Leader Dialogues
What are Leader dialogues?
The Leader Dialogue sessions are an opportunity for learners across Wales to ask the Senedd political party leaders questions that matter to them. Building on the success of the Leader Dialogues delivered in 2022, we have delivered further Leader Dialogue sessions as part of this programme.
What we delivered
We held four Leader Dialogues in October 2023, with 175 Y8 to 13 learners from 11 schools questioning the Senedd Party leaders. We then held another four in January and February 2025, with a further 549 learners from 9 schools and colleges. You can find a list of the leaders who took part in the appendix.
Questions covered a variety of different issues, including the 20mph speed limit, climate change, foreign policy, university fees, devolution, healthcare and the coming 2026 Senedd Elections. Each leader also answered questions about their own political journey and career.
Young people must have the opportunity not just to speak with politicians, but to engage meaningfully with the political process itself. The more we empower them to engage constructively with decision-makers early on, the stronger our democracy becomes.
I’m grateful for the invitation and the insightful questions from learners—I look forward to taking part again in the future."
Impact of Leader Dialogues
Leader Dialogues are popular with teachers and learners. They serve as a useful recruitment tool, with five teachers/schools joining the programme for the first time, and a further seven returning to the programme because of the opportunity for the learners to take part in a Leader Dialogue.
The impact of Leader Dialogues on learners’ political knowledge and understanding, their oracy and communication skills, their trust in the democratic system and confidence to engage in politics is still positive, though lower than the impact the ‘standard’ Dialogues have.
Our feedback data is limited from Leader Dialogue sessions, so it is hard to know exactly why this is the case. It could be due to less preparation; from speaking to teachers, learners who take part in Leader Dialogues tend to focus on question preparation, rather than encouraging learners to understand the role of the leaders, and so on. It may also be due to the format of the Leader Dialogues, with large groups of learners taking part and only a limited number of those learners able to ask questions.
As we discuss in our ‘Key learnings’ section, group size and the opportunity to ask questions affect the impact of the session on learner political knowledge and understanding, skills, and confidence.
From speaking to teachers, the key benefit of the Leader Dialogues is to make more senior politicians feel approachable and within reach. Indeed, learners who took part in Leader Dialogues are more likely than those who took part in the ‘standard’ Dialogues to contact a politician - a 9% point positive change compared to no change for similar aged learners. Owen Thomas, teacher at Ysgol Bro Preseli noticed the following: “[The Leader Dialogues] sparked a wider interest in politics and our pupils have since embarked on a letter writing frenzy. A politics club has also been established, driven by the pupils.”
