Supporter's information

Supporting people to find out about politics

This website is first and foremost a tool for engagement with people you support (people with a learning disability, people with communication impairments or people with limited literacy). It is a resource to use with people rather than for people.

Politics affects us all in every area of our lives; from the food we eat, to the air we breathe; from the medication we may need, to the swimming pool we use. Politics is as much about shopping and catching the bus as it is about things like the economy, the NHS or national defence. This is why politics is important.

Politics is not just about elections and voting. It is about things like signing a petition, meeting your MP or writing to your local councillor as well. It is about knowing that there is a whole range of activities that people can get involved in. In fact, people you support are probably already doing some of these things.

This wide range of activities means that everybody can be involved. There should never be any reason to think that "Politics and getting involved is just not relevant to the people I support."

Three sections

The Every Vote Counts! politics information is in three main sections.

One section is all about how politics affects you, one section is about how politics works, and one is about how to get involved. This will help you show someone why politics is important and how they could get involved. It is up to you to decide how you use this information.

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You may not need to use everything on the website when you are supporting someone. Instead you can support someone to access just the information that is relevant to them.

For example the 'How politics affects you' section has lots of different examples of ways in which politics can affect our lives. It could be too much information to look at all of these with someone. The range of examples means that you can choose the ones that will be the most relevant to the person you are supporting and look at those. You may just want to use the stories part of this section.

The section about 'How politics works' contains some information about how the country is run and looks at things like Parliament, politicians and the Government. It could help you to explain to people about how decisions are made and who makes these decisions.

Some of the information in this section may be quite complicated for some people. You do not need to have a good understanding of how politics works to support someone to get involved and have a say, and so you may decide to skip this section altogether, or just look at bits of it.

The section about how to get involved is relevant to everyone. This section should be used to show people that there are lots of different ways of getting involved and having a say, and it suggests a whole range of activities that people can do.

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