Schools Question Time

On Thursday the BBC broadcast one of my favourite programmes of the year, Schools Question Time. It’s the annual edition of the regular Question Time but with a distinctly youth flavour: produced by student winners of a competition; a young audience; and for the third year running a “young person” on the panel. Because I was out on Thursday evening, I’ve only just got around to watching it.

For whatever reason, this year’s programme felt significantly more small-c conservative than previous editions.  The audience definitely was older than before*, and the panellists, with the exception of 18-year-old Suzanne Burlton, could have been on any edition of the programme. And whilst all credit to Suzanne for her ability to participate in the discussion, I couldn’t help thinking she was a fairly predictable wannabe-politician and brought little to the table that wouldn’t have been said by someone twice her age. It’s a theme similar to my previous two posts, we need to engage young people on their level: not dress them up in suits and tell them to act like grown-ups.

Even the comments from the audience seemed a lot more restrained than other years, and certainly they seemed less vocal than we’ve seen on the programme over the last few months.  A young person who suggested that others turn to drink because there was nothing for them to do on a Friday night was rebuked with the suggestion she should read a book.  (Meanwhile a friend on Twitter said “they have the internet now FFS!” – I can’t quite work out whether he was joking).

Where was anyone, in the audience or on the panel, championing the right for young people to hang-out with each other on a Friday night? With the exception of one audience member, there seemed little support for the idea that young people might actually want places to go on Friday night and the weekend, and pointing out that if there isn’t the provision of suitable activities then they’ll create their own. There are moves to increase weekend opening of statutory youth clubs, but it’s still sketchy as best and there is plenty of resistance to the idea. And yet we know that young people respond positively to having activities to do – it’s often that there aren’t the adults to support them.

All this said, I still like the fact that we have this programme and would love to be invited to work on the show (or be in the audience one time).

On a related note, I was glad to see that John Bercow, the recently-appointed speaker of the House of Commons, stepped in to reverse a decision made by Commons authorities to prevent Cub Scouts being able to lobby their MPs because they were not old enough to vote.  Luckily most MPs appear to have thought this was a patently absurd decision, but you do have to wonder how anyone reached that decision in the first place.

* it’s worth pointing out that reading up on how the programme is put together, I think the young producers can choose the age of the audience as well as the panellists.

Photo, showing David Dimbleby at another Schools Question Time event, courtesy of eyedropper. Used under licence.