In 1992 the Irish Government adopted the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and committed to promoting children’s rights. This study looks at the current literature and practices regarding participation provisions in their early years at primary school. The “right to have a say” based on Article 12 of the UNCRC is an ambiguous one open to much interpretation; who decides what matters affect children and what is the “due weight” their voices should be given? This study looks at the concept of functional agency as a means of redefining the participation of young citizens in the classroom. It encompasses the everyday actions that children engage in that promote citizenship, leadership, and agency, reconceptualising their participation. By locating contextual opportunities for agency in the classroom and facilitating robust connections with others, choice-based freedoms and functions can flourish in the junior primary classroom. To embrace this reality, adult gatekeepers are required to adopt a mindset that promotes children’s capabilities and positive liberty. An action-research model was employed over six-weeks to determine what matters were of most concern to a class of junior infant children in a North Dublin primary school. Through discussion, critical literacy, and shared action on the ecological systems in the children’s lives, family, school and community other themes of care and choice, play and nature and animals emerged. These emergent themes were widely observed and reported by the children as the key matters affecting them. The children’s interests led the study iteratively, their knowledge and understandings influenced the cyclical research design. Children’s voices are conceptualised as complex and requiring careful listening; they were captured through various listening methods, creating a mosaic. The children were not only contributors but assumed the roles of co-researchers. With the children’s explicit assent at the outset of each lesson, they contributed data and interpreted it through cooperation with me, as teacher researcher. Having children’s interests at the heart of the study and their input into analysis, ensured they were attaining and enacting agency that was meaningful to them. The actions in the study conveyed to them that they were being heard and were influencing its direction and outcomes. How the children chose to report on these themes and how this listening environment was structured are detailed in the findings. The discussion section sees how the children’s choices to assent, dissent, contribute and act, define their functional agency within the study and, by extension, within their classroom. This concept can be used to map the context, connections and freedoms in any classroom and realise the actuality and potential for functional agency.