Dan Jones has been the Youth & Children’s Adviser for the Diocese since March 2006 and brings with him twelve years experience of working with toddlers to teenagers. Dan provides an extensive range of services and support for those who work with, or have a passion for working with children and young people in a variety of ‘informal’ settings, including volunteer and paid workers, clergy and readers.

In this day and age, churches are frequently being reminded to take responsibility for the care and well being of children and young people within the life of their church, and be accountable for the work they do. "Child Friendly Church" is a scheme to help with this.

Exploring the admission of children to Communion before Confirmation can be a tricky one for any church.  If you would like Dan to help you and your congregation discuss children and communion, please contact him. You may also like to read the diocesan guidelines ‘Communion before Confirmation’.

Read more: Dan Jones on "Creating An Inclusive Church"

From time to time individuals and parishes ask for help in developing their youth and children’s work.  Sometimes, we can recommend specific training packages - see The Key Training - however Dan is more than happy to work with you to develop a training session(s) that meet your specific needs.

An inclusive All-age Easter talk involving children and young people...

• Buy some plastic Easter Eggs - the kind that open so that you can put things inside. Easily available from PoundShops.
• Read the Holy Week/Easter story with the children/young people. Ask them what they want to say about it to the congregation.
• Then ask them what objects/symbols might help them say/show their ideas.
• Source or make these with the children and put one inside each egg. (Remember which is inside each colour and the order you want them to appear.) Decide together what needs to be said about the object/symbol.
• On Easter morning, have less confident children opening the eggs and showing the object/symbol and the more confident ones saying something about it. If the church is large, you might want to substitute boxes for the eggs so that the objects can be larger!
• Finish by having all the children saying, 'He is Risen' - and the congregation responding 'Alleluia'. (You could do this two or three times getting louder each time.)

On Saturday 15th October, over 250 youth and children's leaders and volunteers attended 'The Next Generation' conference in Wells. Find out why people called it "amazing"...

In order to comply with best practice and proposed government legislation, all volunteers who work with children and young people on behalf of the Church of England are being encouraged to achieve a Bishop’s Certificate in Youth and Children’s Work.

Do you need materials for leading a children's or youth group? Would you like help preparing for all-age or adult worship?

ROOTS publishes lectionary-based resources for all kinds of church in two bi-monthly magazines: "ROOTS Children & Young People" and "ROOTS Adult & All-Age"

The Winter 2010 Newslink for Youth and Children's Workers features creative ideas for Christmas crafts, prayer and worship, drama and discussion, articles on exploring silence and the challenges of working with mixed age groups, and recommended resources and training, including details of the new Key 2 sessions for 2011.