Principle 3:consultation

• Consultation is vital to respect children’s voices and experiences in digital innovation. The right to be heard assures children opportunities to ‘freely’ express their views and have these views given ‘due weight’ ‘in all matters affecting [them]’.1 This right is crucial to counterbalance social and cultural biases against recognising children’s views. • While engaging children in designing and developing digital technologies is an already established design practice, it is often only used for products and services intended for children. Yet many children use products and services not intended for them, and consultation matters here, too. • To be meaningful and effective, consultation with children should be ‘transparent and informative, voluntary, respectful, relevant [to the child], child-friendly, inclusive, supported by training, safe and accountable’. Policy makers and innovators should flexibly use the forms of communication that work best for children, bearing in mind their age (or ‘evolving capacities’) and circumstances (including digital inclusion or barriers to participation). Crucially, it should include communicating to children how their views ‘influence the outcome of the process’ in practice.