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There has been a recent surge of interest in consulting children and young people about issues affecting them. Research in this area can in the main be said to have been motivated by adult agenda, with little attempt to seek the views of children and young people themselves. This paper is based on what children have said about consultation. They were critical of some of the more widely used methods, largely because they saw them as unrepresentative. The main message from the research is that children want to be consulted if it is done properly, if it is about issues directly affecting them and if they see it as likely to yield results that are likely to benefit them or other young people. Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The contextThe recent growth of interest in children's participation in civic life, partly reflected in and stimulated by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNICEF, 1995), has led to concern about how to facilitate the involvement and participation of children and young people in public life and in the public policy process.The Scottish Parliament has shared this concern. Built into the foundation documents of the Scottish Parliament were the principles of being 'accessible, open, responsive and develop (ing) procedures which made possible a democratic approach . . . ' (Scottish Office, 1998). Keen to extend these principles to children and young people, the Parliament early in its life, commissioned the research upon which this article is based. It foccuses on what children and young people themselves say about being consulted (Laybourn and others, 2001).There is also a rapidly expanding academic literature on consultation, spanning different disciplines. To date, this research can be said to have been largely motivated by adult agenda (Woodhead and Falkner, 2000;Prout, 2000) and striking by its absence is any attempt to seek the views of children and young people themselves about the relative effectiveness of different research methods and approaches to consulting children (Laybourn and others, 2001). This lack is something we hope to remedy in this paper. MethodologyWe talked to some 200 children and young people aged between three and 18 from across Scotland. We conducted group interviews, with 12 groups in mainstream education, and to ensure representativeness, a further six from more excluded backgrounds.Children were from four Scottish local authority areas, including an inner city area with diverse ethnic population, one prosperous suburban area with a proportion of children from peripheral estates, one school in a small urban area with some rural pupils and one mainly rural school.Groups were organised with children in primary 6 (9-10 year olds), second year (11-12 year olds) and fifth year (15-16 year olds). Children and young people were from a wide range of backgrounds.We also talked to:* One group of very young children * Teenage girls from an Asian Muslim background * A special needs group of ten year olds with learning difficulties * Teenage boys with experien...

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When glucose and sodium carbonate were infused into immature foetal lambs during asphyxia, a high rate of glycolysis was maintained and the blood pressure and heart rate fell more slowly than in untreated lambs (Dawes, Mott, Shelley & Stafford, 1963). The plasma potassium rose more slowly and it was thought that there might have been less tissue damage. However, the experiments were performed under general anaesthesia, respiratory efforts were uncommon, and at this age (74-92 days' gestation) the lungs are functionally immature. The present paper describes experiments on mature foetal lambs and rhesus monkeys delivered by Caesarean section under local anaesthesia, asphyxiated for a standard time, and then resuscitated. The results show that in mature foetuses gasping is prolonged by treatment with glucose and sodium carbonate during asphyxia, and that, on re-admitting oxygen, treated foetuses recover more rapidly and more completely than untreated ones. METHODSFoetal lamb8. Observations were made on nineteen mature foetal lambs of 140-145 days' gestation age (term is 147 days) weighing 3-1-5-5 kg and including four sets of twins and two sets of triplets. Each lamb was delivered by Caesarean section under local anaesthesia and was placed on a heated table alongside the ewe, still attached by the umbilical cord. A rubber bag filled with warm saline was immediately slipped over the lamb's head. A catheter was introduced into a femoral artery under local anaesthesia for the measurement of blood pressure and heart rate and, if the lamb was to receive an infusion, a second catheter was inserted in a femoral vein. Each lamb was then asphyxiated by tying the umbilical cord. Femoral arterial blood samples were taken just before tying the cord and after 5 and 10 min asphyxia. The total volume of blood removed after tying the umbilical cord did not exceed 3-5 ml. in any one lamb. One lamb from each litter (ten lambs in all) was asphyxiated

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