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Results are in - 2025 PSA/FT Student Blog Competition!
“Can Social Media help save Democracy?”
This was the question asked of students, aged 16-19 in full time secondary education, who were invited to respond by submitting a blog to the annual PSA/FT Student Blog Competition.
The judges were impressed with the high standard and interesting perspectives of over 60 responses to this question. They expressed their hope that the students will continue to develop the knowledge and skills demonstrated in their submissions.
From this strong field, our congratulations go to this year’s winner:
Laura Barani from Taipei European School!
You can read Laura’s blog here and it will be published online by the Financial Times.
We also congratulate joint runners up: Caitlin Danaher, age 16, from Ark Isaac Newton Academy and Kian Noorani, age 17, from Churcher's College. They were delighted to have the opportunity to read out their blogs at Shout-Out UK’s ‘Have I Got Fake News for You’ political and media literacy quiz for schools in parliament on 10 June.
We thank our judges: Stephen Bush, Associate Editor and columnist at the Financial Times; Dr Ana Nunes, Nottingham Trent University and PSA Trustee; and Matteo Bergamini MBE, CEO, Shout-Out UK
And our thanks, of course, to all the students who entered - and we hope you will consider going on to study politics at university. Former PSA Trustee, Professor Stuart Wilkes-Heeg from the University of Liverpool, gives five good reasons for doing so!
- If you’re reading this, you are presumably interested in Politics. To study a subject for three years or more, you ideally need to enjoy it, so being interested is a great start.
- Politics matters - it affects all our lives, every day, in ways great and small. I can’t promise that studying Politics will enable you to change the world, but I can promise that you’ll end up understanding it a lot better.
- Don’t underestimate this one - if you study Politics, your family and friends will always ask you to explain things to them. When there’s an election or some big political event, almost everyone suddenly gets at least a bit curious about Politics. If you can help others to make sense of it all, you’ll be contributing to the greater democratic good.
- Studying politics qualifies you to do a lot of things in later life. Very few Politics graduates become politicians - rather more become journalists, civil servants, campaigners, regulators or, even, teachers of politics. What you learn on a Politics degree will be transferable to all manner of other contexts and professions.
- Finally, there are lots of options - within each of the related degrees that you choose, you’ll be able to specialise in the aspects of politics that inspire you the most. Whether that’s Plato’s political thought, proportional representation, or the study of war and peace (not the book). Whatever it is the draws you to politics, you'll find it somewhere in a degree course - and a lot more besides!