1. Will the Commission provide an update on plans to engage with newly enfranchised voters, particularly as schools and colleges have moved once again to online learning? OQ56092

Last year, education resources were co-produced with young people and education professionals. These were later adapted for home learning due to the COVID-19 restrictions and they are offered directly to schools through the Hwb platform. Since the beginning of the autumn term, our education team has been delivering virtual sessions to schools and colleges across Wales and they will continue to do so. 

Diolch yn fawr, Llywydd. Thank you very much. I'm sure that all Members will be very much encouraged to hear that the work has been adapted and is continuing. Is there anything further that the Commission feels that individual Members of the Senedd might be able to do to help promote young people's understanding of their new rights to vote?

Well, to take all possible opportunities to do so, when you're either speaking directly on Zoom in any meeting with young people in your constituency, or whether you are on broader media. I had an opportunity on Heno on Monday evening on S4C to once again promote the new right that young people in Wales will have—those who are 16 and 17 years of age—to vote the Senedd elections. So, use social media, and use all possible media to promote the reality of the situation, namely that young people do have the vote here, and encourage as many of them as possible, first of all to ensure that they are registered to vote, and then to use their vote. I'm sure that there will be some party politics coming into that as we approach the election, but what is most important is that the people of Wales use their vote, but particularly those who are 16 and 17 years old, who will use it for the first time in the Senedd elections.

Llywydd, although we live in this abnormal environment, there is a tremendous opportunity that arises now from the online learning. It seems to me something more direct, which is actually using it also as a tool of engagement—not in terms of any form of political direction, but in terms of specifically identifying, among that 16 to 17 group, and promoting the right to vote, the right to registration, and making it part of it. It is a tool that could actually promote that. I wonder if you've thought about how that might occur. I know that it might involve engagement with the education Minister or whatever, but it seems to me that it's an opportunity not to be missed.

Well, certainly we are aware that our young people are the most digitally aware cohort of the population. Therefore, adapting how we promote the new rights that young people now have to vote as 16 and 17-year-olds in Wales—adapting that to digital platforms that they are very well used to, either in social media or in the educational platforms that they are using every day now, is something that we are doing. As I said in my answer to Helen Mary, we are already placing our resources that are available to schools and to young people on the Hwb platform and other platforms. So, I agree with the question as posed by Mick Antoniw, yes, that there are plenty of opportunities for us to do more in new ways with young people in promoting their democratic experience. But we do so in the—I think you used this term—abnormal context that we are in, Mick Antoniw, and we've just heard the challenges that that poses to our young people as well in the previous set of questions to the education Minister. So, there is a balance to be struck here, but exercising their democratic right in the next election is something that we are excited about, and we want to make sure that young people in Wales are informed of that new right and how to exercise it.

I really welcome the innovations that have been done for the provision online in these difficult circumstances, and I think that it's commendable. I just wonder whether we are missing a trick here for the future—although it's probably too late for this one. I wonder if I could ask your views on whether the Commission would be willing to explore a concept that I strongly support—which they do in other countries such as Sweden, and so on—where they actually use their resources to provide a proper, actual election going on in schools, contemporaneous with the election going on in wider society, for 14-year-olds, for 15-year-olds and so on, so that they are ready. I just wonder, in the future, would this be something that the Commission, and the expertise that it has at its fingertips, would be willing to explore—to take the lead role in doing this within our schools, to prepare young people for democratic engagement?  

Well, the mock election of 1983 at Lampeter Comprehensive School was the first election that I took part in, a long time ago, and that was very direct experience. I won't share with you now what political party I stood for at the time, but I've learnt the error of my ways since then. But just to say that the exact direct role of electing and elections in a context that the young people are familiar with, and relating that to the real world—we know that school councils and primary schools and many young people are involved in different democratic ways already. I think that you pose an interesting prospect of formalising that probably a bit more than it's currently done. As you've hinted, it's probably too late for this set of Senedd elections, but it's certainly, I think, something that we could look at into the future. I'd certainly be interested in asking the Commission of the future to look into that for future elections. By the way, I won the election in 1983 in Lampeter Comprehensive School.

I don't think that was ever in doubt. Question 2, Mandy Jones.