big Lottery Fund, makes sure children and young people not only share their views and experiences, but also get to run their own campaigns.

After many years of lobbying for consultation rights for school students - which would bring English education law and practice in line with Scotland and Wales and the rest of Europe - we achieved a significant victory during the passage of the Education and Skills Act 2008. The Act amends the Education Act 2002 to introduce a duty on school governing bodies to "invite and consider" children and young people's views. However, draft regulations published in January 2010 threaten to considerably restrict this new duty. We are once again lobbying strongly for children and young people's right to be heard and taken seriously in school.

Following our successful lobbying in 2004 for extra rights for children in contact with social workers, we pushed for statutory Children in Care Councils. First promoted by the Government in 2006, the Councils were not included in the Children and Young Persons Bill. After lobbying by CRAE during the passage of the Bill through Parliament, the Children's Minister Kevin Brennan confirmed that every local authority would be expected to establish a Children in Care Council, and that Ofsted would monitor them from 2009.

We are still trying to persuade the Government to take action to ensure young people can continue as Trustees of third sector organisations. Changes in the law which came into force in October 2008 mean that under 16s are now prohibited from being company directors, including of incorporated charities. We are tring to persuade Ministers to introduce regulations to exempt charities from the 2008 changes.

Our national co-ordinator was commissioned to write a paper for the Council of Europe on increasing the action taken by member states to promote and protect the participation rights of children and young people. Many of the report's recommendations were included in the Parliamentary Assembly's recommendations to the Committee of Ministers in March 2009.

In July 2005, we launched our comprehensive participation training materials, called Ready Steady Change. In 2008, we published an overview of the impact the training materials have made in a variety of settings. The report is called ‘Training for change’ and can be downloaded from our publications section.