Futurelab argues that society has to empower young students by enabling them with the tools to become better citizens and make informed decisions about their lives and their communities.
Young people are often maligned for being apathetic when it comes to politics but their response to certain issues has shown us that they do have the requisite energy and enthusiasm to be active citizens. Education innovator Futurelab asks: Is it the formal political system that’s at fault and, if so, what changes could be made to truly engage young people in real citizenship?
The Make Poverty History campaign in 2005 was a key moment in the lives of many young people. Often accused of being apathetic or uninterested in political issues, teenagers and twentysomethings were vociferous in their support for the campaign. White wristbands were everywhere; more than 200,000 people attended a Make Poverty History rally in Edinburgh; and in an Oxfam survey of 16-25 year-olds, 84% said that the campaign had made an impression on them – compared to only 35% who said the same of the general election.
The success of the campaign in capturing young people’s imaginations suggests that they are not apathetic but simply disengaged from the formal political system. As Joseph Ammoun, an executive council member of the English Secondary Students' Association (ESSA), points out, thousands of young people are involved in projects like the Millennium Volunteers, and in organisations like ESSA and the UK Youth Parliament. There is “growing disillusionment,” he says, with the formal political system, but it’s not the same as apathy.
Neil Selwyn, Senior Lecturer in Social Science at Cardiff University, agrees. Young people, he suggests, are more civic-minded than previous generations, and are often actively involved in single-issue and non-formal political causes. He sounds a note of caution, however: “We mustn't lose sight of the narrow range of young people who are turned on by these issues - especially in terms of class - and also the sustainability of this engagement. Signing an online petition or attending a charity concert doesn’t really constitute engagement.”
So, how can we harness some of this energy and enthusiasm? How do we encourage young people to become active citizens, whether it’s by joining a political party, getting involved in single-issue campaigns, or doing voluntary work for a charity?
While formal citizenship lessons were introduced in 2002 as a way of addressing the issue, their success has been patchy and the quality of lessons has been criticised by Ofsted. Jessica Pykett, an Education Researcher, has been researching formal citizenship lessons in schools, but believes that informal citizenship education is crucial, because it enables children to grasp the wider context in which they live their lives. She observed one lesson, she says, in which race and social class were discussed: “One boy thought that the cultural make-up of Britain as a whole was the same as that found in his local area.” This suggests that learning about citizenship can help to broaden a sense of identity that would otherwise be very firmly rooted in pupils’ own locality and their own personal experiences.
One approach to enabling children to take part in citizenship activities is to encourage ‘learner voice’, through engaging children more actively in their own education, a philosophy that informs the DfES’ personalised learning initiative. A three-year ESRC project called Consulting Pupils about Teaching and Learning found that, when carried out properly, consultation was an effective way both of involving children and making change happen – in this case, improvements to the school. In one project, called Students as Researchers, children themselves were given the opportunity to research the views of their fellow pupils.
The best method of consulting children, says Julia Flutter, a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge who worked on the project, was to use a mixture of surveys, group discussions and one-to-one interviews; that managed both to elicit a wide range of views and to obtain more in-depth insights into what children wanted. While it was important to manage expectations, she says, it was also important to show that children’s views could have an impact; in one example, where children were consulted as part of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) project, the girls came up with the idea of a “safe space” they could go to during playtime, and this was included in the final design of the building.
There is evidence, says Flutter, that students involved in consultation projects go on to do more active work in the community. A common concern, however, is that while consultation initiatives can be effective in engaging children who are middle-class or particularly academic, it can be difficult to access the voices of children that do not fall into these categories. Schools need to be aware of this and make special efforts to address it.
Anna Leatherdale, Director of the Phoenix Education Trust, a charitable organisation that aims to give school students a greater say in influencing their education, says that only 8% of students attending ESSA's annual conference believe their school councils (often dominated by more articulate and confident children) to be effective. She believes that consulting a wider range of students, including those who are more disaffected, does work. On the whole, she argues, children understand that if they are listened to, and their views acted upon, they will offer reasonable and realistic suggestions: “Research shows that students in democratic schools are happier and more in control of their learning, and subsequently academic achievement improves.”
One of the Trust’s achievements has been the creation of ESSA, an organisation run by and for school and further education students aged 11-19. ESSA encourages school students to find ways, says Ammoun, of “giving young people more of a say, not just in their schools but in education in general”; one pilot project is looking at the use of citizens’ juries in schools as a method of involving young people in decision-making.
Some of the more successful projects run by schools have involved working with the wider community. A recent report from The Carnegie Trust, ‘Inspiring schools: Case Studies for Change’, shows the ways in which students can be actively engaged in citizenship projects. In the Greig City Academy, for example, groups of students have taken part in police consultations on youth crime, while others have worked with the local Traders and Stakeholders Association, putting on events such as a carnival fair (organised by the students) to attract more people into the area to shop.
Another way of engaging children is to make political structures themselves more accessible, and maybe the most effective way of doing this is through technology. If we are to take young people’s own concerns and interests as a starting point, then we need to understand that teenagers now manage their social relationships very differently from teenagers of a generation or so ago. The use of text messaging, instant messaging and social networking sites such as MySpace are all part of the daily social interactions of many teenagers.
If corporate advertising can reach young people through viral e-mails or videos on YouTube, then these technologies can also be used to harness young people’s interest in political issues. The UK Youth Parliament, for example, uses internet forums to enable its select committees and regional committees to stay in touch with each other, while the Executive Council is elected via the internet. Democracy itself is becoming digital; Pykett says that the children she observed were fascinated to discover they could e-mail their MP or the Prime Minister. Increasingly, the websites of local councils and public bodies enable citizens to make comments about services or gain access to information about the work they’re doing. The internet can, argues Pykett, be a way of “revolutionising the geography of education” – of opening a window onto the rest of the world.
Selwyn agrees that technology can be useful as a way of helping people communicate and become exposed to other points of view, quoting a free resource called Power League as an example (www.powerleague.org.uk). By enabling you to rank and display group opinions on any issue, Power League provokes group discussions on whatever subject you choose. But Selwyn sounds a note of caution: “Often the root causes of a problem such as disengagement with citizenship issues are not technical – they are social, economic, cultural and so on. As such technology on its own will do little to change things.”
The idea that children and young people should be given a say in matters that affect them is now common political currency, and forms a central part of the Government’s Every Child Matters initiative. Yet there is also public ambivalence about young people’s role as active citizens. When 19 year-old Lucy Tate from Pontefract became Britain's youngest ever magistrate, the appointment, instead of being welcomed, was largely criticised because of her youth. Do we, as a society, fear giving young people too much power?
Pykett argues that there are justifiable concerns about giving young people too much representation: “Where children are ‘empowered’, the risk is that they are also therefore responsible, accountable and culpable for the decisions they make, and must deal with any repercussions. This would seem to take away the notion of childhood as a time to experiment and make mistakes.” It can be naïve, argues Pykett, to suggest that “all voices are equal, because if this were the case, there would be no need for education, and opinions would be as valuable as justified argument.”
Citizenship education, whether formal or informal, has to be about enabling students to become more reflective, and giving them the tools they need to make informed decisions about their lives – without burdening them with too much responsibility. For schools, argues Selwyn, the task of producing active, engaged citizens is not one they can face alone: “Formal lessons can provide a framework or even an inspiration, but they are meaningless unless they correspond with young people’s real lives outside of the artificial setting of the school.”
Futurelab is a not-for-profit organisation that pioneers ways of using new approaches to learning and technology to transform the way people learn.
