Political Engagement and Active Citizenship (Internal Assessment)
Domain 5 is the internal assessment: the political engagement activity and its written report. It rewards genuine political participation, precise framing of an issue, and analysis that links your local experience to global concepts.
Core rules
- The activity must be political. It should involve power, collective decisions, resource allocation or contesting policy: a council meeting on housing, a campaign, a petition, a demonstration, a union or party activity. Volunteering or charity work becomes political only when you analyse the decisions and power behind it.
- You must participate, not merely observe, and be able to evidence what you did.
- The report typically moves from context and the political issue, through a description of the engagement, to analysis using key concepts (power, legitimacy, participation, citizenship), then a reflection on your own political identity and effectiveness.
- Link scales: local, national and global.
Worked example
You attend a council meeting on a school transport cut. Weak framing: I went to a meeting about buses. Strong framing: a research question on how local decision-makers justified the cut; evidence from the meeting record and budget papers; analysis of who held power, whether consultation was meaningful (input versus output legitimacy), and comparison with national funding decisions. Reasoning: the marks come from analysis of the political issue, not from a diary of attendance.
Traps
- Choosing a non-political activity and forcing a political analysis onto it.
- Narrating what happened without conceptual analysis.
- Offering no evidence for claims about the issue.
- Overstating the impact of your own activity.