You want to collaborate with young people to design new services or systems.

That’s fantastic.

Be prepared for young people to amaze you with their skills, talents and stories.

But you also need to remember that young people’s brains are not fully developed. During adolescence, their pre-frontal cortex partially shuts down so the body can focus on other things, like muscle and reproductive development. This affects young people’s decision-making skills, organisation and logical reasoning.

So what?

Well, this means you need to carefully consider the ethics of codesigning with young people.

To help you with this, we’ve developed an Ethics Worksheet so you can consider the key questions to ask yourself before you start working with young people.