Youth Cabinet Meeting 17/05/18

By Josh Patterson on May 29, 2018 • ( 0 )

Introduction:

On Thursday 17^th May 2018, the West Sussex Youth Cabinet attended our 2^nd meeting in Centenary House, Durrington: where we received our Youth Cabinet (YC) lanyards with our names and photos on. We were joined by Mark Jenner – Head of School Effectiveness and Rachel Conway for ½ of our meeting. Then after they’d left we got into our area groups to discuss the problems we feel we have in our communities. We also spoke about some resolutions to some problems we had in the cabinet itself. The MYP that attended the meeting was DMYP Oliver Farragher.

The 1^st Half of the meeting with Mark Jenner:

During this hour, we were spoken to by Mark Jenner to speak about the education system and schools. Firstly, we conferred about the good things we thought about schools and the academic environment us youths are around. A few of these things were:

Free Education
Social Preparation
The opportunities
The receivable test results
Careers Advice

Conversely, we spoke about things we didn’t like about schools and what could be done better. A few of those things were:

Staff cuts
Pressure on students to meet expected expectations. e.g. MEGs and expected grades from SATs.
Teachers need to know students better
Mixed classes- teachers would mostly focus on the younger pupils and work was easy for older years
The range of how many pupils attend different schools: 70 in one school and 1500 in another
Low confidence talking to teachers

We also spoke about balance in schools

Teacher and pupil trust
How some years of school are either really challenging or just pathetic and useless. Yr 7. are babied because they just joined etc.
Some ways of how teachers deal with issues wrongly

After, we all were eager to ask questions and had many that were answered but unfortunately didn’t have enough time to have every single question answered or we’d have been there for hours!

The 2^nd half of the meeting:

We firstly voted in which venue we liked best and we came to the decision that we preferred Worthing to Horsham. Although one of the meetings would have to be in Horsham as it was a big venue for a big meeting. We spoke about emailing Caz for communication so she knows things but also maybe one more meeting a month in different localities to get more stuff done. Then we got into our local area groups and spoke about the problems in our communities. Based on these, we all agreed on the top 4 our Cabinet would focus on:

The Worthless Campaign
Cheaper transport for students
Mental Health Awareness
YC awareness in schools and public.

Also, in our groups the top things we would focus on are:

East Arun, Adur and Worthing- The lack of bins around in public and damaged pathways and roads
Crawley and East Grinstead- Lack of teachers attracted to West Sussex and the lack of Youth Parliament awareness
Horsham and Mid Sussex- Food Waste in schools and information centres
Chichester and West Sussex- All of the overall cabinet focuses.