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The hand-held camera jerkily records a scene that could be from any children’s home, in any town, anywhere in the country.

A care worker is accusing a teenage girl of stealing his cigarettes. A bit of a troublemaker and a heavy smoker, the girl is an obvious suspect. But this time we know she is innocent. Earlier her best friend, whose video diary we are watching, has filmed the real culprit removing the cigarettes from the care worker’s jacket pocket.

The friend tries to intervene but is brusquely dismissed. "And turn that bloody camera off," shouts the care worker. Later, confronted with the video evidence of his mistake, he tries to shift the blame. "You should have told me," he shouts. "I tried," is the reply. "Well you didn’t try hard enough."

This vignette of care home has been acted out by members of the Rights and Participation Project (Rapp), a young persons’ advocacy group based in Hull.

Acted so well, in fact, that its 15-year-old star won an award at this year’s Hull film festival and the film is now being used as a training aid for care workers in Hull.

It is just one of several initiatives that Rapp has been involved in since 1997, seeking to give disenfranchised young people in Hull a louder voice when dealing with officialdom.

The project was launched after a multi-agency conference concluded that education, health and social services were failing to engage with a large number of young people leading risky lifestyles in the city

Children’s rights officer Craig Clark explains: "The main theme that came from the conference was that these young people felt they had been saturated by a lot of well-meaning adults, rather than really listened to." So joint finance came together from social services, Save the Children Fund, the Warren [a young people’s resource centre] and the health service to set up an independent listening service.

The result was a service that works both on a one-to-one basis with individual young people and on a more strategic level, helping agencies develop systems that can respond to young people’s needs.

"Firstly there’s the independent advocacy that we provide daily across a range of services helping young people who feel they can’t get access to services or they’ve been done a disservice," says Clark. "Then we use what we’ve learned from that to develop other systems to make sure that young people are listened to."

Of course, this championing of children’s rights is much in vogue. The government has issued National Advocacy Standards requiring local authorities to communicate more effectively with young people. And the Local Government Association, the NHS Confederation and the Association of Directors of Social Services have jointly published the Serving Children Well report proposing that "children’s champions" are created to "walk the services" identifying weaknesses and reporting areas of excellence to be shared between agencies.

However, despite Rapp’s apparent synchrony with the latest government thinking, Clark is acutely aware that the project must also embrace its rhetoric. Rapp is therefore seeking to launch its own children’s champion team which will try to extend the project’s services over a wider range of agencies.

"Rapp’s core philosophy will stay the same," says Clark. "The difference is that we are widening the safety net approach by trying to get other agencies on board. There’s a host of stuff coming from government, like the national standards. So these agencies are going to have to become involved in advocacy systems. We are inviting them to do this through us."

There is also a more pragmatic reason to expand the service. Rapp’s funding from Save the Children Fund runs out in March next year. Hence the drive for more partners.

Under the children’s champion banner Rapp will continue to offer its one-to-one advocacy aiming to help young people deal with a wide range of issues.

"These are young people who have fallen through all the various safety nets," says Clark. "They have been excluded from school, or run away from home or care. They’ve got outstanding warrants or they are being chased around town by frustrated education welfare officers.

"Through the children’s champion programme we are trying to look at that safety net approach with the other agencies. We are not looking to become the ultimate safety net but to strengthen the protection put in place by the other agencies. When the young people fall through those system, we will try and feed them back in.

"The way we start is always from the point of view of the young person; how they see the situation and how they feel about it. We then try to help them develop allies to bring about a more positive situation."

For instance Rapp works with a lot of children who are on the brink of school exclusion. By encouraging them to become involved in more positive pursuits (recent examples include making the training film and speaking at a national conference) the project aims to boost the young person’s self-confidence and combat the feeling that the system has given up on them.

"The pressure for Rapp is to be creative, to be different from the adults that these young people have had contact with before," says Clark. "We are trying to get away from the last chance saloon and not write people off at the age of 12 and 13."

Clark admits that Rapp’s approach can cause friction within some agencies who may feel they are being undermined.

"The head teachers especially do feel threatened because, while there’s a lot in the Education Act about parental rights, there’s only a little about children’s rights. And in the Ofsted world that we live in, it’s all target-related."

Nevertheless, Rapp does works closely with a number of services to help develop procedures that young people feel comfortable with.

One of the most obvious ways of doing this is through the development of complaints procedures that are responsive to young people’s needs.

"We’ve tried to develop systems with the big bureaucracies to ensure that young people are listened to," says Clark. "One way of doing that is through robust young person-friendly complaint systems, on the back of the Waterhouse report, that give young people access to an advocate within the complaint systems."

Rapp has also managed to give young people a voice in the recruitment and selection of social services staff. A group of young people who have experience of local authority care have been trained in interview techniques are now regularly used on social services selection panels. Questions devised by young people are also incorporated into every selection interview.

"It’s not tokenistic," says Clark. "We are involved in development work right from the beginning."

It is this experience in developing young person-oriented systems that has encouraged services such as Hull’s newly formed Connexions scheme and the local health service to join up with the children’s champion programme.

"The health service has, for a long time, been concerned that they receive very few complaints from young people," says Clark. "That’s a bit worrying when you think of how many kids use health services. They have systems in place but they are very adult-oriented."

Connexions, meanwhile, is looking at setting up local independent watchdogs to help young people access means of redress when they feel the Connexions relationship has broken down.

In many ways it is ironic that Rapp finds itself touting for new funding just at the moment when local and central government appears to be backing the principle of children’s advocacy. Nevertheless, with the recognition of children’s rights at an all-time high, the potential for expanding the project’s service has never been greater.

Certainly Clark remains enthusiastic about forging partnerships with a wider range of services.

"As long as they value the experience of projects like Rapp and others who have been doing this work for a long time then there a great deal of potential for joint work," he says.