Politics in the news | Free activity for new and returning politics students

Here's a free news-based activity that teachers can use for new or returning politics students.

Summer can often be a period of little political activity in the UK. 2022 has proven different (well, different from the last two summers anyway) in that the Prime Minister has been forced to resign and the Conservative Party have gone through a leadership election full of recrimination and new policy promises. How much attention have our politics students been paying?

This is a simple resource that can be used to show real examples of key terminology from A Level Politics for new students and get returning year 13 students to review topics they have already covered. The single sheet document is a mocked-up broadsheet newspaper front page which references 15 real world political events from the summer of 2022.

Suggested uses:

For Year 12 students:

• During an induction session: ask students to review the paper (in groups) and discuss what they know about the story headlines
• Give the sheet to new students as an early homework and ask them to research a series of key terms from the specification (e.g. legitamacy, democracy, think tanks, lobbyists, pressure groups, Old Labour vs New Labour, One Nation vs New Right, Left Wing vs Right Wing, electoral systems, constitution, devolution, committees, opposition, executive, collective responsibility) and ask them to find examples within the news stories
• Having set the task above, ask students to return with their own examples of a news story from the last 6 months that illustrates an aspect from the list of key terms that you have set them

For Year 13 students:

• As part of an early lesson on their return (or as homework), ask students to read through the news stories and ask them to list as many key terms as they can relating to the stories
• Ask students to pick any of the stories and write a longer article to fully explain the event and link it to a key topic from their Year 12 work