What you might need to know

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

This lesson is really fun, and the kids enjoy it immensely.

We get them to reflect on how easy or difficult it is and what it takes to make decisions when there are 27 around the table. How can you reach a consensus?

This reflects how decisions are made in the Council of the EU, which is only one of the European institutions where national ministers sit. In practice, the full process to pass European laws is much more complex and includes the European Parliament in particular. However, for the purpose of understanding the ethos of decision-making at the European level, compromise to reach consensus, as is often the case in the Council of the EU, is a good point of entry.

Unlike a lot of our national political systems across the EU, which are adversarial, EU decision-making is much less so. To get the children to understand the concepts of compromise and consensus, it is worth starting by asking them whether they would be able to agree on the same movie to watch. This usually gets them talking!

Moving on to look at countries’ individual interests and how they need to take them into consideration when reaching a compromise, we use children’s literature, namely The Day the Crayons Quit.
We start by asking the children to think about the parallel with the EU while we read the story.

Reading this book, page after page, or playing it on YouTube, gets the children to see that each crayon has a specific complaint or request. By the end of the book, we ask the children to explain what kind of parallels they see with the European Union. They usually come up with lots of great ideas.

We finish the lesson by asking them to colour an A3 sheet in groups of 6, where everyone has to agree on the colours picked.

I can tell you that I had a ‘live Brexit’ situation where a child and his group absolutely refused to compromise on brown to colour a flower. The child demanded his own sheet. I gave it to him. But by the end he complained he hadn’t done as much as the others who had worked together. Brexit in a nutshell!! He was very happy to have control over how the sheet was coloured but sad that he had done much less than the others.