Throughout April, Francesca and I have been working on all three of our priorities, to help get young people’s voices heard in Poole.

In April, we have been working relentlessly on the National campaign- “A curriculum for life”.  We have been making progress in both acquiring signatures for the petition and getting schools to sign up to the pledge. A curriculum for life is the overhaul of the current PHSE lessons, and the mandatory teaching of sex and relationships, political education, community cohesion, budgeting, citizenship tests, finance skills etc. For more information on the campaign click here

So far, we have around 300 signatures from a variety of people across Poole, and the numbers are still rising! Parkstone Grammar School has signed the pledge and we hope to get more schools to sign up. We have also had a consultation with Poole Youth Forum, whereby we got the opinions on the National Curriculum for life campaign. Everyone seemed to be in favour of the campaign and many people with very strong opinions on the matter. We have also finished correlating the results of the survey, which we can now announce.

In total, 319 people had their voices heard in our “Speak up” survey. The top voted issue was Mental Health and Wellbeing, with 100 votes alone, making up over 1/3 of the total. Therefore, this will go on to form our last priority, which we are very excited to be developing and shaping, as it is something that a huge range of people feel passionately about.

We have also made progress on our stress priority, which is very exciting. We have been working with the Dorset MYPs Moya Dunne and Eve Laird to develop a stress day that can be delivered to teaching staff to help reduce the levels of stress for young people, particularly around exam time.

We have had meetings with both the Dorset MYPs and Chris White (Strategic Manager, Open Access Team) and our day is beginning to really take shape. We are planning to hold a workshop based conference in October time, with a pack that can be taken back to the schools, to really make a difference in the levels of stress young people feel and how it can affect us. As a result, we hope to have a “Stress Charter” that schools can sign up to. We will keep you updated as we make more progress around this priority.

Finally we have been going to a variety of other meetings, such as children and young people’s overview and scrutiny panels, to represent the views of the young people of Poole. With regards to our other priorities, we have arranged meetings with various different people involved in the arts for June, to allow us to discuss the development of our arts project.

We are also in the process of setting up a Twitter page and regular surgeries to allow young people to get their voices heard about issues that they feel really passionate about, and to give them the opportunity to take their passions further and make a difference.

In the next month, we may be slightly quieter with our work, as we both have exams coming up throughout May. We wish everyone the best of luck and we can’t wait to update you in the upcoming months about the exciting work that we are doing.

Jess Elms, Member of UK Youth Parliament for Poole