How much should political parties know about you?

Suitable for 14-19-year olds (secondary and high schools, and college), this article and accompanying activity sheet can be used in the classroom, debate clubs and at home.

This resource links to KS4 and KS5 politics and ICT.

It can also be used as a careers resource and links to Gatsby Benchmarks:
Gatsby Benchmark 2: Learning from career and labour market information
Gatsby Benchmark 4: Linking curriculum learning to careers

• This teaching resource explains the work of Professor Colin Bennett, a political scientist at the University of Victoria in Canada. He and his former students, Dr Smith Oduro-Marfo and Jesse Gordon investigated how political parties around the world use their citizens’ data and what this means for democracy.

• This resource also contains an interview with Smith and Jesse and offers an insight into careers in political science. If your students have questions for the team, they can send them through the Futurum Careers website.

• The activity sheet provides ‘talking points’ (based on Bloom’s Taxonomy) to prompt students to reflect on Colin’s research and challenges them to design a survey to ‘harvest’ data and create a micro-targeting political campaign.

This resource was first published by Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, tech, engineering, maths, medicine (STEM) and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE).

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