Video: How is the UK government organised?

﻿Hi, and welcome to lesson five of how does UK political system work. Today, we're going to be exploring the question of how is the UK government organised. So, we're going to be looking at different, kinds of different government departments and their role. Okay, so for today's lesson, you are going to need your notes from last time, some paper, a pen, a different coloured pen and a quiet place to complete the lesson. If you need to grab any equipment or move, please do so now. Pause the video and then come back when you are ready. Okay. So, today we're going to look at three key questions. We're going to look at, how the government is organised. We are going to look at what the kind of different government departments are and we're going to look at the role of the treasury, which is one specific government department. Okay. So our first question is how is the government organised? Okay. So to think about this, we're going to start off with kind of something quite familiar to you, and we're going to look at how your school is structured and organised, okay. And we're going to produce what's called an organisational structure diagram. And what I would like to do is draw a diagram to represent your school structure okay. Think about all the different people in it. So your head teacher, your deputy head teacher, your assistant head teacher, your heads of department, your heads of year, your teachers, your form tutors, you. Who would you start with, who would you end with and how do these people relate to each other? Okay. And if you don't want to do your school, then you can do another organisation that you belong to. So a sports team, music group, et cetera. Okay. And if you're not too sure by what I mean by an organisational structure, I've had a go at drawing one for a football club, okay. So if you think about a football club, you've got the person in charge of it who's the chief executive okay. And then you have some kind of kind of vice executives and then kind of a big football club might split off into two bits. So it might split off into the kind of football players. So you've got your kind of executive for the football players and the team manager and then your head coach and you've got your first team players, and then for the other bit of the team you've got how it runs and how it makes it's profit et cetera. So you've got a commercial director, sales manager who makes sure tickets sell, you know they sell merchandise and things like that okay. So what I would like to do is produce a school organisational structure. So pause the video now and have a go at doing that. Okay well done for having a go with that, okay. And here is one produced by another assistant teacher, Mrs. White. And this shows the organisation of you know, many, many schools okay. It depends how your school is kind of organised. So at the top, we've got the Department for Education who kind of oversees schools and then because there are different types of schools, they've branched out to a County council or an Academy Trust. And then you got your head teacher, your deputy head teacher, your assistant head teacher, head of year, your teacher, through to you, your parents and carers. And an important thing, let's have a look at how they're all organised, okay. So while those are the top person in charge or a group in charge, everyone kind of links together to make the school work. And this is very much like the government okay. So why do you think it's important to have a structure with an organisation? What do you think are the benefits and what do you think could be the negatives? Okay. Now you don't have to write this down if you don't want to, but you kind of if you want to make a list. Kind of maybe pause the video and just take a couple of minutes, just have a think about what the benefits and what the negatives of having a structure within an organisation. So I've just got some thoughts here. It gives a clear chain of command so when something goes wrong you know kind of where to go. It gives each person their responsibility. So for example kind of when I go to school, I'm a teacher so I know that I've got a defined responsibility. I know I'm a form teacher so I know how to look after that form, et cetera. and there are also tasks to be overseen and directed so I know my manager gives me things to do specifically because of my job. She also does things because of her job, et cetera. It might make it a bit difficult though, because if there's lots of people in charge, it's like well which kind of which manager do I go to? And it might cause a bit of tension if you think the people above you aren't supporting you well enough to do your work effectively. Okay, so I'm sure you've got some of the same ideas, so well done for giving that a think. Okay, so we're going to have a look now at how the government is organised. I'm going to look at the key roles and people within the government. So I'm going to start off kind of with the Monarch okay. And we've looked at the role of the Monarch in a previous lesson, kind of the difference between government and parliament. So we know that we have a constitutional monarchy now. So that means that that kind of the monarchy doesn't run the country, but does have a very important role in it. It's kind of often quite traditional, it's often quite ceremonial, but she is technically kind of the head of state. So kind of, this is where we will start off. Then we have the prime minister okay. So the prime minister is the leader of the government, and currently this is Boris Johnson