Founder Blog · Post 1

Why I started More Political Education

Josh Dolan, founder

I love politics. I find it genuinely interesting — the way ideas turn into laws, the way arguments get won and lost, the way decisions made in Westminster end up shaping everyday life all over the country.

And here's the thing that took me a while to notice: I only really discovered any of that because I took A-level Politics.

Before that, throughout my entire time at school, I was taught essentially nothing about how the country I live in is actually run. Not how a bill becomes a law. Not what the difference is between Parliament and government. Not what my local council does versus what an MP does. Not how to tell the difference between a news story that's reporting something and a news story that's spinning something. None of it. I didn't even know what I didn't know.

And then I took A-level Politics, and suddenly all of it was there: the structure, the institutions, the arguments, the history. It made me wonder — why isn't this taught earlier? Why is the basic operating manual for the country you live in treated as an optional subject you only meet if you happen to pick the right A-level?

That's the gap I want this campaign to close.

It's not about making everyone love politics

To be clear, I'm not trying to turn every student into me. Most people aren't going to fall in love with politics, and that's completely fine. You don't have to enjoy it to need it.

Everyone in this country lives under laws. Everyone uses public services. Everyone will, at some point, vote, write to a councillor, sign a petition, talk to their kids about what's on the news, or just try to work out whether something they've seen online is actually true. Those are not specialist activities. They are part of being an adult in a democracy. And we currently leave it almost entirely to chance whether someone learns the basics needed to do any of them well.

That's a strange thing to leave to chance.

Why this can't just be "do it in citizenship class"

Citizenship education is on the curriculum, technically. In practice, it varies enormously from school to school. Some schools take it seriously. Plenty don't. Even where it's taught, the political-literacy side of it often gets squeezed out by other priorities, and students leave knowing more about how to write a CV than how the country makes laws.

I don't blame teachers for this — they're working with limited time and limited resources. But the result is that whether a young person leaves school understanding their own democracy is essentially a postcode lottery. And as voting rights extend to younger citizens, that lottery starts to matter more, not less.

What this campaign is, and what it isn't

More Political Education is a non-partisan campaign for stronger political and civic education in UK schools — properly embedded into PSHE and citizenship, taught consistently, and built around things every young person should be able to do: understand how Parliament and local government work, recognise misinformation, follow a political argument without being manipulated by it, and know how to take part if they want to.

It is not about telling young people what to think. That has to be said clearly, because it's the easiest thing for a campaign like this to be accused of. The whole point is the opposite: equipping students to think clearly for themselves, ask better questions, and reach their own conclusions. A genuinely well-taught political education does not produce a generation of one political view — it produces a generation that can argue properly with each other. That's the goal.

Why I'm starting now

Because I've just come out of A-level Politics and into my first year of university, and the gap I noticed at school still feels recent. I'm at the age where I can clearly remember not knowing any of this — which I think is exactly the right vantage point to campaign from. A campaign for civic education probably lands better coming from someone who only just left the gap than from someone who left it twenty years ago.

This is the start. There's a website, there's a plan, and there are people willing to put hours into it. If you're a teacher, a student, a parent, or anyone who thinks this matters — I'd love to hear from you. The link is at the bottom of the page.

— Josh