A poll conducted by YouGov after the last general election revealed that the Liberal Democrats won 16% of the vote of those aged 18–24-year-olds. As good as this may seem (especially compared to 5% of the same age group we won in 2015), this was still 2% behind the Green Party and 25% behind Labour. Traditionally, social liberal parties tend to score well amongst younger voters and this trend has continued in all elections this year. To further solidify our status as an electoral force this is the most likely demographic with which we could make advances in 2025 and beyond. As Labour plans to extend voting rights to those aged 16 and 17, there is no better time to run on a progressive platform aimed towards young people.
EDUCATION
The Conservative Party have broken education. We’ve seen this figuratively in the failure of Gove’s academy system and literally as our underfunded schools are cold, damp and falling to pieces. The current Labour government has a mountain to climb when it comes to, not only improving the quality of our state schools, but also to ensure that our education system is equipping our young people for the real world.
In our current secondary school education system, there is far too much emphasis on examinations. Students who may be talented engineers or mathematicians will have to re-sit an entire GCSE because they couldn’t describe a desert well enough in their English exam. On the other hand, our future doctors and surgeons may not be able to pursue their ideal course at Sixth-form or college because they forgot the exact trigonometrical value of sin, cos and tan. The problem is that our examinations are stripping away the value of our education system; damaging the progress and wellbeing of our students. Students will sit around 31 and half hours of exams, not only is this brutal on our young people but it’s incredibly difficult on our teachers who are working relentlessly to ensure that their students are equipped enough to get a certain number on a test.
To solve this, I propose a change to the way we go about education. First, and most importantly, we must change our broken and outdated examination system, specifically our current post-secondary GCSEs. Exams are becoming increasingly irrelevant with students having to learn a large amount of content which they won’t ever use again and can be easily replaced with fewer exams over a longer period of time. Japan and Canada have a small number of standardised tests every couple of years and both have a thriving education system with an improving number of satisfied students.
FOREIGN POLICY
The Erasmus programme was one of the less pronounced concessions we made when leaving the European Union. This was a scheme where students were able to study or do an internship in another EU country or one of the 6 ‘third countries’ associated with the programme. This was funded by the European Commission. We chose to leave the EU and not become a third country in the programme so, to put it simply, our students have less opportunities than others.
Obviously, we can’t just rejoin the European Union tomorrow, but rejoining the Erasmus programme once the current cycle ends in 2027 will be vital to ensure that the quality of education and opportunities granted to our students don’t fall further behind our European counterparts.
My last proposal is to grant some sort of advisory power to the British Youth Parliament. For those who aren’t too sure what this is, it’s basically a group of young people elected in their local area to represent the interests of the youth in their area. In my local area, Salford, our members of youth parliament are working to reconstruct an old youth centre in partnership with other youth groups; despite their local success the role is almost entirely tokenistic. The British Youth Parliament have a large meeting in the Commons every few months and, despite their supposed mandate from young people, they have no power to advise government and have a largely pointless role when it comes to anything outside of their local area.
The British Youth Council, the group running Youth Parliament, was recently scheduled to close due to “ongoing financial challenges”, since that announcement the running of the Youth Parliament was handed over by the Government to the NYA or National Youth Agency. The group is now running from a grant by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. This should have been an indication that those in power intended to have some relationship with the Youth Parliament but both major parties have left the group in its current ineffective position. This leaves an open goal for us to propose a method of allowing the Youth Parliament to advise government on policy impacting young people. The Youth Parliament can write reports to MPs and act as an insider pressure group to enact real positive change.
To summarise, the votes of young people will be essential if we’re to carry on our electoral progress. I propose to:
- Replace our current system of standardised testing
- Rejoin the Erasmus programme (already party policy)
- Grant advisory power to the British Youth Parliament
Follow @LibDemVoice on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
By 1954 not even Dickie Attenborough was safe on a bombsite
Tories in disarray as Badenoch wings it on pensions
Can you help Barnardo's?
Latest voting intention and leadership ratings opinion polls
Aging, Development, and Living at High Altitudes (Oxygen Levels)
The Charge of the Light Brigade - A perfect analogy for the United Kingdom today
Peter Davies
Craig Levene
Nick Baird
David Evans
Anthony Acton
7 Comments
Spot on about education. We need to put forward a changed curriculum and qualifications system that in our secondary schools comes under one framework with equal parity for practical and academic learning so they are not regarded as of different value. In 2022 there were 3 reports saying how our system is not fit for the future of our young people and the overemphasis on passing written exams is part of the problem. In the last 2 years I have tried to persuade our party of this and so far, no progress.
In making policy on education, one should decide first if the aim is to maximise the potential of the individual or issue job-tickets for a neo-liberal economy. The former leads to ideas like a life-long learning account. The latter leads to a treadmill of competitive exams aligned to the needs of prospective employers, as interpreted by commissars.
Once you make clear your aims, detailed policy will flow.
These seem like very niche proposals. Nothing wrong with that per se, but they don’t seem to me like the kind of things that should be high priority in attracting the youth vote. I’d expect most young people are likely to be far more concerned with issues such as whether they will be able to get a good job and afford a decent place to live once they leave home/University/etc. and whether enough is being done to tackle problems like climate change.
Erasmus benefits only a tiny proportion of students. Providing that opportunity may well be a good thing but it’s hardly a mass vote winner. And I would disagree with David about exams. Sure, there’s probably a case for reviewing whether we are testing people the right way, and for making sure that the content of courses is appropriate and relevant. But there’s nothing wrong with, at the end of a course, giving people the chance to show how well they’ve studied, understood, and learned to apply what they’ve learned. Exams (plus a contribution from coursework) are an imperfect way of doing that, but I’m not sure anyone has yet devised anything better.
Thank you for an important « signpost » article!
Might it be that our state education is not broken but succeeding in submergedly encouraging our children and students to become mass produced adults who are unquestioning, subservient and stunted in the attitudes, skills and concepts which facilitate and encourage critical thinking and social cohesion?
« We can only see what our attitudes let us see and our minds are organised and prepared to grasp. Too often, we present our children and students with answers to remember instead of the drive to perceive opportunities, problems and in-betweens and then analyse and manage them well. » (From H. Bergson and R, Lexington)
Why does the EU refer to us a third country?
Presumably France, Germany etc are first countries? Who are the second countries?
Does their list of approval extend to fourth and fifth countries?
It is our internationalist view that should appeal to young voters and distinguish us from the other Parties. We live in an interdependent world and young people understand this best. It is only by working with others that we will regain our place on the world stage.
I would question the branding of the academisation (which is actually a cross party achievement spanning 40 years) as a “failure”. If you look at the evidence in the sector (I say this as a teacher myself) the academisation programme has moved the education system away from local government and into the hands of sector experts.
On the examination system – I would recommend looking at Arne Duncan’s “How Schools Work” and similar works which provide a very good defence of why examinations are utterly necessary. Our curriculum reforms and academisation (which we implemented in government) are some of the things we should be proudest of because of the positive effect they have had on raising literacy and numeracy rates amongst some of the most disadvantaged communities.