It was as if delegates at the Form the Future Conference 2023 at Churchill College were following the lead of Members of the UK Youth Parliament when the latter did the same just over a year ago (see my blogpost here).
Above – have a listen to Izzy Garbutt MYP from 05 Nov 2022
The keynote speaker was Cambridge MP and Shadow Agriculture Minister Daniel Zeichner MP.
Above – Daniel Zeichner MP (Labour – Cambridge) with Anne Bailey of Form the Future. Photo: Richard Wishart
“How to prepare people for a rapidly-changing world”
I got the sense that various communities in Cambridge across a range of sectors, interests, cohorts, geographical areas, and social classes, are coming to the same conclusion about the malfunctioning of our city and county: our politics is not working. Our governance structures are not working.
While none of the panellists or speakers that I heard at the event were explicitly party-political – this wasn’t the time or the place for it, it was impossible to get away from the fact that the Conservatives have been in Government since 2010 (Whether in coalition, minority, or majority), and that as the major party it is their ministers that are responsible for the huge political decisions that continue to affect our lives. So when speakers criticised things like:
- the shortcomings of the OfStEd assessment systems
- the lack of funding for schools
- the continued chronic skills shortages in key sectors of the economy (local and national)…
…it’s hard not to avoid analysing and passing comment on government policy.
Making the pitch for citizenship and democracy learning
One of the things I felt was conspicuous by its absence was the lack of public sector careers people at the event – in particular the sorts of careers where young people can head down a path where they can influence the policy decisions that are made whether locally or nationally. I caught up with one longtime social media contact who I finally met up with for the first time at the event, and we agreed that far more needed to be done through both careers advice and citizenship education to ensure that young people know that careers in local government, the civil service, and in state functions like the NHS or civilian support for the uniformed services are available.
I was able to put a couple of questions – one to Mr Zeichner and one to the ‘Gen Z panel’ both of which were around citizenship education. With the latter, I asked the panellists mainly in their early 20s what their experience was of careers information for local government and the civil service, pointing out that I only found out that the civil service *existed* when I was 20 and had got to university. And even then it was only because I saw an advert in the back of The Big Issue that I had bought on a cold spring morning in Brighton back in the Year 2000. That was when one of the panellists made the connection between citizenship education and careers – something that I had not thought about before.
Furthermore, the panellist said that they had only found out about the civil service because of an outreach scheme done by a charity in London aimed at young people from under-represented backgrounds. One of the other panellists then commented that the worlds of politics and public policy are seen as good at offering ‘exclusive’ opportunities to a very limited few, but are failing badly at educating the many of the existence, let alone the functions of the institutions which may result in higher application rates from people from underrepresented backgrounds.
Daniel Zeichner’s keynote speech
As far as I’m aware the event was filmed so you’ll be able to judge for yourselves what Cambridge’s MP said. I’m not sure I trust my brain-fogged memory (I spent much of this afternoon in bed with Post-Exertional Malaise (the joys of CFS/ME) which is why I could not stay for the afternoon session.
“Citizenship is one of the most important things we can teach our young people”
Daniel Zeichner MP to Form the Future Conference 2023, 01 Dec 2023
Yesterday evening a copy of Citizenship Today by Jenny Wales arrived in the post – just in time for me to bring it along to the event. In the Q&A session I held up the book and informed the audience that only 145 teenagers in Cambridgeshire took the GCSE in Citizenship Studies in 2022. Noting that it only became a GCSE under the previous Labour Government because the then Education Secretary David Blunkett (who had spent the previous decade working on the policy) drove it through, I asked Mr Zeichner how on earth were we supposed to educate young people about the world they are entering when most of us in the room barely knew a thing about politics and policy-making. Hence I was grateful for the quotation in response because it raises what is otherwise a niche issue up the political agenda.
Pippa Heylings – LibDems MP-candidate for South Cambridgeshire on small businesses
It was good to see senior representation from both Labour and the Liberal Democrats at this event because it’s both a means people who might otherwise not get to meet local politicians being able to question them about a specific policy area (education being pretty much universal – like healthcare, which is why you cannot take the ‘Politics’ out of either in my view!) while at the same time enabling them to feed back key issues into their party policy-making functions. For the Liberal Democrats it’s worth noting that Cllr Pippa Heylings was selected as their MP-candidate a few years ago for South Cambridgeshire and that this is one of their national party’s top target seats.
