Lesson video

Hello, and welcome to our lesson today.

My name is Mr. Miskell and I'll be your citizenship teacher for today's lesson.

Now today's learning is part of a wider unit of work about how does local democracy work.

Now, what we will be focusing on today is just one aspect of that, which is about why is registering to vote so important.

Before we start our learning together, we just need to make sure that we've got a few things sorted.

Now you need to make sure that you've got a pen or pencil by your side and a sheet of paper so that you can participate in the tasks that we're going to do together, and you can also make notes about important points.

As well as that you need to make sure that you are in a quiet space so that you can participate in our learning without any distractions.

Now, if you've got all those things sorted then you can continue with our lesson now, but if not, you can take the opportunity to pause our class and you can restart it when you have got those things sorted.

Now, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about our agenda today, so what we're going to be doing.

So the first thing that we're going to be doing is we're going to be considering why registering to vote is so important.

We're going to be personalising that with someone called Zac and talking about why it's important to Zac and his life and what he wants to change in his community.

Then we're going to be looking at what is the process of registering to vote, which will then lead us into helping Zac's voter registration drive.

And we're going to be talking about what a voter registration drive is in a second.

We're going to create a leaflet for a voter registration drive that Zac can use on his stall to encourage people to register to vote, and it'll run people through the different steps of registering to vote.

That will then lead us on to consider about power, because in citizenship we consider power a lot and why it's so significant to decisions that are made in our communities, but also in the wider country and the wider world, and why the local elections matter in terms of power in our local area.

After we've done that we're going to be bringing our learning together.

So let's get going with our learning today.

Now the character that you see on screen is Zac, which we've been talking about throughout this unit of work.

And I would like us to consider Zac and the importance of registering to vote.

Now I will make this full screen so that you can follow this as I read through it with you.

There are two words on your screen that you may well struggle with a little bit.

They're going to be parts of the glossary at the end of the lesson, but I'll just define them now to help you with that.

The first one is democracy, and by democracy we mean a system of government whereby people are able to express their views fairly and to vote.

And a voter registration drive is something that we're going to explain in significantly more detail later on in the lesson, but what we mean by that is an organised process of encouraging residents to register to vote.

And a voter must be on the electoral register in order to vote.

So Zac and the importance of registering to vote.

After one of his friends was injured by a speeding motorist, Zac is concerned about the busy road outside his school.

To prevent further injuries, he wants speed bumps to be installed by his local council.

Unfortunately, Zac can't vote in the local elections himself because he's not 18 years old, but he knows that it's a smart move to get people who support his cause registered to vote.

That's because in a democracy, candidates want to win votes and are, therefore, more likely to support causes that a large number of voters care about.

With this in mind, Zac and his friends have decided to organise a voter registration drive in his area.

Now, that leads us on to a voter registration drive in action.

And the photo that you see on your screen now is an example of a voter registration drive, and it's in the United States in the early 1960s.

And the picture shows children gathering around a street stall that aims to get the black community registered to vote and demand racial equality.

And you can see in that wonderful photo there that that's part of an organised effort to get people on to the electoral register, to get them voting and then to get them voting to demand more racial equality.

So voter registration drives are something that have been used throughout history.

Now, I am going to ask in a short while that you are going to fill in the gaps after watching a short video from Stockton-on-Tees Council about how do you register to vote.

Now you can see on screen that the missing words that we're going to be looking for are registration, loan, voters, individual, vote, 16, minutes, and online.

Now I will bring this back up on screen after you have watched the video, and I will give you an opportunity to pause once again to kind of fill this in and look at the missing words in even more detail after watching the video, but I'll also make it full screen now so that, of course you can pause our lesson and you can make a note of those missing words so that you can fit them into the correct place on the particular passage.

Your voice matters so make sure you're heard.

Register to vote.

Your vote matters, make sure you're in.

Every individual is now responsible for their own voter registration.

So if you are 16 or over, you must make sure you're on the register of voters or you will not be able to vote.

More than 137,000 Stockton residents are currently registered to vote, but thousands of people in Stockton are not.

Are you one of them? Well, it's easy and only takes a couple of minutes.

You'll need your National Insurance Number.

It's so quick, you can register to vote in the time it takes to make a cup of tea.

If you're not registered to vote it may stop you from getting a mobile phone, opening a bank account, getting a loan, applying for a mortgage.

Your vote matters, make sure you're in.

So I said, didn't I, that I was going to put this back up on the screen and you were going to now have an opportunity to fill in the missing words about what we've watched on Stockton-on-Tees Council about registering to vote.

I will make this full screen and that will give you an opportunity to find out where the missing words are.

Remember the missing words were registration, loan, voters, individual, vote, 16, minutes and online.

So, thank you very much for having a go with that task, for watching the video and filling in the gaps in the passage.

Now, the answer to this and some feedback for you is that your vote matters.

Every individual is now responsible for their own voter registration.

