Born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1954, Harry Shier lived and worked in England for 25 years, initially on adventure playgrounds, then in training adults working with children out of school. 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 rights and participation, most notably developing the “Article 31 Children’s Consultancy Scheme”, which enables young children to act as specialist consultants to the senior management of diverse cultural institutions, helping them make facilities and programmes more child-friendly. This experience was crystallised in his 2001 paper Pathways to Participation, which has become one of the most important conceptual models of children’s participation in decision-making, widely used in many parts of the world.