It’s been a very busy month for us as Members of Youth Parliament but more importantly as students; with the pressures of revision and exams, as we’re sure many of you are experiencing yourselves.

As a result of this it has been a rather quiet month on the progress front; however we have made some interesting discoveries in terms of our stress priority.

After being under huge amounts of stress ourselves, we have developed a greater understanding of the impacts of stress and have also had lots of feedback from other young people.

For example some young people have highlighted the pressures their teachers put upon them in the lead up to exam time; with lots of these pressures being unnecessary and comments being made such as ‘we won’t finish the course in time’.

Using your views such as these, we are aiming to produce a workshop targeted at teachers to raise awareness of the issue of stress and how teachers can help to reduce the enormous pressures put on young people.

We would really appreciate more feedback or comments from young people about their experiences, concerning stress, or in fact any other feedback surrounding any of our policies.

Moving on, we have also recently activated a twitter account which we hope will enable more young people to keep up-to-date with our news and progress. Follow us @PooleUKYP to get our latest updates as they happen.

On May 29, Jess attended the Regional Meeting in Taunton with fellow MYPs. In the meeting, we firstly discussed the Annual Sitting which is taking place between 26th – 28th July at Leeds University.

The Annual Sitting involves discussing and prioritising topical issues for young people in the UK. We also had talks from the ‘IF’ campaign by Oxfam surrounding equality of food distribution throughout the world. It was a very good day and I look forward to continuing the work with other members of Youth Parliament.

Furthermore, at the Regional Meeting we handed in 446 signatures on the Curriculum for Life campaign from Poole and we are continuing to collect more.

In the upcoming month we are planning to develop our three priorities and we look forward to keeping you up-to-date and hearing your views.

Jess Elms and Francesca Reed