World Forum for Democracy: “Unlocking Parliament” for young people

Strasbourg, 8 November 2016

Sponsored by the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe, Lab 4 “Unlocking Parliament” initiated a discussion on this subject on the basis of the recent experience of two government-funded bodies: ProDemos (Netherlands) and the Parliamentary Education Centre (United Kingdom).

Against the background of the crisis of representative democracy in Europe, as reflected in the rise in populism and electoral abstention, there is an urgent need to raise young people’s awareness of their power as citizens and voters.

On the basis of an interactive play-based approach, developed by ProDemos, 83,000 Dutch pupils on "school trips" visited the House of Representatives in The Hague in 2015 and participated in simulations of the parliamentary process. Around 30,000 others took part in local programmes in their own schools and through visits to municipal, judicial or other institutions. According to the project’s manager, Ms Lilian Leeuwenburgh-Stolwijk, the first scientific assessments of the impact of the programme noted an increase in pupils’ confidence in the institutions and the democratic process in general. A serious challenge remained, namely to reach a larger number of pupils of all ages and all levels of schooling, the aim being to ensure that all Dutch children could visit the parliament at least once before reaching the age of majority.

As far as new technologies are concerned, the Parliamentary Education Centre, which is attached to the Education Service of the United Kingdom Parliament, is extremely impressive with its presentation space comprising four video walls (360°), where pupils from 5 to 18 years of age are totally immersed in the history and present-day context of the oldest parliament in the world. Question-and-answer sessions with MPs are organised in addition to the educational programme. “We’ve managed to build a centre with state-of-the-art facilities so that children no longer associate the image of Parliament with bygone eras”, explained the Education Service’s project manager Mr Daniel Gallacher. “It was a big challenge to obtain taxpayers’ money against the background of the financial crisis, but we succeeded. Only 9,000 students visited Parliament in 2006, but in 2016 the number has reached about 100,000.”

While applauding the professional excellence of the two initiatives, Ms Gudrun Mosler-Törnström, President of the Council of Europe Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, emphasised the importance of educating people about politics on a more regular basis as part of the national curriculum. Like her, the head of Democracy Matters in the United Kingdom, Mr Titus Alexander, mentioned the importance of situating this type of programme at the municipal level. He also stressed the need to focus more on marginalised communities.

The participants acknowledged the importance of increasing the number of young people able to participate in parliamentary simulations, as carried out also in countries such as Estonia and Ukraine, as well as in Alsace through its Youth Parliament. It was also suggested that this type of assembly be involved for real in the decision-making process of local and regional parliaments, as was the case at the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe, where young representatives could express their views. A consensus emerged regarding the role the Congress could play as a platform for co-ordination and sharing good practices with regard to experiential learning about representative democracy. The project co-ordinators in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom indicated their willingness to leave their contact details with the participants and representatives of various NGOs or other initiatives in the same field, in order to enable a network for information exchange to be set up in the immediate aftermath of the WFD’s LAB 4.

The efforts made in connection with this type of initiative indeed come up against several challenges, which were mentioned in the discussions and were summarised in his concluding remarks by Mr Andreas Kiefer, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe Congress of Local and Regional Authorities. Those challenges include not limiting the process to elite schools that are more proactive in their desire to participate, negotiating bigger public spending budgets and ensuring the long-term viability of programmes, trying not to idealise institutions while at the same time fostering a positive mind-set among pupils, developing critical thinking and responsible attitudes, creating networks of teachers so that political education becomes embedded in the everyday life of schools, and doing more to situate these efforts at the municipal level.