Young People’s General Election: PM for the day. What would you do?
In week 3 of our Young People’s General Election, 3,960 pupils took part in a pupil-led classroom discussions on what they would do if they were the Prime Minister.
We asked them…
If you were Prime Minister for the day, what would you do?
Primary/SEN result: End child homelessness
In the primary and SEN schooIs who took part, it’s an overwhelming result for ending child homelessness with 63% of pupils. Introducing shorter school days is a distant second with 19% of the vote.
6% of pupils would increase teacher pay. Keen to explore this in the future; are primary pupils becoming aware of teacher workload?! Or do they really respect their hard work? Or is there some gentle teacher lobbying happening during these meetings?!
It would be interesting to explore this next year…
Secondary result: Votes at 16!
In this week’s question, secondary pupils had the same question but different answer options. These were:
Tougher sentences for knife crime
Abolish tuition fees
Introduce climate tax for frequent flyers
Introduce Votes at 16
Tighter controls on immigration
This was our closest question so far with all options getting at reasonable proportion of the vote.
We tried to give a broad range of policies across the political spectrum, but it’s interesting that votes at 16 narrowly trumped them all. Is this a policy that most young people agree with despite their political persuasion?
Tougher sentences for knife crime is in second place with 29%, and it’s great to hear from our teachers of the interesting debates this has led to this week.
One more week to go!
About the Young People’s General Election 2019
Every week from now until the election, we’re asking young people to discuss, debate on vote on different questions related to the General Election. Primary and secondary-focused questions cover everything from the latest developments on the campaign trail to what young people think should be in the perfect manifesto.
On each Friday, we’re publishing the results on our blog. If you want to give this week’s questions a go in your class, click below:
Check out Educate GE
EducateGE is a collaboration between 24 democratic engagement organisations who have come together to support schools and educators to engage young people in the 2019 General Election.
We have put all of our support in one place to make it easy to view, download and access content. All of our resources are free, non-partisan and have been designed to be classroom-ready.