GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

and the way we do this is by learning how to be politically literate, learning

about the tools and then setting up something essentially like a union within

your school to represent the student voice and then when they set it up they

then have to negotiate with the SLT, so the senior leadership team, within the

school, which are also in on it, to then see what kind of powers that student

union gets, because we do not want to regurgitate or replicate the idea of the

student council model which, frankly, does not work. The student council model

pretty much operates on a level of, “I like you, you’ve got straights As, you’re

the president of the student council”. That is not democracy. That is not the

kind of thing we want to showcase to the next generation. We want to make

sure that young people have the ability to actively participate in democracy

within schools so that when they come into essentially the real world when they

hit 18 and they become part of the franchise, voting and engagement is second

nature, it is something they have always done. We want to encapsulate that

within education.

We have also got the ability for schools to poll, so we can do community polls

across our network of schools and then schools can do their own polls. We

have had polls on various different things from uniforms to Brexit, a lot on

Brexit, as you can probably imagine, and on top of this the students, once they

get access to the e-portal themselves, can start writing articles and writing

blogs about issues they care about, because, again, this is the idea of giving

them a voice and a platform to debate, discuss and share issues that they care

about and they want to talk about.

We should then go on to our main website, shoutoutuk.org, which is all

student-led, all written by young people in secondary school or just after

secondary school. They also get access as part of the subscription to a load of

workshops on a variety of different issues from black history, LGBT plus rights,

feminism. We also did one which worked really well using Star Wars and the

Star Wars universe to introduce them to international relations and the

Government which actually works really well. The idea is political literacy is the

baseline. Everybody should have political literacy in schools. It should be a

right as well as a duty to be able to have the tools to engage in our democracy,

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