So if you are 16 or over, you must make sure that you are on the register of voters or you won't be able to vote.

Thousands of people in Stockton are not registered.

Registering only takes a few minutes.

You will need your National Insurance Number.

You can register online.

If you are not registered to vote it may stop you from getting a mobile phone, opening a bank account and getting a loan.

Now, well done with that activity.

One particular thing you might be confused about here is a National Insurance Number.

That's something that's issued to people by the government when they're 16 years or older and it allows them to work really.

And it's something that they have to give to their employer, but here it's used to help local councils kind of verify that the people exist.

So you would give your National Insurance Number to your local council so that they could verify that you exist and therefore can go on the electoral register as well.

So that leads us in to our next task, which is going to be about a voter registration leaflet.

Because Zac is running a voter registration store in his community, he needs a leaflet to give out to members of the public at his store explaining how people can register to vote and why it is so important.

Now I want you to think back to the video from Stockton-on-Tees Council, and your leaflet should include two things.

Firstly, why registering to vote is important.

And secondly, what you need to do to register to vote as well.

You can see from that picture on your screen there that a leaflet is something that's often folded up into multiple parts as well.

It's something that you hand out to people and that Zac is going to use in order to explain it to the general public, because sometimes, on a store you want to talk to people verbally, which is really good, but you might also want to give them something in order to take away, to remind them of the process of registering to vote as well, which is Zac saying, he's trying to get as many people on to the electoral register.

So now is the time that you need to pause the video to complete your task.

Now you need to hit play again once you finish to resume it, when you've done the task Good luck.

So thank you very much for really designing an excellent leaflet there about voter registration that Zac can use as part of his voter registration drive.

Now I'd like you to complete a bit of a self-assessment feedback about this.

And this table is part of the worksheet to help you, that's attached to this lesson.

The things that I'd like you to specifically look at is does it explain why registering to vote is important? So give it a tick if it does, as part of your self-assessment, or a cross if it doesn't.

And underneath it, does it explain what you need to do to register to vote? So you can give it either a tick if you think that it does explain what you need to do to register to vote, or give it a cross if not.

Now you don't need to have a copy of this table in front of you, you could draw the table on sheets of paper and just give it a tick or a cross.

Or you could ask someone else, perhaps in your household, or someone else around you to help you with this assessment as well.

So good luck with the self-assessment.

Now as part of our agenda at the start of the lesson we were talking about power and we said that we would talk about why local elections matter and about power and control of councils.

Now elections matter because they elect your local representatives to make council decisions.

But local elections also matter because they decide which political party is in power and, therefore, who runs your local council.

A political party with the majority of councillors can run the council and make decisions.

Now that majority is really, really important.

And I'm just going to take an opportunity to explain what we mean by majority and what the definition is.

Now, a majority means one political party having 50% plus one of all councillors on a council.

And that's really significant, isn't it? Because if you've got a majority of councillors you can make decisions without any other political party or group of political parties, or group of councillors ganging up against you to stop you making that decision.

That's what we mean by power really, you've got the power to make decisions as a group, as a political party.

And an example of that, that I'd like to share with you is of Newcastle City Council.

And this is Newcastle City Council in the summer of 2020.

And you can see from the colours on screen that one particular political party has the majority.

Can you see which political party has the majority there? Now in order to get certain, in order to get a majority, so the number of councillors needed for majority is 39.

How do we work out what that figure? Well, it's 50% of all councillors.

So 50% of the 78, plus one councillor.

And you can see there that the majority of councillors are the red grouping, and that is Labour, which is 56 councillors.

So they've got well over a majority of councillors.

And you can see that the Liberal Democrats have got 19 councillors, and Independent, so those councillors without a political party are three.

So even if the Liberal Democrats and the Independents ganged together they still wouldn't have power because they still wouldn't reach a majority of councillors.

And we know that a majority is 50% of all councillors plus one there.

Now, I'd like us to use that knowledge of what we mean by a majority and what we mean by power and a majority to look at a case study.

And our case study is of local election results in Walsall, which is in the West Midlands.

And it means that power shifts to the conservatives.

I'd like you to read the summary of the local election results in Walsall to help you with the next task.

Now I'll make this bigger on the screen to help you.

Now, there are a few words on your screen in different colours.

We have already talked about majority and what we mean by a majority, but words that we haven't talked about is manifesto or manifestos.

A manifesto is a set of written pledges to potential voters about what a political party or local candidate would do if elected.

And a ballot box is the box where voters votes are placed once cast in a polling station.

A polling station is a place where people vote.

So in May, 2019 local Conservatives in Walsall won enough seats to form a majority on the local council.

This followed on from the local Labour Party winning control of the council in May, 2018 local election.

Both political parties fought the election on very different manifestos, each making different promises for the West Midlands town.

The choice people made at the ballot box made a direct difference to who was in power in their town.

