What is it about?
This paper explores why research with children in schools is becoming harder due to time pressures, limited resources, and logistical barriers. We describe how partnering with groups like Scouts and Girlguides can provide a more engaging, practical, and accessible way to involve young people in research.
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Why is it important?
Collecting research data from children and young people is essential for understanding development, learning, and wellbeing but recruiting participants through schools has become increasingly difficult. Schools face rising pressures on time and resources, stricter safeguarding requirements, and limited capacity to support external research. As a result, valuable studies are often delayed, scaled back, or abandoned. This commentary is important because it highlights these growing challenges and offers a practical, community‑based alternative. By proposing the use of established youth groups, such as Scouting and Girlguiding communities, as settings for data collection, this work introduces a timely and innovative approach. These groups are already structured around learning, skill‑building, and positive youth development, making them naturally aligned with research activities. Engaging with these communities can widen access to participants, reduce reliance on overstretched schools, and create a more enjoyable and empowering experience for young people. This approach is unique because it connects public engagement with rigorous research practice, showing how outreach activities can serve both educational and scientific goals. Adopting this model could broaden participation, diversify samples, and make psychological research with young people more sustainable, inclusive, and responsive to real‑world challenges.
Perspectives
Working in these settings showed me how powerful community‑based research can be. Young people asked thoughtful questions and engaged with scientific ideas in in such an excited manner. Our undergraduate student volunteers gained the confidence to communicate science clearly, and leaders welcomed the chance to enrich their programmes. Seeing Scouts and Guides light up when learning about the brain reminded me why this work is worth doing. It shows that public engagement does not just support research but strengthens our community!
Dr Nikki Dean Marshall
University of Nottingham
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Beyond the classroom: a commentary on overcoming the challenges with conducting research in schools by using public engagement as a novel approach to data collection, Research for All, February 2026, UCL Press,
DOI: 10.14324/rfa.10.1.2.
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