‘Too young to vote? The history of school mock elections in Britain’ by Helen Sunderland (Oxford’s Centre for the History of Childhood)

Londoners Record Their Vote on National Polling Day, Holborn, London, England, UK, 5 July 1945

This talk looks at how schools have taught children and young people in Britain to vote since the early twentieth century by organising their own election contests. School mock elections were held at the same time the country went to the polls. Schoolboys and girls stood as candidates for political parties, wrote manifestos, campaigned, and cast their ballots – despite being under the voting age. For some young people, mock elections were moments of political awakening that inspired a career in politics. For others, they were just a welcome change from the usual school routine. School mock elections grew in popularity through the twentieth century. By the 1980s, the BBC’s children’s television news programme Newsround coordinated mock elections across hundreds of UK schools, gathering nationwide data on young people’s voting intentions for the first time. School mock elections have stood the test of time as a tool for teaching democracy, but what difference did they really make? What impact might the introduction of votes at 16 across UK elections have on school’s own contests?