Jacob Simmons, Year 8, has written an article as one of his PiXL Edge tasks. We reproduce it below:

In a UK general election people vote for who they want in Parliament. The UK is divided into 650 areas called constituencies. In an election each constituency picks one person to represent them in Parliament. Each representative is called 'a member of Parliament' or 'MP' for short. MPs are usually members of groups called political parties. The party with the most MPs forms the government.

Imagine a world where wolves and sheep live and vote for their own MPs. If you want to eat sheep you will want to vote for someone who will invent laws allowing you to do that. But if you are a sheep then you may want laws to protect you from being eaten. If you had control over the most influential people in the nation what would you tell them to do?

There are two houses in parliament:

The House of Lords
The House of Commons

They aren’t like homes, they’re just big fancy rooms (also called chambers) where people debate, discuss and decide on the issues that matter.

For the government to make laws they have five steps to take:                                                   

• First they strike up a proposal.
• Next they make a bill, which is an idea of what the new law will look like.
• After this they take a vote on whether to implicate the law or not.
• The prime minister then signs off the new law.
• And on the odd occasion so does the queen!

A political party in Parliament is not a big get together where the queen, prime minister and MPs sing and dance all day. Instead, a political party is a section of Parliament that each stand for their own ideas. If we go back to the wolf and sheep we could say they both represent a party. The ‘sheep’ party and the ‘wolf’ party would both stand for separate ideas, so the wolf party may stand for eating sheep and the sheep party may stand for banning eating sheep.

When the election is over, the Houses of Parliament shut for a day to count the votes and find out who wins. If the wolves won the election, they would implement a law that would allow them to eat sheep. However if the wolves didn’t win by a large enough amount then they couldn’t make the law!

- Jacob Simmons