Lesson video

Hey everyone.

For the final time, welcome to today's lesson.

This is lesson six of six, where today we are going to be looking at what are pressure groups? Now for today's lesson, you will need a pen and some paper, and you will need that quiet working space free from distractions.

There are some resources attached to today's lesson.

So if you want to, you can print those out or have them at hands so you've got them in reference for today's lesson.

Can I give you a moment now to pause the video, to find that space and find that equipment.

And once you are ready to start today's lesson, please press resume and we will go forward and discuss what today's lesson will be about.

Now in today's lesson, we are going to focus on three key questions and three key elements.

We are going to look at what is a pressure group? So we're going to define the term pressure group and discussed examples of those.

Then we're going to look at these terms direct and indirect action.

And again, we're going to give some examples with what direct and indirect action are.

And then I want you to assess the effectiveness of both direct and indirect action in relation to a scenario.

Now, to get us thinking about pressure groups, this may be a term that you have came across before, but this may be a completely new concept today.

Just to get us thinking at the start of today's lesson, what I want us to do is use the five questions stems. Who, what, when, where and why, and have the term pressure groups in the forefront of our minds.

What I'd like you to do is ask as many questions as you can think of using those questions stems in relation to pressure groups.

I give you a few moments now to write those down.

So you can pause the video now to complete your task and press resume once you are finished.

So some key questions that I thought of when I complete this exercise for you is who gets involved in pressure groups and who runs them? What are they and what do they do? When do pressure groups meet and when do they stop fighting? Where do they meet? Where do they campaign? And why do they start and why do they get involved? Now, the answer to that, our first question, what are pressure groups? Okay.

So the following couple of slides, you will need to take some notes down so you can understand who and what pressure groups are.

A pressure group can be described as an organised group that does not put up candidates for election, but seek to influence government policy or legislation.

So there's no political elections for a pressure group you can join a pressure group freely.

And although that you don't put people up for elections to influence policies and legislation, you can seek to influence them in other ways.

And by the term pressure groups, you might be able to start to understand how they do so.

Now you are like I say you are free to join a pressure group and you're right to protest and authorities cannot stop you from joining a pressure group and on the other side cannot force you to join a pressure group either.

Now, it's really interesting to know that some people avoid using the term pressure group, because it inadvertently interprets as meaning the groups who actually use pressure to achieve their ends and that does not always necessarily happen.

It could just be something like you raise awareness about something, but you are still bringing to light an issue or a situation that you feel passionate about and that you are campaigning for change.

Now, whilst in Britain, the number of political parties are very small, the number of pressure groups runs into its thousands, and as the memberships of political parties is falling, the membership of pressure groups has increased.

So they do go hand in hand and some people might want to join a pressure group rather than the political party, because they might only believe in one particular issue in favour of another.

Now with pressure groups, it's all about influence, okay? The more people that you can get to join your cause more influence you will have.

Now, we're going to look at a task here about influence and advocacy.

Now, can you just write down very briefly, what does the word influence mean to you? So give the video a quick pause there.

Now with that term influence, I want you to imagine that you are selling these two beautiful puppies.

Now the person viewing the puppies only wants to take one, but you want them to be housed together.

So I would like you to think about how would you influence them to take both home? Now, the key here is advocacy.

It's the quality of your argument.

You need evidence of being persuasive within your speech, okay? So you can either here write a speech or you can perhaps record a speech.

So think about how you are going to appeal to the buyer of the puppies.

How would you try and influence them to buy both and not just one? And how are you going to make sure that you appealed to them? So how are you going to influence them? How are we going to use your advocacy skills, your writing skills and your spoken skills to get this buyer to take both puppies home when they only wanted to take one.

So pause the video here.

You can either write the speech or you can perform the speech by recording and then press resume once you are finished.

Okay, so my model response here.

How could you even think about leaving one behind? Look at her.

She is simple perfection personified! If you take both, you will not only be getting yourself an extra companion, but you will also give them the gift of being together.

They can run together, play together and make sure they have the connection only family can bring.

Do you want to be responsible for separating them? Do you want to be the reason that they are lonely? If you have one dog, have a second is easy! You already have the food, the home and the environment for both.

