A team of six students participated in the European Youth Parliament (EYP) in Seville
The European Youth Parliament (EYP) is an international organisation aimed at engaging young people in international politics in a more advanced way than the day to day curriculum in school allows. The process is as follows:
Students volunteer for the EYP and they are allocated to a topic committee, each committee has an area they are researching and reading articles and papers about, they do this research and communicate with each other and a committee chair for a couple of weeks before the event. The topics are current ranging from the necessity to enforce new environmental laws through to the negative impact gaming addiction can have on young people.
Over the weekend students meet together with their group and their committee chair, the event starts on a Friday with an evening of team building in Seville at the Plaza de España.
Students then meet again for the whole day on Saturday and their aim is to formulate a set of guidelines surrounding their particular topic that they wish to be passed into EU law, (this year’s booklet is available here).
On Sunday all of the groups come together for the general assembly, this event involves each committee giving a speech supporting their outlined proposals. Their ideas are then put under close scrutiny by the other committees and a round of debating and tough questioning and defending follows. Finally the whole assembly votes on whether their ideas and proposals are successful and therefore put into hypothetical EU law.
The range of skills developed and then displayed by our students is fantastic. They have to carry out research both independently and as a team, they must communicate expressively and with confidence in order to solve problems and the organisation operates in English.
It was a great event this year and all of our students performed excellently, the team was made up of six Y12 students Angela, Francisco, Rosario, Ines, Gonzalo and Irene. The general assembly was held in the Torre Sevilla and what had been a marathon event for our students coincided with the marathon itself!
It was also great to see some of our previous participants moving onward and upward through the EYP organisation with Clara Molano taking part as a committee chair and Yago Molano working as vice president of the assembly. One of our parents Mr Rene Van Bavel also gave the opening speech, a thought provoking talk on fake news, Brexit and the importance of backing up political arguments with science and research, it was a weekend for the school to feel proud
