Every young person has rights: We, as a representative council for 11-25 year olds, advocate for positive change and children’s rights across the city.
The Curriculum for life working group has been meeting monthly to create a campaign to raise awareness of the importance of PSE lessons and how they need improving.
The group have been working with a website developer Youth Friendly to develop the existing Tools4Life website, making it more accessible and adding more information to the website.
The group are now creating a campaign alongside the website so young people can show their support in asking for PSE lessons to be improved. The group are hoping to have the website launched soon! Here’s a sneaky preview of the new updated website.
The CYC First Aid Training for All working group have been hard at work over the three months developing a plan on how to address the challenge of getting first aid in the curriculum and every school to have a defibrillator.
The first action for CYC members was to hold meetings with first aid providers in the city, so meetings with British Red Cross and St John Ambulance took place in January. The meetings were very positive and they both agreed to help support the campaign starting with the offer of free first aid workshops to a range of local six forms groups.
CYC members felt that they should put their money where their mouth was and get trained! British Red Cross delivered an evening of training where young people learnt valuable skills such as CPR, recovery position, scolds and bleeding.
Working group member April Spiteri (15) said ‘Our campaign continues as we have written a letter to Assembly Member Suzy Davies to support her call to have a debate in the Assembly about including first aid in the National Curriculum’
CYC Members will now meet Assembly Members on the 29th of March at the Senendd to share their campaign. Keep a look out at our twitter account for updates and photos from the day!
On Friday 11th November, Elin Bold and Stephanie Ezeadum, Members of Youth Parliament for Cardiff debated a range of topical issues, including the need for a ‘curriculum for life’ and tackling racial and religious discrimination in the House of Commons. Elin gave a speech on her ideas for a ‘better, kinder democracy’.
276 Members of Youth Parliament from across the UK participated in the debate and have been elected by their peers to represent them with proceedings being chaired by the Speaker of the House of Commons, Rt Hon John Bercow MP.
This year’s UK Youth Parliament’s sitting will have marked the 7th year that MYP’s have debated on the green benches of the House of Commons. The sitting heralds the start of UK Parliament Week, an annual festival of events intended to connect communities across the UK with their democracy. This year’s Make Your Mark ballot to decide the topics of the Youth Parliament’s debate in the House of Commons, received a record number of ballots, reaching 978,216 young people. This cemented Make Your Mark as the biggest youth consultation of its kind in UK history, with almost two million young people aged 11-18 taking part in the last two years.
Members of Youth Parliament voted to campaign on votes at 16 and a curriculum for life (devolved England issue only) in 2017 with 112,687 young people across the UK voting to lower the voting age to 16 as their top priority in the recent Make Your Mark ballot.
Votes at 16 has been a campaign for the UK Youth Parliament for several years and there were passionate speeches made for the campaign in the House of Commons Chamber.
CYC have been busy coordinating the UK Youth Parliament Make Your Mark Ballot here in Cardiff once again. CYC members have been contacting schools and youth groups all across the city to take part in the biggest youth consultation for 11-18 year olds in Europe. This year we had over 9500 young people from across the city take part and cast their votes. The top 3 issues voted for by young people were in 2016 were:
A curriculum should prepare us for life: School should cover topics including finance, sex & relationships and politics in the curriculum.
Tackling racism and religious discrimination, particularly against people who are Muslim or Jewish :
All young people should work together to combat racism and other forms of discrimination, and ensure we know the danger of such Hatred.
First aid education for all young people: All young people should learn basic First Aid on a regular basis , including CPR and all schools in the UK should have a defibrillator.
Cardiff Youth Council Members Yasmin Bashary and Stephanie Ezeadum (MYP) represented the CYC Race and Religious Discrimination Group at the annual MEND Annual Dinner and Islamophobia Exhibition last month.
MEND is a not-for-profit company that was founded to help empower and encourage British Muslims within local communities to be more actively involved in British media and politics.
Race and religious discrimination came second in this year’s CYC ballot and a working group has been formed to try to address the issue.
Guest speaker Yvonne Ridley explained that ‘we must not give oxygen to Far Right Groups and instead stand together and be united to expose the hate’.
Just a quick post to tell everyone that there’s a new campaign page up and running for CYC – #DontHateEducate
This page has been set up by Cardiff Youth Council members to support our priority of tackling racial and religious discrimination in Cardiff, if you’d like more information on how the UK Youth Parliament as a whole are taking on this priority, then click here.
Firstly, sorry for activity being a bit slow over Christmas, but now we’re back!
Just to remind everyone of the meeting we have coming up tomorrow, and to show you the agenda that’s been prepared for tomorrow, here it is;
We have some really exciting news to share with you all about the Mental Health priority, and we’ll be doing some important work on all of our priorities this week, so it’d be great to see you all there!
As always, a warm welcome to any new members, and if you have any questions at all feel free to get in touch 🙂
We have some really exciting news to share with you all about the Mental Health priority, and we’ll be doing some important work on all of our priorities this week, so it’d be great to see you all there!