YAG Data Sense-Making Workshop

PCE has led a nationwide study on youth agency in education, and from the outset it refused to study young people at arm's length. A Youth Advisory Group (YAG) was formed to work alongside the research team, shaping the study from its initial conceptualisation through methodology and tools, and modelling the very agency the research set out to examine. The group's involvement was continuous: YAG members fed into decisions at every stage, so that by the time the findings emerged, they already carried the fingerprints of the young people they described.

Once data collection was complete, PCE convened the YAG for a findings validation and sense-making workshop. Rather than presenting conclusions to a passive audience, the session positioned YAG members as an interpretive layer: co-analysts at the final stage of the research. Through structured exercises, they were asked to:

• Validate and contextually enrich the qualitative themes through their own lived experience.

• Interpret the key quantitative findings with the explanatory depth that statistical data alone cannot provide.

The findings were presented back to the group, and their perspectives were recorded and folded into the final analysis, ensuring the study's conclusions were grounded in, and owned by, the young people at its centre.