Voices blog

Over the past few months, I have been interning with the legal team at the Citizenship Foundation. In November, I attended a Lawyers in Schools training session at Slaughter and May.

Here, the lawyers were given instructions on how to teach the students about the law and how to run the various activities that would help the students think more deeply about the topics. The lawyers who attended the training session all wished to devote their time to their partner school that they would be working with for the next few months.

Aside from learning about how to run the programme in the schools, the lawyers participated in one of the activities that the students would be doing in the Human Rights session. The lawyers were really involved with the activity and there was much debate over some of the issues and questions posed. The lawyers were enthusiastic and excited about the programme and were eager to volunteer their time in the schools.

I also had the opportunity to observe a Lawyers in Schools session at both The Urswick School in Hackney and Central Foundation Girls’ School in Tower Hamlets. The students were very excited to have the lawyers in their classroom and were engaged with the topics discussed. In fact, the students and the lawyers were so engaged with one particular issue that they spent the entire allotted time on one activity.

The students seemed to have learned a lot about what was being covered and were thrilled to share their beliefs on the topic. I remember one of the students at the Urswick School talked about how one should be responsible regarding the driving age. Listening in, I overheard one of the students list some of differences between the laws in the U.K. compared to the laws in the U.S.

Each of the volunteers who participated in these sessions appeared to have enjoyed their time working in the classroom. The lawyers were excited for the subsequent Lawyers in Schools sessions and getting to know their students better.

It was entertaining to watch these sessions because I liked to hear what the student’s opinions were. I also liked watching the lawyers interact with them as well. The lawyers and the students seemed as if they had learned a lot from each other and were looking forward to spending the next few months working together.

Erin is studying Business Management at Siena College in New York and has been helping us out while studying in London on a placement scheme. She has been interning at the Citizenship Foundation, helping out on the Lawyers in Schools programme, Magistrates Court Mock Trial Competition and Bar National Mock Trial Competition.

The Government published data on Friday (19th November) on governmental spend over £25,000.

Open data enthusiasts are piling on from all sides to pick through the data.  I must admit that my first instinct was one of sheer neighbourly nosiness; I looked first to see how much support the charity I work for receives from government, then had a quick look at those that I’m most interested in because they are most like us.  But in the long term I can see this giving me a much more detailed understanding of how public services that I am interested in are being delivered.

There is criticism as well that this will lead to a nation of  ‘armchair auditors’ who instead of curtain-twitching, will be going online to poke into the details of government spend, and then FOI-ing the life out of any department who has spent money on something that they don’t like.  Well, yes, it is time consuming for civil servants to answer Freedom of Information requests, but we have to decide whether that’s a part of democratic life that we are going to support.  I think it has to be.  My view at heart is that surely it cannot be right that we can find out more about our best mate’s ex on Facebook than we can about how our tax money gets used (for the record, I do nothing to find out any information about my best mate’s ex).

In any case, delivering public data to the interested citizen seems to be a large part of what the Coalition government sees as ‘Big Society’ - digitally and statistically empowered citizens logging on to scrutinise government expenditure, looking for value for money and looking for delivery of promises.

It’s a tall order.  I’m a self-confessed open data geek but it still challenges my analytical muscles to stretch and strain meaning out of the data published today.  If the Government really want meaningful, independent discussion about this data, then Citizenship Education needs to be supported to help people work with it.  Otherwise the digital divide combined with open data will result in an increased participation gap, with those in-the-know able to get better evidence for their side of the argument and ultimately tilting patterns of distribution so that public services meet their needs. We cannot afford to take a ‘you snooze, you lose,’ approach to something so critical as who gets which services. Something needs to be happening right now, in schools and in communities, across all age groups and all levels of digital fluency, to help people get to grips with how government runs this place.

This could mean interesting stuff, like linking up Citizenship Education with mathematics (understanding statistics) or with ICT (understanding how to use ICT to deal with data).  But that takes time and commitment, and the leadership needs to come from the grassroots AND those who set national policy.

If governments want engaged citizens, then they must support Citizenship Education, by retaining it in the statutory curriculum, by supporting it in communities, and by giving those who teach it sufficient resources and support.

Essi Lindstedt, writing in a personal capacity, and as a signatory to the Democratic Life campaign.

Working on Go-Givers, I’ve seen time and time again, that given the right tools, many children will give up their time or money for a good cause, - and I’m sure that my friends over in G Nation will attest to the same thing. So, I was interested to read research published by the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) on the charitable thoughts and habits of children and young people.

This week, Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) published their research in conjunction with FIVE News- in the run up to their ‘Britain’s Kindest Kid’ competition. Some of CAF’s findings reflect the trends highlighted by the Citizenship Foundation’s Giving Nation research - Cancer Research, RSPCA and Children in Need coming out as popular benefactors in both cases, for example. More surprisingly, CAF’s research tells us that 27% of young people had given money to charity in the past 6 months, a low figure when compared with the 55% cited by G Nation’s 2007 research.

After reading the CAF figures, what struck me, is that 75% of the children surveyed would like to give more to charity. Furthermore, 85% believe that charities need to do more to get children interested in their work. So, how to bridge that gap? Well, schools taking part in the Giving Nation Challenge seem to have done a pretty good job of it - in the 08-09 academic year, groups of young people in schools across the UK worked together to raise £295,123.86 for charities of their choosing. On top of that, kids in London primary schools were busy with the Make a Difference Challenge - fundraising was a focus for some, whereas others decided that petitioning or awareness-raising were more appropriate ways to support their chosen cause.

Beyond just fundraising, kids taking part in these programmes feel a real sense of achievement. A 9 year old working on a local regeneration project recently told me “I am proud of what we are doing. I hope there will be change” adding that “Helping society is fun!”.