Empowering future generations to be Changemakers

The old cliché that a week is a long time in politics seems to be rather an understatement these days. Today, we live in a world where even an hour can bring about the most momentous change.

Indeed, the pace of change is more rapid than ever. Across all spheres of public life, everything has, for some time, felt like it’s moving at lightning speed.

Whether in the world of politics itself, here or in other countries; the economy; technology; conflict and wars; the environment: the changes that are taking place are relentless.

When you feel out of the loop, it can leave you with a sense that change is happening to you, not with you. That power is in others’ hands, not yours. That you have no stake in your own future.

Even those of us who are extremely engaged are finding it hard to keep up. Imagine what it must be like for people who aren’t already engaged or who face barriers to engagement. It’s impossible to know where to begin.

When you feel out of the loop, it can leave you with a sense that change is happening to you, not with you. That power is in others’ hands, not yours. That you have no stake in your own future.

Unfortunately, we also know that there are disruptive forces and influences out there seeking to undermine our democratic norms and to sow division and distrust.

Add all of this together and what you have is a recipe for a disengaged and apathetic population, a strained democracy, and a self-fulfilled reality of power centralised in too few hands.

It is in this context that all of us who have an interest in democracy must consider how we can better support people to play an active role in public life: to understand how decisions are made and, crucially, how we ourselves can claim the power to make change happen.

That was the basis of The Open University in Wales’ Changemakers project, which reported recently. It was a multi-year applied research project, supported by the OU’s Open Societal Challenges programme, which seeks to use research to find solutions to some of society’s most wicked problems.

As part of the project, we worked with young people from Grange Pavilion Youth Forum and Pembrokeshire Youth Service, practitioners, campaigners, and others to find out what and how young people want to learn about democracy and active citizenship.

[…] our research found that young people felt more confident that they would be able to effect change through the Senedd, compared to the UK Parliament. However, they were less confident in their understanding of how to go about doing that.

What we found was that young people are more likely to be dissatisfied with democracy and less likely to participate in what we’ve called formal politics, such as voting or joining a political party, although they may participate in other forms of political life.

This suggests that an increased focus on formal politics and political engagement is important and necessary when working with young people in these areas.

We also found that information and knowledge gaps are a significant barrier to participation and understanding. This is highly variable, depending on the quality of political education received at school.

Interestingly, our research found that young people felt more confident that they would be able to effect change through the Senedd, compared to the UK Parliament. However, they were less confident in their understanding of how to go about doing that. A lack of knowledge, particularly in terms of who and where to contact, contributed to this.

All UK curricula, including the Curriculum for Wales, would therefore benefit from a more specific focus on political education and active citizenship. In this context, it may be useful to consider the findings of my colleagues Prof Eleni Andreouli, Dr Sandra Obradović, and Prof Kesi Mahendran in their Citizens in the Making report.

Similarly, we found that young people are very often unsure about how the various levels of local, national, nation-state, and international parliaments, governments, and agencies work. There is a lack of understanding of what each of these are for, and who is responsible for what.

Any enhanced political education should therefore include this important context, and should also reflect the sociocultural, historical, and political circumstances of the place in which it is delivered.

The Curriculum for Wales is perhaps starting to make somewhat of a difference, but we also found that the focus on citizenship education in schools, and especially secondary schools, can be problematic.

Citizenship education should therefore not only be embedded in the school curriculum, but also extended to post-16 learners and to adults in the community as part of a wider public information strategy.

Learners in post-compulsory settings are largely going without, and that’s to say nothing about adults.

Citizenship education should therefore not only be embedded in the school curriculum, but also extended to post-16 learners and to adults in the community as part of a wider public information strategy.

As well as studying what young people wanted to learn, we also looked at how they wanted to learn. We developed a number of resources – including our Introduction to making political and social change course on the OU’s free online learning platform OpenLearn – which we tested with young people. Perhaps unsurprisingly, what we found was that an online tool would be most effective.

The result is a new learning resource called Changemakers, aimed at supporting young people to understand issues, know how to take action, be inspired by other young changemakers, and to grasp the basics of devolution.

It’s a bilingual website that has been tailored to the specific context of Wales, and to what we found through our research, which we hope will be useful in supporting young people to become active citizens.

While this part of the project has now been reported, this work is by no means finished. Neither our report nor the Changemakers website are final products. Indeed, our research showed that these can be developed further, and that yet more resources are needed, both in Wales and further afield.

What is clear is that we must all put our shoulders to the wheel because our democracy depends on it. In this ever-changing world of ours, we need more diversity of experience and thought, not less; more voices in our politics, not fewer; and more people exercising their democratic rights, not fewer.

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