Examination of Witnesses (Questions 195-199)
MS JESSICA
GOLD, MS
RAJI HUNJAN,
MR TOM
WYLIE AND
MR JULES
MASON
15 MAY 2006
Q195 Chairman: Can I welcome our witnesses
today: Tom Wylie, Jessica Gold, Raji Hunjan and Jules Mason. We
are grateful when witnesses give of their valuable time to come
before the Committee. We are, I guess, something like mid-way
through our look at citizenship and we did have a little break,
where we started it and then suspended it while we got on with
looking at the Education White Paper, but now we are back on track.
It is an interesting time to talk about citizenship; certainly
all of us were rather surprised by some of the announcements today.
Can we start by asking you, in a nutshell, if you want to not
repeat your CV but just to say where you are coming from on this
whole citizenship issue? To start from the left, can I ask you,
Tom, to open up?
Mr Wylie: I have a background
as one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools for 17 years. Now
I am the Chief Executive of the National Youth Agency, which is
a developmental body, concerned primarily with what happens to
young people outside formal institutions, so my take on the citizenship
question is primarily about that interface between the school
and what it is doing and the world, and what is going on in the
world of young people to promote their citizenship.
Q196 Chairman: Are you happy about
the way things are developing in that relation, in terms of the
last three years?
Mr Wylie: We are broadly happy.
The starting-point is that young people spend only nine minutes
of every waking hour in school, so the question is what happens
in the other 51 minutes, and I would urge the Committee to concern
itself with the 51 minutes, what is going on in the democratic
process, the engagement by councils in ensuring that young people
have scope for having a voice or an influence, in service, and
so on. You may know that the most recent assessment of their performance,
the Ofsted Annual Performance Assessment (APA) study, said: "Opportunities
for young people to participate in decision-making, policy
development and democratic processes were developing well in 84
authorities, that were judged as areas for improvement in 40."
I think that is probably about right: two-thirds of places are
doing reasonably well; about a third not making much of an effort.
Q197 Chairman: Right. Jessica?
Ms Gold: I first got involved
in this field as chairperson of my school council. I had to fight
with the boys in my year for the role, when I was in my sixth
form, and I won; they did not like me for that. At the time, obviously
pre-citizenship, we had a head who was very keen and really believed
in the student voice. A few years later I had an opportunity to
co-found School Councils UK and I thought there was some good
potential in that idea. I guess School Councils UK started hitting
the educational world at the end of the 1990s, gradually building
up resources, very much an "on the ground" organisation,
always working with schools, earning about 75% of our annual income
by our regular contact with schools and the resources we sell
and the training we sell to schools. We have always been very
tied in with what schools need and what they are looking for and
how they want to be supported. Our general assessment of where
things are at is that, in the light of how many books we sell
to schools, as clearly teachers want help with school councils
and participation, we have sold something like over 12,000 of
our primary school councils' tool-kit and over 5,000 copies of
our secondary school councils' tool-kit. Teachers are very keen
and they do not know how to give students a voice effectively
and we want to help them.
Q198 Chairman: Thank you for that.
Raji?
Ms Hunjan: My background is that
I am a teacher by trade. I have produced a number of formal resources
about political literacy, mainly when I was at the Hansard Society
and also on behalf of the Parliamentary Education Unit. Now I
work for the Carnegie UK Trust on the Young People Initiative
programme and our interest is primarily in promoting young people's
active involvement in decision-making. We have funded a number
of projects in that area and we have commissioned in that area
as well. Our interest is in the formal and informal sectors and
we are looking quite actively at how to combine the two sectors
and encourage more informal participation in schools. We broadly
support the citizenship education curriculum. We are concerned
that a number of schools have tackled it in the same way they
have tackled other subjects, students behind desks, learning facts
and knowledge, which is an important part of the citizenship curriculum,
but our concern is that what we do not want is very, very knowledgeable
young people who then are not invited to participate in formal
decision-making processes. Those young people would be more dangerous,
I think, than young people who know nothing and therefore will
not know that they could participate, but those young people who
have knowledge and understanding of democracy would then like
to exercise their rights as citizens. That is where we are coming
from.
Q199 Chairman: Thank you for that.
Jules Mason?
Mr Mason: I work for the British
Youth Council, which is the national Youth Council serving people
under 26 in the UK and we are a representative body of local and
national youth groups, ranging from faith organisations to traditional
wings of youth organisations, like the Scouts, etc. In terms of
my own personal background, I am a representative governor at
a school in north London, Fortismere, and a former trustee of
the British Youth Council, because all our trustees are aged 18
to 25. In relation to citizenship education, there are three clear
things about which the BYC is concerned. One is seeing citizenship
education as a move to facilitate real student participation,
which includes a stronger student voice, resulting in citizenship
running throughout the school and its ethos, rather than just
being relative to one specific subject. The need for citizenship
education to go beyond the classroom or the actual physical building
of a school; which feeds into the last point about it being a
key plank in transforming schools into extended schools,
enabling schools to have a wider connection and relationship with
their community and enabling pupils to have a wider connection
with the community base on their local doorstep but also the wider
community.
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