Citizenship at key stage 3    (Year 7-9)

• List pupils' favourite leisure activities on the board, and ask them to say which ones make use of public facilities. Assess to what extent the most popular activities rely on public provision, eg by investigating the number of facilities provided by the local council authority. Which seem to be the most/least costly to support? Who should pay for these? Pupils should then find out how the local authority raises funding for leisure and what spending priorities there are.

• Tell the pupils that some people have written to the council complaining that a new skateboarding and biking area in the local park is a waste of money, as it is used by only a dozen or so young people. The complainers feel that the money would be better spent on facilities that more people, including the area's many elderly residents, would make use of. Ask pupils how the council should reply. Discuss the issue of spending taxpayers' money on facilities for pursuits that relatively few people take part in, eg skateboarding. Look at local public leisure facilities from the point of view of cost compared with number of users. Which facilities are the most valued, and by whom? Pupils could carry out a survey as part of their research, canvassing the views of other members of the school and/or local residents. They could then present their findings to the class.

• Pupils could investigate how much their local authority spent on parks and leisure facilities in the last financial year, compared with other spending. They could present their findings in different forms, eg pie charts, graphs.
• In groups, pupils could imagine that they are councillors on the local Parks and Leisure Committee. The council has been told to halve its spending on leisure facilities in the coming year. The groups need to decide, in broad terms, which of the facilities most frequently used by pupils (see first activity) should be closed down, which should be cut back and which should not be touched at all. An alternative exercise could be undertaken on the basis that the council budget for leisure is being doubled. Each group explains its spending priorities, and the class votes on which spending plan it prefers.
• As a class, explore the reasons behind pupils' decisions to favour one activity over another. List the kinds of reasons they suggest, eg popularity with a majority, a valuable and unique asset to the community.

• Present the class with the following scenario: a premiership football club wishes to expand into a new state-of-the-art stadium in a part of town within a residential area of mixed ethnic groupings. The alternative to expansion is to relocate the club, either to another town or to a greenfield site on the edge of this one.
• Ask pupils to list the arguments for and against the new stadium. For example, reasons for could include: crowd numbers have increased and the existing stadium is too small and old-fashioned; the ground needs to be upgraded to improve access and to conform with health and safety regulations; the new ground would be a great asset for the town and would attract many visitors; the town as a whole would benefit from the increased revenues paid by the club, and from the extra money spent by supporters. Reasons against could include: greater nuisance to local residents on match days; vandalism along routes to the stadium; increased violence between supporters and against members of the public; the enforced closure of local pubs on match days; a change in the area's character; the development is not sustainable; and too much pressure on the transport system.
• Divide the class into three or six groups. Group A are members of the local planning authority, who must recommend whether or not to allow the expansion. Group B are the management of the football club and the leaders of the supporters' club, and want the expansion to go ahead. Group C represent local residents and shopkeepers, who may not share the same opinions about the club's plans. Using their local authority's website, pupils could investigate how the authority considers planning applications, and how local people are consulted. Who has the power and authority to make decisions? At what point would national government become involved? Give each of the groups time to research and prepare their arguments. Then hold a mock 'public meeting' chaired by a local councillor to try to come to a broad agreement on the issue.

• Ask the pupils to think of a sport where physical contact is either part of the game or might happen accidentally, eg basketball, hockey, football, rugby. The class should consider what should happen to:
  • a team that consistently intimidates its opponents
  • a player who makes a reckless tackle and seriously injures his/her opponent
  • a rugby referee who fails to keep control of a game, which then ends with someone being seriously injured when a scrum collapses
  • two players who get into a fight on the pitch, one of whom receives an eye injury that prevents him/her from playing professionally again
  • a footballer who is being racially abused who then leaps into the crowd and assaults the person abusing him/her.
• Ask the class to decide whether the law has been broken in any of these cases. If so, should the matter go to court? Discuss the relevance of laws in assault cases.