What you might need to know

This video includes AI-generated content produced under human supervision. Script by Dr Emmanuelle Schön-Quinlivan.

This class is entirely dedicated to running the European election.

You first need to get the children to look at the posters designed to encourage voting for candidates. Then the candidates deliver their speech (1 to 2 minutes) from the front of the class. The journalists ask each of them a question. Finally the journalists organise the debate with the voters by taking questions from the floor.

Before starting the voting process, you have a good opportunity to remind pupils that grown-ups vote for a candidate for all sorts of reasons: because the candidate helped them, because they are popular, because they are good-looking, because they have good ideas, because they are funny, etc. Candidates who are elected are not always the ones with the best solutions and the best ideas.

This helps frame your own election where maybe the winner or winners will be the ones that are popular rather than the ones with good ideas. How we decide on our preferences for candidates is also part of democratic life and is often far from rational.

Once you have the ballot papers printed out (you’ll find them in your instruction pack), you need to get the children to vote. The vote has got to be individual and private, so try and find a corner of the classroom where nobody can see what the child ticks. The voters will then put their ballot paper in a ballot box that you might have made. Any square box with a slit at the top and a European flag on it will do.

The final aspect of the election is the tallying of the votes. I tally the votes in front of the children as a transparency process. Children always get quite excited then. Once you have your one or two candidates elected, depending on what you decided at the start, these members of the European Parliament will represent Ireland for 5 years (this is pretend!).

This class finishes on a slide explaining how the European Parliament is one piece of a larger four-piece puzzle together with the European Council, the European Commission and the Council of the EU.