Go on, can you resist those beautiful blue eyes? Now what I've done there is I've tried to appeal to somebody's good nature and not guilt them, but I've started to make them feel sorry that if they leave one dog behind that they are going to disappoint them, and I've spoken about family values there.

So they deserve to go together, why wouldn't you? I've also said if you've got one dog, well having a second one surely is easy! Cause like I see you've got the space and the environment.

Now your speech might be similar, but I've tried to be persuasive in that speech and appeal to somebody's good nature.

I'll tell you how you can submit your responses at the end of this lesson.

So we need to look at what are pressure groups responsible for? If we know who pressure groups are, we need to know what they are responsible for.

So there are two things in whole that pressure groups are involved in, in one that they influenced politics, and one that they influence the law.

Now pressure groups provide a means of popular participation in national politics between elections.

So we've looked at in previous lessons that elections should take place within a five-year period.

Now, if that is rigid and we have to wait five full years until the next election pressure groups are really, really important between elections.

Excuse me.

Now, what they do is they can gather sufficient support and if the government are putting forward new pieces of legislation, they can force the government to amend that legislation or even further scrap legislation as a whole, because of the influence that they've got.

For example, we're talking 22 years ago now March, 1998, 300,000 people went to London to protest about the Labour government's rural policies, and that was known as the "Countryside March".

Now the government reacted by announcing plans for a Ministry of Rural Affairs and they published a white paper investigating all aspects of rural life.

So you can see there that between elections, the pressure group was really important in getting that key piece of legislation started and that Minister of Rural Affairs appointed.

Pressure groups are also really important because they have a sense of specialist knowledge and they often have access to information that is highly valued by decision makers.

Now, for instance, MENCAP and MIND, two groups that advocate on behalf of people with mental disabilities, they're often invited to give government briefings and in return for those information and that specialist knowledge, these groups have an input into making decisions and they can also receive financial contributions direct from the government.

So there's kind of a relationship there between the information given and the contributions and the influence that they have coming out of it.

So if they've got specialist knowledge and they can influence decision-makers and policy makers, then you would hope that the policies that they are writing are going to be more favourable for our citizens in the United Kingdom.

They then can influence the law, so they can inform.

So pressure groups inform decision-makers of their members preferences on a particular topic.

For example, teachers unions.

So if teachers are perhaps unhappy with a certain term, or they're perhaps worried about a certain issue, they can go to their teacher's unions and those unions can put forward their preferences to the relevant ministers.

They can also help out in elections.

So they may give time and/or money in the lead up to elections and they can help, political parties, draught manifesto's and help with any policy writing.

Now, a new term for you here, they might be able to vote in a bloc.

Now our bloc is voting together in one particular way.

So they decide between their memberships, which way they will vote.

And by doing this, they promise either to help someone that's being cooperative with them, or they threatened to harm in a nonviolent way, and non-corporative legislator.

So perhaps if someone's been non-cooperative with this pressure group, they can harm their election chances by not voting for them in an election.

They can however then vote as a group to help somebody that has helped them or maybe they've worked with in the past.

So they can have a massive influence on the result of an election.

They can also be responsible for writing bills or new laws and a pressure group can speed up the legislative process by writing bills and helping legislators make agreements.

So again that specialist knowledge plays a massive part there because they know exactly how people are feeling and what people are wanting.

And then fairly, they can simply influence.

So they can influence members of the executive branch you have some law making input.

Now, some examples for you of some pressure groups are the NUS, the National Union of Students, the UNT, the National Union of Teachers, the BMS, the British Medical Association and the NSPCC, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to children.

Now those pressure groups perform a really important role for their members, and they put forward any of the issues that we've spoken about to the executive or to other forms of So how do they get their views across then? So we've who they are and we've got what they do, but how do they get their voices heard? Well, we have two terms in citizenship.

We have something called direct action and indirect action.

Direct action first then entails physically attempting to hinder activity that is seen as wrong or through the gaining of promotion through spectacular actions.

It must be known though, that direct action does not have to be dangerous and direct action does not have to be aggressive.

What direct action does is simply approaches the problem activities at their source and attracts considerable media attention.

For example, lobbying, you are directly going to your MP and stating your issue or asking for help.

