EC Meeting Papers January 2019

Matteo Bergamini Alison Stoecker

Shout Out UK

Office of John McDonnell

GFTU-PROGRESS REPORT- Online Political Literacy Platform:

Project Summary The support given to Shout Out UK was to help deliver the Online Political Literacy Platform for free to 10 schools in specified areas. This all-encompassing platform provides the entire school and all students within, with the tools necessary to engage in politics and a platform to ‘shout out and be heard’. Spearheaded by Shout Out UK’s Political Literacy Course, the platform includes a polling system, the ability to set up your own student union and a blogging set up on which students can publish their own articles directly onto our news site. Within the platform, schools can also book three offline, drop-down workshops on a variety of issues from Media Literacy to the ‘Politics of Star Wars’ which uses the Star Wars universe to explain issues around migration and international relations. The purpose of this report is to deliver the first update on the progress of this project. Activities Since negotiating with the GFTU and getting partial funding approved in March for the first 5 schools, we have successfully launched phase one with four schools having already started utilising the online platform; Salvatorian College, Christopher Whitehead Language College, Forrest Hill and The Wren School. The fifth will begin in November 2018. With the second round of funding being approved for an additional five schools over the summer, we started to recruit an additional five schools, of which most will begin utilising the platform in early 2019. The funding allowed us to bring in an additional employee, specialised in communications to assist us in expanding our school outreach. The funding also supported our free taster assemblies, allowing schools to see what we do, why it supports youth services (or lack of), making it more likely for them to sign up. Each week the Marketing and Communications officer (Kat) gets into contact with schools in the specified areas given to us by you. This is done either by ringing the school and asking for personal emails/extensions of the teachers or sending a general e-mail to the office specific who the intended recipient is. If successful Kat will send an email with all the details regarding the online platform and try to arrange a call. Once a school has successfully agreed to use our online political literacy platform. Kat, whilst cc’ing Lucie (our education officer) into the e-mail, works on securing a start date and books the school in for training. This is then securely logged into both our records and the excel sheet that we send to you. Once we have successfully got a school/teacher to agree to take on the online political literacy course the next step is to set their account up for them. Emails are sent out to the teachers, with all the information to their login details. Then a follow up email is sent by the Education Coordinator (Lucie) introducing herself as the welfare/technical support for the platform- included in this email is the ‘E- Platform Guide’. This outline, with screenshots, descriptions how to access and utilise the platform.