Category: Citizenship

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Citizenship SchoolCouncilsUK-archive

Derbyshire New Model for School Councils

Pupils and Politics is a document from david Holmes at Derbyshire Healthy Schools which aims to change the structure of school councils across the county. The new model uses the language and structures of the English parliamentary system in an attempt to teach young people about English democracy as well as providing a workable school council. Within the cabinet there are people with responsibility for different departments which are the sub-committees.

More info is in this document: file:///S:/Training/LA%20&%20Other%20Consultancy/Local%20Authorities/A-E/Derbyshire/Pupils%20and%20Politics.pdf

If you are unable to access if from the above link, please email me and I will forward it to you.

Jess L (5/9/08)

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Citizenship SchoolCouncilsUK-archive

Youth Citizenship Commission

One of the articles I found on Voice It1 (see previous post), written by one of the student ‘journalists’ was about the newly created position of Chair of the Youth Citizenship Commission.  This commission will:

  • Examine what citizenship means to young people.
  • Consider how to increase young people’s participation in politics; the development of citizenship among disadvantaged groups; how active citizenship can be promoted through volunteering and community engagement.
  • Lead a consultation on whether the voting age should be lowered to 16.

It has a small budget attached (£6m).  I think we should try to get a meeting with him and see whether he will support the Standard (and maybe more).
Full article >>

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Citizenship SchoolCouncilsUK-archive

Radiowaves.co.uk/voiceit

At my meeting with Futurelab one of the other people there was from synergy.tv. One of their big projects is www.radiowaves.co.uk which allows schools to create their own radio stations for free. This could be a great tool for school councils. An offshoot of this is Voice It! which is particularly about using those tools for campaigning.

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Citizenship SchoolCouncilsUK-archive

Citizenship Survey

There’s some really interesting stuff in this.

Amongst many other things it looks at how much influence people believe they can have on their locality and Great Britain, what they believe to be important British values, how discriminated against people feel and how much they mix with other ethnicities.

Some facts that I thought were interesting is that Africans (living here) feel they have the most influence on British society, 26-35 year olds are generally the most cynical and dissaffected, the elderly are the most trusting and lots of people lie about how much they mix socially with people from other races.

Unfortunately it only goes down to 16 year olds, so I’ll be writing to them asking whether they might extend the survey next time to include school-aged children.

This is the link.