Schools will need to give democracy lessons to children from the age of 11 and ask teachers to leave their politics at the classroom door to help prepare for votes at 16, the head of the UK elections watchdog has said.
Vijay Rangarajan, the chief executive of the Electoral Commission, said democratic education would be rolled out at first to those aged over 14 in preparation for votes at 16 at the next election.
However, he said this would ultimately need to start at age 11 in order for pupils to be in the best position to take advantage of being able to vote at 16 and 17.
The Electoral Commission is preparing material to give to schools to help with democratic education, amid calls from some politicians, such as David Blunkett, for better preparation.
In an interview with the Guardian, Rangarajan said huge work was going into the citizenship material to make it “impartial”, and said schools and teachers have a role in making sure they do not attempt to sway students in how to vote.
“We’re going to need teachers to be really good at leaving their own personal views a bit at the door here,” he said. “And making clear, when they have got personal views, it’s just personal views.”
Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform, has complained he sees the education system as being “full of leftwing prejudice” and “anti-Reform bias”.
Rangarajan said teachers “will need really good materials and some guidance on how you can teach this stuff well” with debates about engaging political issues, as well as the mechanics of how the system works.
“I can see that quite a few political parties have concerns about partiality, so we’re spending a lot of time on how we make sure the material is really impartial,” he said.
A poll of 6,000 teachers by Teacher Tapp found that more than 80% do not think the national curriculum currently prepares children enough to be able to vote at age 16, while about half of 16- and 17-year-olds have said they do not feel adequately well informed to be given the vote.
Rangarajan, a former ambassador to Brazil, who has been leading the regulator for just over a year, said one of the big lessons from the Scottish move to give 16-year-olds the vote in the independence referendum and in local and Holyrood elections was that schools needed to be on board with education about democracy.
“The main lesson that we took was it was extremely patchy in schools in Scotland, so that’s why we’re working on the education stuff really early on,” he said. “A lot of teachers said ‘We don’t want to engage’ in the run-up to the Scottish referendum, which was really quite sensitive. So teachers need some support.”
He said providing material nationally as an elections watchdog meant that teachers could “blame us if parents don’t always like it” but it was essential to get good levels of engagement among young people. The elections chief also said it was crucial to get young people thinking how to evaluate online material critically and tell what is misinformation.
The evidence is mixed on whether lowering the voting age for elections in Scotland and Wales has increased democratic participation, but there is emerging data suggesting that voting habits are more likely to stick if they are formed early.
Rangarajan spoke to the Guardian after the government unveiled its election reform package to tighten the rules on political funding, crack down on abuse of candidates, increase fines for breaking the rules and move towards more automatic registration of voters.
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He said the Electoral Commission had been calling for the closure of some of the loopholes to stop foreign money entering politics since 2013, so it was important to see the government bringing in changes to restore voter trust to the system.
However, he called for further action on bringing back the independence of the Electoral Commission, after Boris Johnson put it under government oversight for the first time by giving ministers the right to set its policy objectives.
“The point of principle is a government depends on an election to get re-elected,” he said. “And it shouldn’t be able to instruct the people who are trying to referee that re-election.”
The government has so far resisted overturning Johnson’s changes, but peers could push for the Electoral Commission to become fully independent again when the promised elections legislation gets to the House of Lords.
He also said there was more work to do on protecting especially female candidates from deepfake porn, and looking at whether more needs to be done to strengthen the rules around donations to political crowdfunders by cryptocurrency.
He said the biggest worry currently, in terms of defending democracy, was about abuse putting people off wanting to be politicians, particularly women and ethnic minority candidates. “It’s very gendered,” he said. “We’re getting into the realms of some of the deepfake porn and so on that we’re seeing being used as a direct tool against women candidates quite a lot.”
A speaker’s conference is examining the issue, with the Electoral Commission taking part in Scottish pilots that involve centralised units of police, electoral officials and IT experts working together to track down those involved in generating abusive material.
Despite a push from some ministers for a ban on cryptocurrency donations, which can be difficult to trace, Rangarajan said he did not think that was necessary as there was already a huge responsibility on parties to be sure they knew the source of their donations. “Parties get given far more weird things than crypto,” he said, pointing to donations of artworks, foreign trips or the use of yachts, which can be harder to quantify.
