We spend a lot of time in our sector talking about centring the voices of children and young people. But too often, the spaces where ideas are shared and decisions are shaped are still filled almost entirely by adults.

Adults present research about children. Adults talk about what children need. Adults with recognised titles and years of professional experience are given authority—while young people with lived experience are invited in briefly, if they are there at all.

That is what we wanted to challenge through ISPCAN Congress 2026.

We didn’t want young people’s participation to be a performance, or a nice moment before the “real” Congress continued. We wanted to build something that treated their lived experience as expertise and asked all of us to think differently about whose knowledge carries weight in the room.

That became the starting point for ISPCAN’s first dedicated Youth Stream.

Turning that intention into something real

It would have been easy to begin by adding a few sessions to the program and calling it a Youth Stream. Instead, we started by looking closely at what was already there.

We went back through every submitted paper involving co-design or co-authorship with children and young people. Emma and Conor developed a matrix to consider three things:

• Was youth voice genuinely present, or simply referenced?  

• Was lived experience treated as expertise, or as illustration? 

• Was there real partnership in how the work was done, or was participation added afterwards?

The matrix helped us look beyond the language of participation and ask what it had meant in practice.

Where a paper scored strongly, we contacted the presenters and asked another question: how will you centre the voices of children and young people in the presentation itself?

Some presenters had already thought deeply about this. Others hadn’t. Those conversations gave us a chance to think together about the difference between presenting about young people and creating space for their knowledge to be heard.

Out of that process came a dedicated Youth Stream sitting alongside the Congress’s other content areas.

We did wrestle with whether separating it out risked suggesting that youth participation belonged in one part of the program, rather than throughout the whole Congress. But in a space still largely designed by and for adults, we also knew that relying on youth voice to appear “everywhere” could mean it appeared nowhere with enough visibility or weight.

Changing who the room centres

The stream also became bigger than the papers submitted. We spoke with young people with lived experience of trauma and adversity, advocates and children’s commissioners from across Australia. From those conversations came a panel exploring what protection actually looks like from the perspective of the young people it is meant to protect.

We didn’t begin with which adults should be on the panel. We began with what young people wanted the conversation to explore.

That meant confronting some of the hierarchy that naturally comes into a space like this. Commissioners and other senior decision-makers may enter the room with recognised titles and decades of professional experience. But that does not make their presence more important than the presence of a young person with lived experience.

In fact, their presence on this panel would not make sense without young people. It is young people’s lives, experiences and knowledge that make the conversation necessary.

We hope this recentres something that can sometimes get overlooked in professional spaces: children and young people are not there to support the work of adults. They are why the work, and the Congress itself, exists.

Inviting young people into a Congress like this raises questions you need to grapple with and make sense of. What support is available before and after? How do we make participation safe for each individual young person? How do we ensure it does not become extraction? How do we recognise the issues that affect young people nationally while making space for the very different systems they encounter across states and territories?

None of that became easier just because Emma and Conor were relentless about it. If anything, the standard they held the process to made it harder – in the good way.

Because meaningful participation should change the process. It should ask more of the adults involved. It should not only change who appears onstage at the end.

What “protection” looks like

The panel’s central question is simply to ask and perhaps a bit more difficult to sit with: what does protection actually look like, from the perspective of the young people it’s meant to protect?

Something has come through clearly in our conversations with those involved. Children and young people do not always experience “protection” as protective when it means being shut out of conversations about their own lives.
Being prevented from speaking or being involved in decisions, even with good intentions, can feel less like protection and more like being managed.

That’s not comfortable for a sector built around systems of protection. But it’s exactly the kind of discomfort we need to stay with and unpack, alongside children and young people, rather than explain it away.

More than a place on the program

The Youth Stream will not transform an entire Congress on its own. But it represents a different starting point.

It invites us to look critically at how participation happens, not only whether the word appears in a paper. It asks presenters to think differently about whose knowledge they bring into the room. And it asks adults with professional authority to recognise that their knowledge is not automatically more valuable than the knowledge young people hold about their own lives.

Most importantly, it reminds us that young people are not a special addition to this work. They are at the heart of why it exists.

This is the first time ISPCAN has created a dedicated Youth Stream at the Congress.

We are hopeful it won’t be the last.