Examination of Witnesses (Questions 117-119)
19 MAY 2004
MR DUNCAN
CULLIMORE AND
MS CHRIS
WEEDS
Q117 Chairman: Welcome, both to Chris
Weeds, our education officer and also to Duncan Cullimore from
Lewisham Borough Council. We are very grateful you both came at
very short notice. If we could start with you, Duncan, could you
describe to us your role and address the extent to which, if at
all, Parliament or parliamentary proceedings or the House of Commons
specifically features in Citizenship as part of the curriculum
you oversee.
Mr Cullimore: I have some material
here. It is various documents relating to participation which
is the focus of our work in Lewisham, improving the participation
of young people in their life and in politics basically, with
a small "p" and a big "p". We have a number
of initiatives in hand and the documentation you have identifies
some of that, and I will speedily run through that. I also have
a couple of CDs and a pamphlet which I can leave with you. The
CDs are very short videos. One was produced when we did two activities
to improve the number of youngsters who were registered to vote,
and the other one is a recording of a 14-19 young people strategy
group. Both are quite interesting in terms of identifying the
kind of work which is going on in Lewisham, the kind of contribution
that young people can make to improving participation. If I can
very quickly run through what I have given you in terms of the
paperwork, then talk about four of the activities we have done
over the last year, what our priorities are for the next year
and the extent to which this links to the Houses of Parliament.
I think the main point is that we actually do very little work
focused purely on the Houses of Parliament, but what we would
hope to happen is that young people will develop attitudes and
values which promote their participation in the community, and
that feeds through to the work of the Houses of Parliament and
to improving voting and participation in elections and that kind
of thing, and an understanding of the importance of democracy.
So I will very quickly run through what we have here. I have identified
the three priorities we have for working in schools over this
next year. You then have a few extracts from our Young People's
Citizenship and Participation Strategy across the borough, and
there are two or three pages there. If you turn over to what is
called page 4, which is an appendix, I will come back to that
in a minute because that identifies more or less everything we
are doing in the borough. We then have strategies we are using
on the next four sides. We then have information about the young
mayor, who was elected last month and is I think the first young
mayor in London and I will talk a little bit about him and what
his work involves. Then a piece about young people who went to
the Commonwealth Young People's Conference in Edinburgh in November,
and then some information about the voter registration week, and
we organised two of those last year. If I first turn to the diagram
which you have on page 4, what this shows is the relationship
between the work of young people and the adult world in terms
of the borough. At the top of the tree is the mayor of Lewisham
but it shows the relationship of the young mayor who, as I say,
was elected in April for one year, the relationship of that mayor
to the adult mayor, to the various committees around the adult
mayor, the Scrutiny Committee, the Cabinet members, the Strategic
Partnership, and also the Children and Young People's Stakeholder
Forum.
Q118 Chairman: These are all committees
of the borough?
Mr Cullimore: These are all committees
of the borough. Then in the bottom half you have information about
the various young persons groups who are involved in feeding information
into the young mayor and then into the borough. So there is the
Young Citizens' Panel, which has just been formed and comprises
300 young people in the borough who essentially volunteered for
it, although there was a process of contacting parents and guardians.
We also have the Neighbourhood Forums, so within the actual estates
and small areas within the borough we have neighbourhood forums
for young people. On the right hand side we have Specialist Forums,
so people like teenage parents, care leavers and young carers,
those groups whom we feel need a particular voice in the community,
have their own groups. We also have volunteers, a volunteers'
programme for young people involved in doing things as volunteers.
Then we have Sector Forums, as we are calling them. For instance,
I run a 14-19 Strategy Group for young people, and there are two
youngsters from each school and college who meet about every four
weeks to talk about their curriculum and how to improve the curriculum
and their learning, and they are effectively a focus group for
the borough-wide Strategy Group and they are feeding information
into that. There is a whole range of those Sector Forums, addressing
different issues, Connections have a forum, there is a Health
Forum, et cetera. So there is a whole series of different networks
of young people who are participating in the life of Lewisham
and effectively learning how to participate in a democracy.
Q119 Mr Heald: The young mayor does not
attend all these meetings, does he?
Mr Cullimore: No. The young mayor
has only just been elected and the meetings are organised by council
representatives and they are there to inform different groups.
For instance, the young mayor will probably not attend the 14-19
Strategy Group—he might do but he probably will not—but
those groups could inform the young mayor if they wanted to. There
is a communication channel there so that can go through to him
or her, but it is a him at the moment. So we have that network
there. If I move on to the activities now—am I all right
for time?
|
