Young debaters were amazing!

I’ve said many times before that one of the things I most enjoy is promoting the importance of democracy.

And each year the County aims that at young people by organising a growing number of events for schools, mainly primary, to give the kids an idea of why it’s important and what it means in reality.

Local Democracy Week from Staffs CC on Vimeo.

I didn’t do quite as many of those events last year as I normally do because of time constraints and one of the schools in my patch that we couldn’t fit in then were so keen they were happy to do it recently instead. Just on that, I think what the County are doing on this is great but in my view it should be more than just a couple of weeks a year. I’m encouraging that and I know they are looking at some sort of expansion to the programme.

Anyway, 30 youngsters from Manor Primary in Drayton Bassett between Lichfield and Tamworth came up to County Buildings a couple of weeks ago and what a fabulous bunch of youngsters they were… a credit to their school and parents.

We did a question and answer session to kick things off and then the kids split into four teams to represent political parties. They each set budgets for a variety of services and soon learned that there’s limited money and lots that needs doing.

After each team set their budget by prioritising which services were most important and therefore should get more money it was debated by all the ‘parties’. The debates were of excellent quality and it’s clear there were some budding public speakers in the making… and I mean that.

In the end every individual had a personal secret vote to decide which of the teams’ budget made most sense and which team had put up the best argument to vote for them. An excellent couple of hours and the teachers and parents who viewed appeared genuinely surprised saying that some youngsters who were normally pretty quiet really came into their own.

The final show of hands which was to find out how many children understood better how democracy and politics work in our country was unanimous.

Several dozen schools took part last year and I’m hoping the short clip of the recent event with Manor Primary will encourage even more Staffordshire to take part this year.

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