Challenges When Co-Designing With Children in the Classroom

Practical insights into running co-design projects with children in school, including common problems that arise and how to manage them, are under-reported. We ran four co-design sessions, each with up to fifteen 10-11 year olds, at a UK primary school. In this paper, we reflect on the co-design process in the classroom and highlight six challenges we faced: school access; unfamiliarity with the school; gaining consent/assent; child engagement; behaviour management; and reporting back our findings to stakeholders. For each challenge, we detail how we mitigated it during the workshops, such as associating assent with specific activities. We also report on further reflections on these issues that occurred after the workshops, facilitated by a focus group with outreach experts and discussions at a workshop with other researchers who co-design with children. The contribution of this paper is to provide practical solutions to challenges faced when co-designing in the classroom.