Next Steps
Learnings
Digital Dialogue: Wales continues to demonstrate its ability to build trust and relationships between young people and politicians. It is effective at building knowledge about political systems and in building young people's confidence and skills to engage with politicians and the broader democratic system.
The programme has continued to expand, and we have supported more learners, worked with more teachers and engaged more politicians than ever before. Encouragingly, one of the most prominent ways that we grew the programme in this phase was through word of mouth, with teachers recommending the programme to each other.
We are also starting to see the role the programme can play in helping schools to embed democratic education, leading to sustained, long-term engagement.
The programme is especially impactful as a useful starting point for schools and teachers at the beginning of their democratic engagement journey. We have seen especially strong outcomes for non-specialist teachers and Primary school learners.
The programme continues to effectively tackle one of the most complex issues of our time: building political trust. One of the key lessons from our work, which is evident from the effect of group size, is that there is no quick fix to building relationships between young people and politicians, and that we cannot easily scale our work through increasing the number of learners engaged per session.
Below are some of the next steps we would like to take to grow our impact.
Next Steps
Working in partnership to map provision
As our breakdown of where we deliver the programme has shown, there is a geographical disparity on where Digital Dialogue: Wales is delivered. There are ‘cold spots’, particularly in North Wales, where fewer schools have taken part in the programme. We currently don’t know if those schools are currently engaged in other forms of democratic education.
To better understand what democratic education and activities are being delivered in schools and colleges, and to see how Digital Dialogue: Wales fits in with that wider picture, we would map what provision currently exists by reaching out to our network and beyond.
We would track and map political contact in Wales, working with partners like the Senedd Education team, regional school consortia, politicians offices and teachers to understand where political contact is taking place outside of our programme. Through building up a national picture, we could work collectively with partners towards more complete national coverage.
Creating a more bespoke approach to supporting schools and colleges
Through the programme we have supported a broad range of schools and teachers to engage with different age groups and worked with teachers with a broad range of skills. In the future, we would want to further tailor our approach. This would allow us to take a lighter-touch approach to our more experienced schools and colleges and focus more attention on non-specialist teachers who are engaging for the first time. Where possible, we would look to offboard schools completely, enabling them to take over the process of engaging politicians.
Youth Hustings
In the future we see significant opportunities to host youth hustings for the Senedd Elections. Due to the timing of the 2024 General Election we were unable to deliver all of the youth hustings we wanted to through this programme, but we would be keen to support more young people to engage with candidates in the future.
We had over 34 expressions of interest from teachers in hosting or supporting hustings ahead of the 2024 General Election, showing that there is an appetite from Welsh schools.
For future youth hustings, we would look to deliver hybrid in- person/online events, or seek to secure funding for transport, as travel costs to hustings proved to be a barrier for some schools. We will also explore different hustings formats that prioritise youth voice and views. This includes learners taking a lead in chairing and facilitating the conversations, as seen at the Mid and South Pembrokeshire and Cardiff West Hustings, to strengthen the positive impact of the events.
Through our relationships with schools, political parties, local authorities, and the best practice we have established through our own experience of delivering youth hustings, we are now better placed to either deliver hustings or support teachers to arrange and deliver their own.
Training politicians in political contact
In the future we would welcome the opportunity to provide training and guidance to politicians around political contact and in particular on supporting pledges, where we see huge opportunities to build relationships and trust. We know that activities such as sending short feedback videos to learners can be a really effective way to communicate. We would be interested to share our practice and evidence that this positively impacts trust and relationships.
We see this as an opportunity to have an impact on political trust beyond our work on the programme with young people, as this would be transferable to other types of engagements politicians have with citizens.
Supporting the Senedd Election
The next three years are going to be an exciting period for Welsh democracy, with the Senedd Elections in May 2026 and the Welsh Local Elections in May 2027. There is a great opportunity to capitalise on the increased interest in politics these elections will bring to help young people to engage in Welsh democracy. Unlike the UK general election we know exactly when the Senedd and local elections will be, allowing us to better plan our support for them.
As the Senedd Elections approach, we are keen to continue to support the network of schools we have worked with on this programme to engage with the upcoming elections, and particularly to ensure that 16 -18 year olds can vote and register to vote in the elections. Given that all of the teachers we have worked with want to continue working with us, we are well positioned to help them to engage.