So what we are now going to do is look at a task to do with that particular case, to the example there from Walsall.

And I would like you to pause the video to complete your task, but the task of course is task three, why local elections matter, control of councils.

And number one, you are going to look at what does winning a majority on a local council mean? Now, of course you can go back and rewind the lesson and you can look at what we mean by a majority.

Number two, so question number two is after the local election in May, 2019 which political party held the majority of council seats in Walsall and therefore ran the council? So you need to press play and resume once you've finished this, and good luck with the task.

So thank you very much for having a go at that particular task there.

And I'm going to give you a little bit of feedback.

So in response to number one, which is what does winning a majority on a local council mean? Well, we know that winning a majority means that a political party has 50% plus one of all councillors on a council.

They can then make decisions and not worry about being blocked by an opposition political party.

Number two, after local elections in May, 2019 which political party held a majority of council seats in Walsall and therefore ran the council? The answer to that is the Conservatives.

Now you can use this that's on your screen to help make your answer even stronger as well, particularly if you were struggling with any part of it as well.

So, after all that we need to consider whether Zac's voter registration drive, whether it made a difference.

So did Zac's voter registration drive make a difference? And I'll make this full screen so that you can read through this with me and we can read through it together.

Now, Zac managed to get 35 people signed up to vote.

Many of these were young people who supported his campaign to get speed bumps to be installed after one of his friends was injured by a speeding motorist.

These new voters made all of the candidates standing in the election much more interested in supporting his campaign.

This is because in a democracy, candidates want to win votes and are therefore more likely to support causes that a large number of voters care about.

In 2019 the Electoral Commission said that one in three young people are not registered to vote, meaning that they don't get a say.

Would you consider a voter registration drive in your area? Now, after participating in this I hope that a voter registration drive might be something that you want to consider as part of a future active citizenship project to do some amazing things in your community and make people much more engaged and participate in democracy.

Now, I would like us to use some of our knowledge that we've learned today in order to try and answer this particular question, which will then lead us on to looking at the glossary of key terms and words that we've covered today.

So firstly, a ballot box is the box where votes are placed once cast in a polling station.

So is it true or is it false? I'd like you to say to me and shout out the answer.

Is it true or is it false there, that a ballet box is the box where votes are placed once cast in a polling station? Now the answer to that is that of course it is true.

A ballot box is somewhere where votes are put once they are cast, and in a locked box because it's important that it is a secret ballot and that people don't know what you voted for, because of course we worry that if people did then there might be pressure on people to vote in a certain way and that's not fair in a democracy.

But we know that actually that ballot box is where votes are placed inside a polling station once you actually vote.

Now that leads us on to our glossary of terms. Now democracy is a system of government whereby people are able to express their views fairly and to vote.

A voter registration drive is an organised process of encouraging residents to register to vote, and that all voters must be on the electoral register.

A majority means one political party having 50% plus one of all councillors on a council.

A manifesto is a set of written pledges to potential voters about what a political party or local candidate would do if elected.

A ballot box is the box where voters votes are placed once cast in a polling station.

Now I'll make this full screen now so that you can make a note of any terms or words that you find particularly confusing.

So thank you very much for participating in today's lesson.

Now we've done a number of things together.

At the very start of the lesson we said we were going to look at why registering to vote is important.

We looked at Zac and we looked at his voter registration drive that he was trying to do.

In order to do that successfully we had to understand the process of registering to vote, and we watched a video from Stockton-on-Tees Council that was trying to encourage citizens in that particular town to register to vote.

Then we helped Zac in his voter registration drive by creating a voter registration leaflet that you then self-assessed.

We then looked at why this was important, and we said that, well it was important because it was about power within local councils and about who makes decisions.

And then finally, we brought our learning together.

Now, if you want to share your work with Oak National that would be absolutely wonderful.

And if you'd like to please ask your parents or carers to share your work on Twitter by tagging @OakNational and using the hashtag #LearnwithOak.

Now, the materials from today's lesson have been provided from the Association for Citizenship Teaching.

Before you finish your lesson, here's a quick reminder about making sure that you do please complete the exit quiz now.

Now, it has been an absolute joy to be your citizenship teacher for today's lesson and I hope you have an absolutely wonderful day.

Thank you and bye-bye, bye-bye Your voice matters, so make sure you're heard.

Register to vote.

Your vote matters, make sure you're in.

Every individual is now responsible for their own voter registration, so if you are 16 or over, you must make sure you're on the register of voters or you will not be able to vote.

More than 137,000 Stockton residents are currently registered to vote, but thousands of people in Stockton are not.

Are you one of them? Well, it's easy and only takes a couple of minutes.

You'll need your National Insurance Number.

It's so quick, you can register to vote in the time it takes to make a cup of tea.

If you're not registered to vote it may stop you from getting a mobile phone, opening a bank account, getting a loan, applying for a mortgage.

Your vote matters, make sure you're in.