I asked Pippa along with Charlotte Horobin of the Cambridgeshire Chamber of Commerce about how familiar businesses were with how Cambridge functions – mindful of the huge number of consultations that have come out from the likes of the Greater Cambridge Partnership. Because if firms who are directly affected by things like the new transport policies and proposals for transport infrastructure don’t know the first thing about how our city and county function, how can we expect them familiarise young people with the same?
I don’t know what the answer is re engaging with businesses and employers on democracy education
No – really. I haven’t got a Scoobie-Doo. I’ve spent the past decade-and-a-bit being out of the formal workplace because of ill-health, with a long-term outlook keeping me in that depressing state. Which was why the debate on equality, diversity, and inclusion that Cllr Dr Alexandra Bulat (Labour – Abbey Division) took part in was as powerful as it was sobering.
Above – Cllr Dr Bulat in full voice
One thing the moderator Kath Austin was insistent on was that the session would not be one that was full of platitude and ‘we are doing well but we need to do more’ soundbites. Hence the contribution from Miguela Gonzalez from AbCam and also on the Independent Commission on the Constitution for Wales was really useful on the specifics – starting off with the data collection. Without the data, you cannot analyse and work out how big the problem is, or where the problem areas are. Therefore you cannot respond in an informed and focussed manner.
Cllr Dr Bulat mentioned that as there is no requirement for local councils to collect data on the diversity statistics of elected members, any attempts to try and respond adequately to the lack of diversity on council benches across the country are doomed to fail. And I write as someone who has experienced being the only Person of Colour inside full council meetings for both Cambridge City and Cambridgeshire County Councils over the past decade or so. And that was as one of the very few members of the public watching on. Hence the timely reference to the #DebateNotHate motion last night at the Guildhall – see Cllr Anna Smith (Lab – Coleridge) here. We’re not going to increase diversity, equality, or inclusion if potential candidates and elected councillors are getting threats.
“You need to forgive yourself – you were not to blame for being educated within a broken system”
I had a couple of questions after the session that I put to Anna Marsden given my own limited education as a 1990s teenager.
I mentioned my own experience of being educated under the Section 28 regime alongside having to go to church every Sunday, and then deliberately choosing Brighton as a city in which to go to university in because I wanted somewhere that was the complete opposite of Cambridge as was in the late 1990s. I expanded on this by saying that I’m part of an entire generation that was ‘educated to be ignorant’ and can imagine that many would not know where to start if they wanted to have an open and enlightening discussion about everything LGBTQ+.
We discussed various options about public outreach – I mentioned the Independence Educational publications – which she said were really useful, and named a couple of local organisations who might be able to provide guest speakers for locally-organised events in and around Cambridge. This followed my point that much as the ‘Great Cambridge Crash Course’ template seems to be working, I’d be utterly out of my depth in her areas of expertise. Therefore if the concept of community learning discussions is to grow similar to as it did in the interwar and post-war eras, more potential speakers and facilitators across a greater range of issues would need to step forward.
Combining Ms Marsden’s quotation in the heading with what former Impington Head Teacher Ryan Kelsall had to say about our 1980s/1990s education was also very powerful listening for me. Without going into detail our childhoods shadowed each others from the start of primary school in the mid-1980s to the end of our A-levels in the late 1990s.
Mr Kelsall remarked that he learnt more about the skills needed for the workplace working on a fruit stall in his teens in mid-1990s Cambridge than anything he had learnt at school, college, or even his degree.
He then made a powerful case of why the Government’s policies on education – in particular on the role of OfStEd and the box-ticking nature of inspections, impeded rather than supported the learning of skills that cannot be taught via an exam paper. Which reminded me of this controversial tweet from the Department for Education.
