Ashley Hodges was born and educated in rural Ohio in the United States in a family where “my parents never talked about politics at the dinner table”. After achieving a first-class honours degree in advertising and working in media, she began volunteering for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign before becoming a paid staffer. The campaign, she says, “gave me an outlet” for her interest in social issues, something that has endured throughout her career. She came to the UK in 2009 to undertake a masters at the London School of Economics, but ended up settling in the capital, going on to lead a number of UK education initiatives including Speakers for Schools before taking on the chief executive role at Young Citizens last June.
What does Young Citizens do and what attracted you to the role?
Young Citizens supports primary and secondary schools to educate and engage young people on citizenship by providing lessons, assemblies and other resources for free.
Over its 30-year history, it has supported more than 300,000 young people to take part in social action, engaged 150,000 in understanding the legal system and reached more than one million young people through citizenship programmes and classroom resources.
I arrived at it slightly fortuitously: I was looking to refocus on how we develop our wider education offer to set young people up for success in the UK. My experience is founded in leading education programmes in the social mobility sector and previously in supporting full civic and democratic engagement, which is why it felt like the right opportunity and the right organisation to do that.
How has the pandemic affected young people’s opportunities?
The pandemic and Brexit have created a huge amount of change for young people. Some of this has been practical like the loss of easily studying overseas or lack of exposure to enriching extracurricular programmes at school that aid their development. We need to think about what we are doing to ensure young people are equipped to go into a complex, global society at a time when there are some of the biggest social and structural changes since World War II.
Young people have been more isolated over the past 18 months and missed out on some of the most important social and emotional periods of their lives. When we talk about helping young people catch up, it’s important we remember that this applies to social and emotional development in addition to attainment.
What’s the charity’s role in tackling these challenges?
We want citizenship education to be available to all young people and be a pillar of the school curriculum. We have libraries of PSHE (personal, social, health and economic) and citizenship education resources and want to get these to as many educators as possible so they are aware of the support we provide.
Linking citizenship education with social action in the community is also something we provide. We offer ready-to-go programmes – the Make a Difference Challenge, Bring About Change – that set out how to deliver social action in the community successfully and provide training for educators so they have the skills to support young people with their projects.
Is the concept of citizenship changing for young people?
We are seeing a generation of young people emerge who are incredibly socially aware, but increasingly frustrated at the perceived lack of action by decision makers. The risk is that they will opt out of participating if that frustration is not recognised. Without giving young people an outlet to act locally as individuals and be able to see how that then trickles up to create change, they are going to switch off and run the risk of becoming disenfranchised.
The first step is giving each young person an opportunity to have that social action experience that shows them it’s possible to act and participate, but then we must think about how we can make sure we don’t lose that passion and engagement. Understanding rights, responsibilities and how decisions are made is important, but so too is recognising that the voting system is not the only political tool to deliver change.
Social mobility has stalled during the pandemic. How can we get it back on track?
In short, we still need to invest more in young children, but importantly we also need to work in partnerships to maximise our inputs; even more can be done on this and encouraged from the leading bodies. We need to assess the impact that lockdowns have had on the early years and what that means for social mobility. An early-years focus to tackling social mobility is needed, as just intervening at sixth form age is too late.
In recent years, the importance of employment and vocational skills have been raised alongside academic achievement. The third part of that equation is to educate young people about understanding the world around them and how it works. Citizenship education has a big part to play in that.
What were the key skills you learned from your time with the Obama campaign?
It was very grassroots and based around community engagement. Everyone felt they were able to contribute and it was very inclusive; everyone was empowered to help us realise the vision. I carry the lessons I learnt there into my work every day.
Ashley Hodges CV
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June 2021 onwards: Chief executive, Young Citizens
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2019 – 2021: Chief executive, AccessEd NGO
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2013 – 2019: Executive director and chief executive, Speakers for Schools
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2010 – 2012: Programme manager, Education and Employers Taskforce
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2009 – 2010: MSc politics and communication, London School of Economics
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Mar 08 – Nov 08: Political field staff, Obama Presidential campaign, USA