Harry Shier

Born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1954, Harry Shier worked in England for many years, first in children’s play, then in children’s rights and participation. In 1981 he founded Playtrain, an independent training agency specialising in children’s rights, play and creativity. In the 1990s he worked and wrote extensively on children’s participation rights, most notably developing the “Article 31 Children’s Consultancy Scheme”, which enables children to act as consultants to the management of cultural institutions, helping them make facilities and programmes child-friendly. This experience was crystallised in his 2001 paper “Pathways to Participation”, which introduced a tool for analysing children’s participation in decision-making that is now widely used throughout the world.
In 2001 he moved to Nicaragua, Central America, where he worked with a local community education organisation, CESESMA, supporting child workers on the region’s coffee plantations in defending their rights. His published work from this period includes Children as public actors: Navigating the tensions (2010), How children and young people influence policy-makers: Lessons from Nicaragua (2014), and Children as researchers in Nicaragua: Children’s consultancy to transformative research (2015), as well as significant work in Spanish. He also wrote the report on the violation of children’s right to play around the world that convinced the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child to produce a General Comment on Article 31 (IPA, 2010). In 2016 he was awarded a PhD at Queen’s University Belfast for his study on Nicaraguan children’s perceptions of human rights in school. He is currently based in Ireland as Researcher on COVISION Project at University College Dublin.
His published writing, in English and Spanish, and a full CV are available at: www.harryshier.net/
Phone: 0858767468
Address: 18 Rowan Terrace