Protesting again, you are directly doing something because you are actively protesting.

Boycotting again, you are doing something you are not buying from that shop, you are not visiting that business, and civil disobedience being out in public and perhaps causing a dispute.

With indirect action then the overwhelming majority of pressure groups action is considered to be indirect action.

Now, indirect action could involve things like the promotion of use of education material, providing debates or calculated lobbying.

Indirect action is much more peaceful in comparison to direct action and it involves government support through the people rather than targeting the source.

So rather than going and demonstrating in the streets, they think that gathering more support through people, getting more members therefore allows them to put more pressure on policymakers.

For example, we could have some publicity campaigns.

This could be done through the use of leaflets and adverts through education material.

It could be through online petitions and getting your numbers up through support, and it could be raising awareness, like I said, through educational material.

So both playing a really, really important role here, but they each have the use and they each have their time and their place.

What I'd like to do then is a bit of a fact check for you.

So, what I'd like you to do is either you can draw the table here or you can use the one that's attached to today's resources.

So we're going to look up boycotting, E-petitioning, active protesting, lobbying to an MP, and writing educational material.

And all I'd like you to do is tick or cross or colour in whichever you think is direct action and what you think is in direct action.

So you can pause the video here to complete that task, which form of action is direct and which form of action is indirect.

So pause the video now to complete your task and press resume once you are finished.

Okay.

Hopefully you've got that boycotting is a form of direct action.

You are doing something direct.

You are doing something physical to influence the business all the people involved with the decision.

Hopefully you've identified that an E-petition is indirect.

You are there gathering support and seeing how much support you can get through numbers and then your petition can go forth to your relevant person you are campaigning against.

With active protesting.

Again I hope that you've said that it's direct action because you are physically doing something.

Lobbying into an MP.

Again, I hope you've put that it's a direct action.

You are doing something to start that change and you are physically doing something in relation to contacting your MP.

And writing in education material can be considered indirect action because you are there trying to get all the people to realise the cause.

In our previous lesson, we looked at the Sam.

Again, we're going to revisit Sam's scenario and Sam this time has decided to join a pressure group so he can discuss issues in his local community Sam's still upset about the plant housing development to be built on the farmland next to his home.

So looking at our previous five methods of direct or indirect action, what I want you to do is decide which ones will be effective for Sam to use and which ones would be ineffective for Sam to use.

So answering this question which method is more effective, director or direct action? You can either complete as an advantage or disadvantage table or you can write a short paragraph that answers the above question.

What I want you to do is try and think of two positives of direct action, and two negatives of direct action before you arrive at a conclusion,.

If you want to stick with me, I've got short timeline continuum that will help you plan your answer.

But if you want to continue with the task, pause the video now, and then hit resume once you're finished, if not stay with me for the short presentation afterwards.

So you might want to start by plotting it on a continuum and have a look at the five methods of indirect and direct action, and in relation to Sam's scenario, how effective or ineffective would it be? So you could draw a line and on the right hand side, it would be that's how effective it is, then down on the left hand side, how ineffective it would be.

So you can pause the video now and use that as a starting point and complete that task for me.

So that is the end of today's lesson.

That is the end of this unit.

Today we looked at what is a pressure group, and we looked at what is meant by the term pressure group and discussed examples of them.

Then we've looked at again the direct and indirect action and looked at examples of direct and indirect action.

And then you've applied that knowledge to a scenario and looked up the effectiveness in relation to Sam.

I want to see some of the work that you've produced today, and I'm especially looking forward to seeing if you have managed to convince people to buy two puppies rather than one.

So if you'd like to please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, using the tag @OakNational and using the #LearnwithOak.

For the final time, can I direct you to a exit quiz which is attached to today's lesson, just so that you can consolidate all of the learning that we've done in today's lesson and in previous lessons.

And I want to say a massive well done because some of the information in this unit has been tough and there are lots of new terms for you to get your head around, but I'm really really sort of looking forward to seeing some of the work that comes in.

And remember to ask your parents or carers to send that in on your behalf.

Thank you for attending all of these lessons.

I hope you found them really insightful, and I hope that you've gotten everything out of them that I intended for you to do so, until next time, I'll see you again.