Tag Archives: erasmus

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 First, and most importantly, we must change our broken and outdated examination system, specifically our current post-secondary GCSEs.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.