Above – I tore ministers to bits over this in a blogpost back in 2020
The final comment that stood out was an audience comment in the equalities workshop from a delegate who identified as having ADHD – which I’m still on a waiting list to get a referral for. They described the symptoms they had experienced in the workplace and how this had resulted in them losing jobs / being ‘let go’ because the employers could not cope or did not want to make the reasonable adjustments. When they described the symptoms I was like: “That sounds like me in the middle of one of my periodical civil service crises!” The sad thing for me is that ADHD in adults was not acknowledged by the medical profession until 2008. By which time I was already crashing and burning. It has only been recently that I started reading up on ADHD in adults and how it manifests itself in the workplace (See this article for example) that what I went through at school, college, uni, and in my civil service days is beginning to make sense.
Which is why Ms Marsden’s reassurance after the workshop was ever so important for me: I wasn’t the only one struggling in that very high-pressured environment – one that the public inquiries into Grenfell and CV19 have rightly brought under scrutiny. Furthermore, I wonder what positive impact working three days a week in London and two days a week in Cambridge might have had in my commuting days – reading recently that the attempts by ministers to get everyone back in the office are resulting in some resistance. But then 15 years ago the video conferencing technology wasn’t there. I know because we tried it out at the time!
“Someone with your skills, experience, and policy background should be being snapped up by someone!”
One of the delegates at the event pulled me up on this when asking what I was doing presently. The problem is – as Mr Kelsall said, is that what the politicians are saying is not being matched by their actions and policies. They say that ‘soft skills’ are important but then they keep in place an OfStEd regime that massively disincentivises anything that might give teenagers the chances to learn those skills. He also criticised the mindset of some business talking heads often pulled in to comment in the national media for ‘expecting the finished product’ from teenagers when they leave school or college.
He was supported by Charlotte Steggall, now of WTW in Ipswich but formerly of this parish, who criticised the ‘tick-box culture’ of some of the professional learning education modules that are delivered online. The examples she gave clearly demonstrated that the testing programmes she mentioned were not giving the firms using it the reassurance that such examinations are meant to provide employers with; i.e. that the person with the qualification has been independently verified by a competent person/body as having the skills to carry out an employment function, job, or profession.
More draconian policies on those out of work, those with disabilities, chronic illnesses, or who are neurodiverse might make paper-selling headlines, but it is not sound public policy
Furthermore, younger generations are more knowledgeable and more willing to call out such things. The fact this conference took place with the theme acknowledging the demands of a new generation is testament to that. I remember filming some videos for some local young musicians in the mid-2010s whose creativity was in a different league to what my generation had. I said to a couple of them that making them do GCSEs and A-levels was a waste of their talents and that it was beyond time that ministers and the public policy establishment acknowledged this.
To conclude?
The conflicts between ministers and teaching unions have been in the headlines for some time now. Yet the problems faced by schools and teachers is one that goes far beyond the funding shortfall. Furthermore, the over-centralised structures prevent local areas – whether towns, cities, counties, economic sub-regions, you name it, from coming up with their own solutions. Not just for their own economic needs, but also social, environmental, and beyond.
My biggest hope from the event – and with thanks to Anne Bailey for the invitation, is that Mr Zeichner’s comments on citizenship will act as a spark for people across our city to familiarise themselves with the essentials of political processes and institutions *before* the general election date is announced. That way, more voters will be able to cross-examine candidates having had more time to research and prepare for what they want to ask. All the more important given that Cambridgeshire now has an additional constituency. Talking of which, if anyone wants to learn the essentials…
The Great Cambridge Crash Course: new events
- Great Cambridge Crash Course – Introduction. Sat 09 December 12:15pm-1.45pm at Rock Road Library. <<– Click here to book
- [TBC – awaiting venue confirmation]. Great Cambridge Crash Course – Introduction. Sat 16 December 12:15pm-1.45pm [NOT at Rock Road]
- Cambridge 2040 – Michael Gove’s plan to ‘Supercharge Cambridge’. Sat 23 December 12:15pm-1.45pm (with mini-booksale for last minute presents!).
- Watch out for a new series of events including some more introduction events starting in Mid-January 2024.
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The Cambridge Town Owl 