The key to success in A level Politics is being up to date with current events and including this in your essays.

Throughout the year, I will ask you to keep a diary of significant news stories and you will share this with your classmates on a regular basis. This is your opportunity to start doing this.

What do you need to do?

Decide on a way to keep track of your important news stories, you can be as creative as you like in this. You might decide to;

• Complete a daily diary

• Make an actual scrapbook or have a special folder for news cuttings.

• Start your own blog

• Create a separate twitter account to track news stories.

Try to watch or read the news every day over the summer and log at least three interesting stories per week. These could be factual accounts of notable events or interesting opinion pieces that catch your attention.

This should include;

• What is the news story about?

• Where did you read it?

• Why did you think it was important? What can we learn from it?

Too much COVID-19? Don't worry if you feel there's only stories about COVID-19 in the news (this is inevitable!) Just try to think about what it might tell us about politics;

• Who is making decisions on our behalf?

• How do we hold our politicians to account?

• Why do different countries handle things differently?

Sources you could use

See below for some suggestions for websites you could use. This isn't a complete list, feel free to look elsewhere but keep an eye out for bias, distortion and fake news.

Also try looking at my suggested TV programmes and podcasts to give you more ideas.