Teenagers 'in charge' of council for a day

Politics A-level student Lilac Gibson said she had always wanted to know how government worked, and be a part of it.

Teenage politics students have been tasked with running a council. And while both the authority, and the challenges it faced, were ultimately fictional, the students' roles have seemed anything but.

Those taking part admit to a sense of being thrown into the deep end of political life through the "management games" event run between schools and Stoke-on-Trent City Council as part of the city's centenary celebrations.

Split into teams and given apolitical officer roles, eight groups, a mixture of A-level and T level students, had to tackle scenarios that officers running a local authority would face.

But finding out the realities behind governance has not dented the teenagers' enthusiasm for the topic, and may have strengthened it. "I just found that it was very informative to find out how many things they actually have to deal with on a day to day basis and how involved council are in our day to day lives," said student Lilac Gibson.

Real-life council officer Angela Glithero said a lot of thought went into setting the tasks, which included responding to a controversial planning application, and also taking on central government's very real and imminent plan to re-organise local authorities.

Explaining the event was the first for the city but hopefully not the last, she said: "It's absolutely new and it could be a real game changer for some of those young people."

That's because politics is a subject with which some young people are becoming increasingly engaged, according to one teacher.

Andy Colclough, A-level politics teacher at the college, said young people were becoming more interested in the subject

Staff at the City of Stoke-on-Trent College said A-level politics had recently become a popular subject choice.

The course is now oversubscribed compared to five years ago, when there were only a handful of students in each class.

Teacher Andy Colclough said he believed wider global events, such as what he described as the "Trump effect" in America were having an impact.

Stating that politics was on the forefront of young people's minds, he added: "We've had Covid, I think a lot of students are hearing around [the] dinner table we're struggling to afford shopping, food bills, energy bills, and I think they want to understand the surroundings they've got."

Stoke on Trent is not so far from Warwickshire, where in July, a 19-year-old Reform UK councillor became leader of the county council.

City of Stoke-on-Trent Sixth Form College A-level politics student Mohammed Ahmed said the event had given him a taste for political leadership

Lilac Gibson jumped at the chance to manage a council for a day and said she learned a lot from the decision-making exercise.

"Personally," she said, "I've always loved politics. I've always wanted to know how the world worked, how the government worked, and I've wanted to be a part of it myself."

Meanwhile, fellow student Mohammed Ahmed agreed that studying politics was about understanding what underpinned events around the world, calling the subject a "no brainer" for the curious.

Pointing to the future, he said: "I like to think that we're the front runners for the next generation of politics."