school – Cardiff Youth Council

Hello,

So firstly, thank you to everyone who came to November’s meeting- we’ll summarize on here what steps we managed to make in deciding what our priorities mean within the next week.

Today, however, I saw something in the news which I think will be interesting to those who feel passionately about the fact that we need to improve the education system to prepare us for life. Our PSE survey last year, featuring 1030 young people, showed us that most pupils aren’t taught first aid at school, but that they would like to be.

This article claims that the opportunity to vote on the issue was totally missed, as the allocated time for this bill was totally taken up by the education secretary and other MP’s blabbing on about it for ridiculous amounts of time- one of them for a full 50 minutes.

The group of MPs used up the bill’s time by talking for hours, with one speech by an education minister described by the deputy speaker as like reading a “telephone book” out loud.

Is this fair?

Do you agree with any of the arguments given by those who oppose it as to why it should not even be considered, and why they don’t think a vote should be granted on the issue?

Those arguments include;

“he himself had been taught first aid in school but had forgotten what he was taught.”

“he did not want “the Government to be sticking their nose in at every turn trying to lecture [teachers] every five minutes that they should be doing this, that, and the other”.

According to the St John’s Ambulance team, it’s a matter of life or death whether a child is taught first aid- is it common sense that we should all know what to do should an incident occur, and that educating at a young age would be a good way to ensure this?

Let us know what you think, and if there are any stories in the news you think are important to young people, feel free to let us know. Additionally, if there’s any relevant topic you’d like to write about, you can!

Thanks again,

Mae and CYC 🙂

Hey everyone, happy Sunday!

Last year, one of the priorities which emerged from the Make Your Mark ballot and onto CYC’s agenda, was “Curriculum For Life”- this means that a large number of young people felt that the education they received at school wasn’t adequate in preparing them for the “real-world” challenges they would face after leaving. Not just that- the curriculum doesn’t prepare us for the challenges we face now, it fails to provide us with the skills and information we need to live happy, healthy lives; the emphasis on grades and exams is such that young people are increasingly unable to cope with the pressure.

We decided to conduct a survey on what young people thought of their PSE lessons, what content they think is missing, and how they think they could be improved.

The results were… interesting. Young people from different schools all over Cardiff took part, and the most notable thing about the results, were the inconsistencies that they showed us. There is no real structure, or any set curriculum for PSE, meaning there are huge differences in the quality of the teaching some people received- though quite a few people claimed they were happy with their PSE lessons, we question what this means when over half weren’t convinced… are some people just happy to have a free lesson which doesn’t mean anything, to do nothing in? Either way, it was unanimously agreed that there’s a lot missing from our lessons, from important topics like citizenship, first aid and mental health awareness to having a qualified specialist doing the teaching.

We turned the most important results into an infographic, which can be seen here; Infographic_v2 (4)

What do you think these results mean? Do you agree? What should be done about it? Let us know in the comments, or on Twitter, or Facebook!

Thank you to everyone who came to September’s meeting, and we’ll look forward to seeing you later this month!