This paper discusses the outcomes of an initiative to empower ten‐year‐olds as active researchers. It debates some of the barriers that are commonly cited with regard to children of this age taking ownership of their own research agendas—power relations, competence, knowledge and skills—and challenges the status quo. It describes a study in which a group of ten‐year‐olds participated in a taught programme aimed at equipping them with the knowledge and skills to design their own research. This empowering process resulted in the children undertaking research projects of their own choosing, designed, carried out and reported entirely from their perspective. Reports from two of those projects are presented as part of this paper.

The concept of children as researchers has gained credence in response to changing perspectives on their status in society, recognition of their role as consumers and increased attention to children's rights. While this has led to greater involvement of children as participant and co-researchers, research led by children-research they design, carry out and disseminate themselves with adult support rather than adult management-is still relatively rare. Children designing and leading their own research opens up new protagonist frontiers. Children are party to the subculture of childhood which gives them a unique "insider" perspective critical to our understanding of their worlds. Child-to-child enquiry generates different data from adult-to-child enquiry because children observe with different eyes, ask different questions and communicate in fundamentally different ways. This paper explores some of the issues in empowering children as active researchers and draws on theory relating to participation, empowerment, voice and emancipation. Its primary focus is to celebrate and value children's own research and includes the full text of an original research study by an 11-year-old girl.

This paper explores the concept of children-as-researchers through an exposition of the pioneering work of the Children's Research Centre (CRC) at the Open University, UK, http://childrens-research-centre.open.ac.uk. It situates this work of the Centre within an empowerment and rights framework and charts its journey, from the first pilot work to its recognition as a centre with significant international reach. The paper focuses on issues, challenges and outcomes and draws on examples of children's research. The impact of child-led research, in terms of contribution to the body of knowledge on childhoods and our understanding of children's lived experiences, are examined along with a discussion of how child-led research can be influential in policy and practice contexts.

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SummaryThe present paper follows up the theme of research ethics that has been discussed in the British Journal of Learning Disabilities in recent years. We join the debate in the capacity of people involved in doing research on, rather than with, people with learning disabilities. We focus on our own quasi-experimental study evaluating the Intensive Interaction approach for pupils who are preverbal. We question our own practice, and illustrate some of the dilemmas which we have faced in our research and some of the compromises which we have reached.