GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

society, they will have the information they need to then go into politics and

understand how to engage with it, whereas most of us, most of everybody else

allows politics to happen to them. We quite often come across young people

that hit 18 not once ever talking about Parliament, Westminster, MPs,

politicians at all ever in their education, because politics as a subject does not

exist. It does not exist in schools, it does not exist in colleges and for us that is

a really damaging situation to be in, because you have got a load of young

people that want to change. All you have got to do is look at the climate

change protests. You see that young people are eager, willing and wanting to

engage in politics, but need that information, need those tools to be able to do

it effectively and for the betterment of their generation and generations to come

after it.

As Alison mentioned, the GFTU sponsored 10 schools to run this programme

across England in some of the lowest socioeconomic areas and I am going to

feed back some of the feedback and some of the information that the schools

and students have given us through pre and post surveys. I want to just

refresh everyone’s memory and just run through how our platform works, just to

give you a bit of a taste as to what these schools went through. Shout Out UK

is an all in one platform for young people to learn our political system as well as

a place to voice their opinions, because it is one thing learning about it, it is

another thing actually doing it and engaging with it. The way it works is that

schools subscribe to our Political Literacy course. We are a social enterprise.

We do not rely on grants. We either get funding from the schools directly or

through sponsors like the GFTU. Schools then gain access to our Political

Literacy course, half a day’s training for the teachers and all the resources and

activities that come with it.

This is the teacher portal. The Political Literacy course is broken down into

three units. Unit 1 deals with the British Government, looking at local and

national governments, understanding what an MP does, what is the role of a

council, all the sort of bare bone basics around a democracy that should

realistically be already on the curriculum, because it is all of our right as well as

our duty to engage as citizens, but for one reason or another, and I will let you

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