We're Listening 2 U

THE Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People, Nigel Williams, today launched a campaign to encourage children, young people, their parents and carers to tell him when services aren’t good enough.

Bus shelters at more than 40 sites in County Down will bear the message “We’re Listening to You” and details on how to contact NICCY for the next two weeks.

Head of Legal and Complaints at the Commissioner’s office, Linda Kerr, said NICCY has already received more than 350 complaints from children and young people about the services they receive or the way they are treated.

“This campaign is designed to help us reach out to children and young people who may be experiencing problems with the services they receive from public bodies, or the way they are treated in their day-to-day lives,” she said.

“It is really important that we hear about these problems from children and young people. As well as dealing with individual problems it helps us decide if there is a more widespread problem that we may need to review.”

The ‘Adshel’-style bus shelter advertisements will appear from today (Monday) for two weeks on 120 sites across Northern Ireland.

“The campaign has been designed to make sure the advertisements are where young people meet, such as when they are travelling to and from school, or where they meet socially,” said Linda.

“We have created a special email address for children and young people who may have a complaint about the services they receive, called listening2u@niccy.org and, as always children and young people can call us on 028 9031 1616 with any issues they may have.”

To date NICCY has received more than 350 complaints from children and young people since the Commissioner took up post in October 2003, averaging one every two days. The complaints range from not enough being done by some schools on bullying, through to service provision such as speech and language therapy and child and adolescent mental health services.

Notes to Editors:
A digital image of the advertisement is available by contacting jonathan@niccy.org (please note this is a 2MB Adobe Acrobat file)
All NICCY news releases are available at www.niccy.org/news
Further information on the work of NICCY are available at www.niccy.org