and the prime minister has overall responsibility for the policy decisions of the government okay. So kind of the Monarch would then kind of feed into the prime minister. And then we have got cabinet ministers okay. So the prime minister is supported in running the government by the cabinet okay. And the cabinet are senior members of government who oversee the running of different government departments. So the government is split up into lots of different departments and as well as being known as cabinet ministers, they're also known as secretary of state and each week they meet to discuss issues kind of which are important and this is called a cabinet meeting and you can see in the picture there that is where they meet kind of usually around the cabinet table, number 10. And then this is the current list of them. So I'm filming this in kind of August 2020, and this is currently list. I mean, I'll just say a few. So we've got Rishi Sunak, he's the Chancellor of the Exchequer so he is in charge of the treasury department. We've got Matt Hancock, who is the Secretary of State For Health and Social Care. We got Grant Shapps he is in charge of transport. Priti Patel, she is in charge of the Home Department. So you got lots of different people okay, which come together to support the work of the government. And then each government department is supported by ministers okay. So the head of the department is kind of the secretary of state, although the cabinet minister, and then these are supported by ministers. Okay. And the minister will have a specific responsibility within the department. And for example they'll oversee one aspect of his work. So if we look at this kind of education department for example, we have the secretary of state as Gavin Williamson, but then we've got other roles within the department which are overseen by different ministers. So for example, the minister of state for school standards is Nick Gibb, while everything needs kind of overseeing by Gavin Williamson. So a bit like in your school. So your school will have kind of heads of department and teachers might have a specific role kind of within the department, but everything will be overseen by the head of department. And then that secretary of state will feed in back to the prime minister. All right so we've got one prime minister, we got 21 kind of cabinet minister's, so we got 120 ministers in total at the moment. So a government department is responsible for putting a specific policy into practise okay. So specific promises of the government are now put into practise by a department. And there were 44 departments in total and 21 of these are overseen by a cabinet minister. Now I'm not going to go through every department 'cause that would take too long, I've just picked a few. So the treasury is to do with money and the economy, the foreign and Commonwealth office is to do with our foreign relations with kind of other countries and home office is to do with things like national security, keeping us safe. Minister of justice is about kind of the justice system and crime. Defence about the army and the air force and the Navy The department of social care is health and NHS caring for people. International trade is about how we trade with other countries. Department of education is obviously education. So primary, secondary, higher education, further education. Department for work and pensions. So it makes sure people have their pension, people have job et cetera. And then all these people involved in these things are also members of parliament okay. So they can become a minister because they are a member of parliament, because they have been elected by the people. Our MPs have another role, kind of many MPS work just on representing their constituents, but others also have additional roles as well. So what I would like you to do now is applying this knowledge to create a structured diagram of how the government is organised. So just like we did with the kind of school, we're going to look at the government okay. And these are the things I would like you to include, the prime minister, the home office ministers, the Ministry of Justice, the Monarchy, the Department of Health and Social Care, the kind of government departments, secretary of state, Department of Education okay. And we're going to look at the hierarchy okay. So kind of who has the most power okay. How does that feed down into different people? And what's the relationship between them. Now if you think you can do that by yourself, then it's fine. You can pause the video now, leave it on the screen and just go off and do it. But if you think you're going to need some help, then you can stay with me and I'm going to give you a model to maybe help and fill in. So here is a model okay. So we've got some letters which you can use to structure your thinking. So again, you might have to pause this and kind of work it out from there, I'm going to have to flip between this screen and the other screen. So pause the video and have a go at that task please. Okay, well done for giving that a go okay. So this is what I got. So we've got the Monarchy at the top who feeds into the prime minister, who feeds in through the secretary of state, then we've got ministers and then we've got our government departments, okay. So it's probably a bit more complicated than that as well, but you know just keeping it simple just to have an introduction on how it's organised, that works quite well. So well done for giving that a go. Okay so we're going to look at the work of one government department in particular okay, And we're