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Children’s agency has become a taken for granted feature and starting point for researching children and childhood. While children’s agency has achieved a level of recognition within the research community there is still some debate as to whether agency has legitimacy in a broader political context. To what extent is children‘s social participation recognised by policy makers and professionals as ‘making a difference to the world we live in’? (Oswell 2013, P. 3). In this paper I explore the nature and possibilities of children’s agency from a UK political and policy perspective. In focusing on the recognition of children’s agency the identity and ontology of childhood is a central theme. Moreover, there is also an expectation that the heightening of children’s ‘presence’ and status would have implications for their material and social wellbeing. I draw on Fraser’s (2000) analysis of the relationship between ‘recognition’ and ‘distribution’ in arguing that the former can obscure questions around the distribution of children’s agency. The issue of distribution generates questions on the groups of children that are likely to benefit from the public recognition of agency. At the same time if we explore the relationship between different groups of children and the deployment of agency, we can identify difference conceptions of agency. In the second part of the paper we switch our attention to the distribution of agency and discuss the way that middle class and working class children deploy their agency. In the process we identify different modes of agency which potentially reinforce class differences and generate different levels of public recognition.

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