Campaigning: Making Change Happen

Campaigning: Making Change Happen

Lesson Plan: How can we make change happen?
Learning Objectives:

• To understand how and why people campaign
• To learn about different campaign methods
• To analyse what makes a campaign effective

Teachers can choose to either follow the below one-hour lesson plan or select individual activities as they wish.

Introduction (10 minutes)

Recap lesson one by asking pupils what they learnt about different levels of government and about participating in democracy in the last lesson.

Explain that one of the ways people can participate in democracy by campaigning.
Use the accompanying PowerPoint to introduce the idea of campaigning to pupils. Ask them what they already know about what a campaign is, why people campaign, and what the different methods of campaigning are.

Activity 1: Campaign Case Studies (40 minutes)

Aim:To explore different case studies and find out about why and how people campaign.

To prep, print and cut out three sets of the questions on worksheet 4and worksheet 5.

Organise pupils into three groups. You could organise groups according to similar ability levels or have mixed ability groups (based on your preference).

Give each group one case study and ask them to read through their case study together.

Hand out a set of the questions from worksheet 4 to each group. Ask groups to discuss the questions with regards to their case study.

Once groups have explored the case study and questions, number the children 1, 2, 3 (etc.) in each group. All ‘1s’ should then sit together, all ‘2s’ together,all ‘3s’ sit together and so on.
Ask these newly formed groups to share and compare their findings from the case studies they previously examined.

Now hand out the questions from worksheet 5to each new group to use as discussion prompts.

Activity 2: Recap Quiz (10 minutes)

Aim: To recap ideas from the two lessons, ‘Who’s in Charge of Change?’ and ‘How Can We Make Change Happen?’

Hand out copies of the quiz to pupils to complete individually. Once they have finished go through the answers with the class and see who got the most answers right.

Please note: Question 9 has space for your local MP’s name to be inserted before printing and photocopying. To find your school’s constituency MP, go to

Extension Activity: Start a Campaign

Aim: To start a real-life campaign as a class or in groups.

If you have the time, you could go one step further and get pupils to start a campaign of their own. The campaign could be planned and explored over a number of weeks to continue the campaigning theme with pupils.

Ask pupils to think about issues in their local area or at school. Do they disagree with anything? Are there are any positive changes they would like to make?Once they have identified the relevant issues, they should choose one to focus their campaign on.

Ask pupils to look over the campaign process diagram on worksheet 7. As a class or in small groups, follow the steps on the diagramto start your own campaign.

Pupils could then fill in the planning sheet on worksheet 6to help them along the way and to organise events to help raise awareness of their campaign.

Once planning is underway, you could contact your MP, local councillor, or a member of the House of Lords with a relevant interest, to tell them about your campaign.

(Find your MP here:

Find your councilor here:

Find a Lord with relevant interest here:

The Speaker’s School Council Awards programmehas a great selection of extra resources to help young peoplerun a campaign:

School councils and other student-led initiatives can submit their projects– big or small – to the Speaker’s School Council Awards each year, usually running from February-May. You can find more details at

Campaign Case Study A: The Rainbow Room

As usual, everyone went into assembly. But today wasn't an ordinary assembly...today the children were leading!

They told their school about a special place nearby called the Rainbow Room.

A visitor had come to the School Council to tell them about the Rainbow Room. It helped children in families where someone had died because these children felt very sad, and needed support. The School Council went to visit the Rainbow Room and decided to raise money to help them. They wanted to buy story books, art materials and comfortable seats, and also help keep the Rainbow Room open.

"We need your help to raise money." They told the school. "We are going to ask people to sponsor us. You can do a run, an obstacle course, write your name blindfolded or throw as many water balloons into a bucket as you can in two minutes, or hold a singing note for as long as possible."

The children were all very excited and collected sponsors. They told family and friends about what they were doing. The School Council planned the day making sure everyone had what they needed in the right places, and that the teachers were in the right places too. All of the 108 children in school took part.

After the event, everyone collected their money together. The School Council couldn't believe it! They had raised £843.85! The children held another special assembly to give the cheque to the Rainbow Room and the newspaper came to take photos.

The Rainbow Room were so proud of the children. They wrote to the local MP to tell him. The money would make a huge difference to their work, and lots more people now knew about what the Rainbow Room did.

(St Mary’s Roman Catholic First School, Northumberland - Speaker’s School Council Award Winners)

Campaign Case Study B: Caged Hen Farming

END TO CAGED HEN FARMING IN UK!

Lucy Gavaghan, (pictured left) a 15-year-old girl from Sheffield, has started a campaign to end caged hen farming. ‘Animal welfare is hugely important to me, and it’s an area where I believe many improvements need to be made.’ explains Lucy.

Unlike free range hens, caged hens never get to leave their cages or go outside. They live in such tiny cages that they cannot even spread their wings.

The hens kept in these small cages often lose their feathers and, perhaps unsurprisingly, get sick. Lucy and her family now care for some hens, rescued from cage farming. She helped them get better and they have become happy and healthy chickens enjoying the freedom of being outside. It was for this reason she decided to campaign to stop caged hen farming.

Lucy started two petitions to get Tesco, Asda and Morrison’s supermarkets to stop selling eggs from caged hens. Within just six months, she had collected 460,000 signatures on her petitions. The response from all three supermarkets was to announce they would stop selling caged hens’ eggs. Since then othersupermarkets such as Aldi, Lidl and Iceland have said they will stop selling them too. By 2025 every big supermarket in the UK will have cage free eggs.

However Lucy has said this is not the end of her fight, she said, ‘Now, I’m using an online petition to the government in an attempt to end Caged Hen Farming in the UK.’ She hopes the government will do this by 2025: now that the majority of big supermarkets are going to stop selling caged hen’s eggs there will be less need for them. It is Lucy’s belief that she can make this happen as she already has lots of support from supermarkets and the public.

She said, ‘I have used online petitions to gather over half a million signatures altogether, and to convince some of the UK’s biggest supermarkets to end the sale of eggs from caged hens in their stores.’

Campaign Case Study C: Votes for Women

In the past, only rich men could vote in an election. In 1832 a law was passed that gave more men the right to vote, but women had to wait almost 100 years to have equal rights.

But how did they make men listen and make them change the law?

It all started in 1866 when a group of women organised a petition demanding that women should have the same voting rights as men. But no one listened so more women's groups were formed all over Britain and in 1897, seventeen of these individual groups joined together.

They had a peaceful approach. Members believed that success could be gained by speaking and education. They put up posters, leaflets and organised public meetings. A woman called Millicent Fawcett felt that any violence or trouble would persuade men that women could not be trusted to have the right to vote. Her plan was patience. Fawcett said that women could hold responsible posts in society such as sitting on school boards – but could not be trusted to vote; she also said that if parliament made laws and if women had to obey those laws, then women should be part of the process of making those laws. If women have to pay the same taxes as men, she said they should have the same rights as men.

However this process was very slow and this left many other women angry. So in 1903 the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia. They wanted women to have the right to vote and they were not prepared to wait. The Union became better known as the Suffragettes. Members of the Suffragettes were prepared to use violence to get what they wanted. They went on hunger strikes, smashed shop windows, and even put bombs around the city.

Soon after, in August 1914, the First World Warbegan and Emmeline Pankhurst instructed the Suffragettes to stop their campaign of violence and support the government in the war in every way. The work done by women in the First WorldWar was vital for Britain’s war effort and in 1918, the law was changed giving women over the age of 30 the right to vote. 10 years later in 1928 women and men received the same rights to vote at the age of 21.