going to look at the treasury okay. And can you remember what the treasury does? Hopefully you can. So the treasury is concerned with money and finance okay, and this is how the treasury is organised okay. So we've got the secretary of state, our cabinet minister, just make things a little bit more complicated, the person in charge of the treasury has a different title, they're known as a Chancellor of the Exchequer and currently this is Rishi Sunak. And again, you can see under Rishi Sunak we have different ministers who are in charge of different things within the treasury okay. So there's a hierarchy within the treasury. And again, there'll be people below them as well who feed into that work, who they then feed back to Rishi Sunak. So the HM treasury is governmennt's economic and finance department, and over sees a number of things, including public spending. So each government department has a budget and this is treasury. financial policies like regulating the banks and different financial services. Then the tax system. So when people get paid they pay tax, then when you go shopping you pay tax on things Infrastructure projects like building a roads, hospitals, schools, et cetera, they provide the money for these. The growth of the economy and they can show whether the economy is growing and what happened when we're kind of in a recession. The treasury will put things together to make us try and get out of a recession or avoid a recession. And the budget is probably the most well known activity of the treasury okay. So each year the Chancellor of the Exchequer goes to the commons and outlines the budget of what they're going to to do okay, and it's symbolised by this red case okay. So each Chancellor holds the red case and has all the paperwork and the red case, and here's the 2020 pictures of that. There's Rishi Sunak on his way to parliament kind of to the house of commons to give his budget in 2020. Okay so the budget is the annual decision of the government of how to spend on each government department okay. So it involves a lot of balancing of income and spending, and the UK gets it's income primarily through tax okay. So tax is money given to the government through things like wages, from businesses, from our spending in the economy, et cetera. But the UK also borrows some money as well to support it's income. And in 2020 to 2021, the chancellor divided 928 billion pounds, which as a figure, I think it's incomprehensible to think of how much money that is, but that's a lot of money between the government departments and also paying off the national debt. And so this is a breakdown of kind of, it's probably quite simplistic break down of what the government spent. Kind of take that as the bottom, figures may not sum due to rounding okay. So it's been round up to be made a bit simpler okay. So you might actually want to pause the video now and just have a look at what amounts were given to what okay. So education for example got 116 billion. The health got 178 billion. Housing and development got 32 billion okay. So quite a lot of spending going on there. So what I would like you to do now is have a think about if you were the chancellor okay, and you would be preparing the budget for 2021 okay, Which is something that we'll be thinking about right now, how would you do it? So we're going to pretend that we have a little increase in budget okay. So we're going to say we've got 936 billion pounds okay. And to make the task a little bit easier, what you can do is you can allocate the money in percentages rather than actual amounts. So what percentage out of 100 Okay so your chart will have to add up to 100% So you're going to look at the government departments which are listed there. So you might want to make a note of them and you can either produce a pie chart or a list okay. Now, to produce a pie chart, you can just draw around kind of something circular. So if you've got any cello tape or a glass or kind of anything at home. Or you can just make a list okay. And have to think about who would give the most to, who would you give the least to, and do you think there's stuff that needs funding by the government that isn't already okay. I should say that this isn't everything that government funds, but just to make it simpler for you I've just put a few ideas there. So pause the video now, have a go at that and then kind of come back to finish off the lesson. Okay so here is mine okay. So I have decided to give the most welfare and then health, and then housing gets the least. So you can see my pie chart and yours might look something hopefully like that if you're doing a pie chart kind of, well done. So that brings the lesson to an end okay and hopefully you now have a better idea of how the government is organised. You can get examples of different government departments and explain what they do, and you can explain the role of the treasury kind of just specifically. Okay so now the lesson's ended. Please don't forget to complete the quiz afterwards to check what you've learnt. Hopefully kind of see you for the final lesson again. Have a good day and see you again next time. Thank you.

Exit Quiz: How is the UK government organised?

Completed: How is the UK government organised?

This lesson will explore the organisation of the UK government. It will look at the roles of the Monarch, the Prime Minister, the Cabinet and Ministers. It will introduce the different UK government departments and focus on the work of the Treasury.

Citizenship

How is the UK government organised?

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