Ulladulla Primary School and governance.

Year 5's curriculum has a focus on governance and how all the different spheres of government work.
I was invitied to speak to my nephews year 5 class at Ulladulla Public School. The class had prepared a long list of questions covering a vareity of topics. For me the most challengeing part of this excercise was trying to convert what can be quite complex things into something that was relevant to the kids.

One of the questions asked was what is it like being on council, my kid friendly explanation went like this.

Sometimes its like the playground at lunchtime, when you meet up with other people, and some want to play football, some handball and others skip. If I want to play handball I have to convince the others not to play football or skip, sometimes you have to compromise and play handball for a while and football a for a while and finally sometimes you have to stick to what you want and play by yourself.

What do Councils do?

I gave them a list of things that could understand easily and then gave the following analogy for planning.

Say you wanted to go on a long bike ride- well you just wouldn't hop on your bike and go but you have to plan and get ready by knowing where you want to go, the best way to get there is it by road or on a bike path, do you have to wear a helmet, do you need to take water and lunch. So you would do a lot of work before you go on the journey and this is similar to Council planning for the future.

One young fellow asked me what it meant that land was owned by the crown!

I also had to explain who could vote in an election.

I hope they had an interesting session, I really enjoyed their questions and it was evident that they were paying attention when they asked questions that related to some of the issues discussed
(What are the hot issues in Council right now!)

I gave them all some homework- to fill in the survey that has been prepared as part off Councils consultation strategy for the Community Strategic Plan. So hopefully that will be some more different ideas feeding into the plans of the future!

Thanks Ulladulla Public for a great day.