Evidencing the Lundy model: where Audience and Influence actually get recorded

If you work with young people anywhere in the UK or Ireland, you have probably met the Lundy model. Developed by Professor Laura Lundy at Queen’s University Belfast as a way of making Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child real, it has been adopted by the United Nations, the European Commission, and national participation frameworks from Ireland to Scotland to New Zealand. In Wales, it sits comfortably alongside the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act: young people’s voices, taken seriously, in the decisions that affect them.

The model has four elements, and they come as a chain: Space — a safe, inclusive place to form a view. Voice — support to express it. Audience — someone with power actually listens. Influence — the view is acted on, and young people are told what happened.

The evidence problem nobody talks about

Most organisations aligned to Lundy can evidence the first two elements well. A survey, a forum, a consultation — these show that Space existed and Voice was expressed, and survey tools do that job properly.

But Audience and Influence are not survey questions. “We told the council’s scrutiny committee on 14 March” is a dated event with a named recipient. “The youth centre’s opening hours changed in May because of it” is an outcome with a consequence. They are records, not responses — and in most organisations they live in someone’s memory, an email thread, or nowhere at all. When an evaluator asks “and what changed because young people spoke?”, the two elements that make Lundy more than a listening exercise are the two with no paper trail.

The model’s own guidance adds a duty that makes this concrete: young people must be told what happened with what they said — the “you said, we did” loop. A loop nobody recorded is a loop nobody can close.

What recording all four actually looks like

• Space is the hours that made it exist — the youth worker’s evenings, the volunteers on the door. Logged as they happen, those hours carry recognised published rates, so the effort behind participation stops being invisible. Every rate with its source.
• Voice is change you can track: ask the group how confident they feel speaking up before the programme and after it, in their own words, and the shift is your evidence. That is distance travelled — group averages, no names, ever.
• Audience is an outcome event: who was told, when, dated and recorded in ten seconds by the person who did the telling.
• Influence is the follow-on event: what changed, when — and the note back to the group that closes the you-said-we-did loop.

Do this per session rather than per annual report, and something bigger appears: a youth forum in one county and a project in the next are suddenly producing comparable records. Aggregate them and you get what no single funder return has ever shown — an area-wide picture of youth advancement: who was reached, what changed for them, and what the sector gave to make it happen. Because Lundy is a UNCRC instrument rather than a national framework, the same records work unchanged across Wales, Ireland, Scotland and beyond.

Counted, never costed

One rule matters more than any feature here: young people are counted as reach, never converted into pounds. The hours adults gave can carry a recognised rate; a young person’s participation cannot and should not. Outcomes stay counts, confidence shifts stay shifts, and no name is ever recorded — participation evidence that respects the people it is about.

Sources: Lundy, L. (2007) “Voice is not enough”, British Educational Research Journal 33(6); EU Children’s Participation Platform, “The Lundy Model”; Queen’s University Belfast research impact case study on the Lundy model.