Back to school for Driffield Councillors

One of the disadvantages of fatherhood is being conned by your children.  My children are professionals at it, years of practice on a gullible Dad I suppose.

 

My elder daughter teaches at Driffield and in a weak moment I agreed to “Go in and do a spot for her citizenship class.” The thought in my head was, pop in for quarter of an hour and talk to her class on the things the Council does.

 

A few months later when I had forgotten about our agreement I find that I have copped for talking to the full Year 8 group of some 340 twelve year olds!  Panic sets in and the immediate reaction is to enlist the help of Felicity, judiciously asking her first if she is free on Tuesday and getting an positive answer before telling her what I’ve just press ganged her to do.

 

Having talked to Mr Wilson, the PHSE co-ordinator, we agreed that it would help to split the mob into two groups of 170 students.

 

A hasty Sunday evening session setting up a powerpoint presentation and we were set for action.

 

We were setting off to show, by demonstration, how local democracy works.

Local Politics……WHAT !! Was our title.

 

I will not trail you through our procession of slides, but suffice it to say that we enjoyed ourselves and I think the kids enjoyed the session.

 

We started with the question, “Who thinks local politics makes any difference to them?” A quick show of hands revealed just two or three pupils who thought it did.

 

They certainly got involved in the exercise, enthusiastically joining in the bits where audience participation was appropriate, setting the level of Council Tax and allocating funds to different Council Directorates.

 

At the end of our session we re-visited our question, “Who thinks local politics makes any difference to them now?”  The forest of raised hands was quite staggering to behold, we must have engaged.   If their spontaneous applause at the end of the presentation could be taken as a gauge of interest then we had had a successful morning.

  

We are sure their input was a measure of their understanding.  We enjoyed it, they were great kids.  We should be proud of them. As for Felicity and me, well we are looking forward to a return visit next year.

Cllr Symon Fraser

Jan 2005