Local Fine Gael Councillor John Dolan has welcomed the support for his motion to sponsor one student from Westmeath in the Graduate.ie programme in the 2019/2020 school year.
‘I heard about this Programme last year and felt that there was a great opportunity for Westmeath County Council to get involved in this great competition and use this as a method to engage with the youth of our county. There are questions set for 20 weeks about different aspects of the way in which the Council and politics impacts our daily lives, with prompts and links to the answers. At the end of the 20 weeks a winner is chosen and receives a prize of a trip for four days to the European parliament. I want to thank my colleagues in the council for their support for my motion and want to encourage as many schools as possible to partake in this initiative,” Cllr. Dolan enthused.
About Graduate.ie Graduate.ie is a free online citizenship and democracy programme for second level students in Ireland. It is a government, local government and EU funded programme and it has been in operation since 2001, the aim of which is to increase the civic, social and political awareness of second level students through a weekly online quiz/competition.
Students are incentivised to take part in the weekly programme with opportunities to win a free four-day educational trip to Brussels, Luxembourg and the European Parliament in Strasbourg. There are a total of 25 free trips to be won each year and to date over 600 students have won similar education trips abroad as part of the Graduate.ie programme.
How it works
Each week for 20 weeks of the academic year students’ logon to www.graduate.ie They are given access to questions, which are provided to us by various sponsoring organizations and are directed by hyperlinks to the sponsors’ websites where they research the correct answers.
Students submit their correct answers to Graduate.ie , where the computer randomly selects weekly winners from all the correct entries.
There is at least one winner selected each week with the 25 winners receiving a free four day educational trip to Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg.
They spend one full day at the European Parliament where they take part in a youth parliament (Euroscola ) with students from other EU member states.
