Imagine you’re 13. You’ve been removed from your home. You’re living with people you didn’t choose, in a place you didn’t pick. Adults you’ve never met are writing reports about you, and a judge you’ve never seen is going to decide who you live with. Will you go home to your parents? Stay with your foster carer? Or be moved back to your auntie’s house? You have very little direct say in any of it.
When decisions need to be made about where a young person will live, who they can see, and what their future looks like, you might expect that young person to be in the room. But in care proceedings in England, children and young people are typically represented indirectly, through social workers, guardians and solicitors. Their views are gathered, summarised and relayed. The young person themselves rarely meets the judge responsible for making one of the most significant decisions of their life.
The Young People’s Participation Pathway (YPPP) set out to change that. Between August 2024 and July 2025, the pilot gave 24 young people aged 10-17 the opportunity to meet directly with judges during care proceedings.
We interviewed 41 people, including young people, judges, social workers, team managers, legal representatives, parents and other professionals as part of an independent evaluation of the YPPP. The full report and summary are available on the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory (NFJO) website. This blog asks: what did these meetings mean to the young people who took up the chance to meet with a judge?
For most young people, meeting their judge was significant not because it changed what happened, but because it changed how they felt about what was happening. Some felt less anxious. Some told us they understood the process better, or felt like a person rather than a name on a file. One young person told us:
“I wasn’t frightened of the outcome anymore. The judge explained the outcome of the session was for my best interests and it was to look after me and safeguard me and that made me feel more at ease… I felt I could put all my trust in her because I knew she’d do something good for me.” (“Mia”)
Some were also better able to accept difficult outcomes, even when the decision wasn’t what they had hoped for. Professionals linked this to the young people feeling they had been part of the process and trusting that they and their parents had been treated fairly. This is consistent with research on procedural justice: people are more accepting of outcomes when they believe the process was fair, and having a voice, even a limited one, is central to that sense of fairness.
But these experiences were not universal. One young person described the meeting as boring. Another found the language the judge used difficult to understand. Most young people met the judge only once, not the three times originally envisaged. The quality of the experience depended on the interpersonal skills of individual judges, and judges themselves had mixed views about the role, with some raising concerns about boundaries and others finding the meetings difficult.
In some cases, meetings did lead to practical changes: time spent with pets, personal items returned, small adjustments to arrangements. On paper, these look minor. But when almost everything in your life is being decided by someone else, a judge hearing that you miss your cat and doing something about it can matter a great deal. As one judge reflected:
“If they haven’t got their XBox or their musical instrument or they’re missing the family dog, [these things are] massively more impactful than I think we realise … and these small things give a bit of hope. But also show that there is reflection from professionals on what the child is worried about and bothered about.” (Judge)
Of course, care proceedings are necessarily focused on safety and long-term welfare. As one professional reflected, the things that come through the YPPP are often “minor in the sense of the issues a court are going to need to decide, but actually under the surface, quite major for the child at the centre of it.” (Social worker) A child saying they don’t like the street they live on, that they miss their brother, that they want to know why they can’t go home. These things matter deeply but don’t sit easily in the formal language of court documents. They get filtered out, not because anyone intends it, but because the system isn’t built to capture them.
For the young person at the centre of care proceedings, the experience can be one of powerlessness. Most decisions are made by other people, in rooms they’ve never been in, using language they don’t fully understand. In that context, small things, like getting your guitar back, seeing your pets, or simply being asked what you think, can make a big difference. They can change how a young person experiences the process, how much they understand, and how worried or confident they feel about the decisions that will be made.
The evidence from this pilot is only indicative (24 young people across four local areas over one year) and it surfaced real challenges. Implementation varied across sites and depended heavily on individual champions. The MyPlan tool, designed to help young people prepare for meetings, received mixed reviews from professionals who felt it was not young-person friendly, and some young people barely remembered completing it.
These are issues that would need to be addressed before the model could work at scale: by integrating participation into existing court and local authority structures, co-designing tools with young people, providing judges with training and support, and raising awareness of young people’s opportunities for involvement. Young people are already entitled to meet judges where appropriate, but many social workers don’t know this, and few areas have the structures in place to make it happen routinely.
But where meetings worked well, young people’s voices were clear: when they were given even a small foothold in a process that otherwise left them powerless, it changed how they experienced it. That should matter to anyone working in family justice.