The trouble with citizenship
The small group of teenagers arrived at the school in tears. They had been threatened by some of their fellow students and abused.
Britain had just voted for Brexit - that small group had been taunted and told their mosque would be closed down.
A week earlier, Lee Jerome, associate professor of education at Middlesex University, had visited the school to see how it was working on improving its provision of citizenship education. The classes had not yet been able to ensure that the abuse did not happen, but they had made sure that other students recognised the political angle to the taunts and could articulate why it was wrong. It was a start.
For Jerome, citizenship education is all about empowering students to recognise instances like this, to respond to them and help prevent them.
“We have to proactively build up students’ understanding of how to read these issues and what to do about them, give them a space to mull them over and work out what they think,” he says.
And yet citizenship education is under threat. Since 2009 the number of students studying the subject has dropped by two-thirds. And there are many who welcome that, who see it as a natural erosion of an ill-defined subject area. Are they right?
A committed bunch of teachers and organisations take a different view. They warn that this is a dangerous drop that needs to be arrested and reversed. They claim that in a period when the country is arguably more divided than it has been for decades, we need citizenship education more than ever.
Lessons from history
Ever since it was introduced as a subject, citizenship has struggled for a place in an already crowded curriculum. Arguably, recent changes to educational policy have elbowed it out even further, with it not being deemed an English Baccalaureate subject.
And yet history would suggest that the current upheavals following the European Union referendum should be a prompt for citizenship education to receive a boost. For the growth of citizenship education has often been spurred on by periods of social and political uncertainty.
For example, fears about the rise of fascism in the inter-war period led to the establishment of the Association for Education in Citizenship in 1934, which aimed to strengthen the principles of liberal democracy.
Another example is that, in 1997, the perceived crisis of “political apathy” caused by a record low turnout of young voters led David Blunkett (who was education secretary at the time) to establish the Advisory Group on Citizenship.
The group’s report, published in 1998, pronounced boldly that its aim was “no less than a change in the political culture of this country both nationally and locally”. It outlined three essential strands of citizenship education: social and moral responsibility, political literacy and community involvement.
In 2002, citizenship became a statutory requirement in secondary schools, with the report suggesting one and a half hours of lessons per week.
Liz Moorse was the manager for Blunkett’s Advisory Group on Citizenship. She is now the senior manager for the Association for Citizenship Teaching (ACT) and she is on the board of trustees at the Citizenship Foundation.
“It was growing and strengthening until 2009, when there were just under 100,000 students taking the GCSE,” explains Moorse.
‘It’s about connecting citizens to their democracy’
However, recent changes to education policy (such as the dropping of short-course GCSEs and the introduction of the EBacc performance measure) have led to citizenship becoming sidelined. The number of students taking the GCSE last year was only around 18,000.
Whether that is because schools don’t understand citizenship and, therefore, don’t invest much energy in the subject, or because citizenship education is actually flawed and people have started noticing it, is a matter of much disagreement.
Moorse is very much in the former camp. Although some schools do teach citizenship as a discrete subject, many combine it with their PSHE provision, or use tutor time or even off-timetable days to cover key topics. Couple this with a lack of specialist teachers, and it’s easy to see why it has been undervalued by schools and thus by students, too.
“Until it has parity of esteem,” says Moorse, “it’s not going to be taken seriously. Where it does [get that] though, it’s such a massively positive experience for young people.”
David Barrs, co-headteacher at the Anglo European School in Essex, would agree. He says that citizenship was a central part of the curriculum at his school long before it became statutory in 2002.
“We were always committed to teaching citizenship as a separate subject. We consider it to be as important as maths, English and science. It has a department, it has a management structure, it does reports and it is monitored in the same way as any other department,” he explains.
“Citizenship is about connecting citizens to their democracy and to their society. Well taught, it should give children a clear view of their own identity in the context of their own culture as well as enable them to move confidently between cultures.
“Students also need to experience the nature of service above self, volunteering and giving. We neglect our social capital as a society at our peril.”
Despite compulsory work experience being scrapped in 2012, the school has continued to offer it and sees it as vital to teaching the subject. It also encourages students to take part in organisations such as the National Citizen Service (NCS), a youth volunteering programme established by the coalition government in 2011.
“[NCS] is a powerful citizenship-building tool,” says Barrs.
The NCS offers 16- and 17-year-olds the chance to participate in a four-week outdoor challenge to build team-working skills. They then return to their communities and carry out a voluntary social action project.
In an article for The Daily Telegraph, former prime minister David Cameron announced that his first job after leaving 10 Downing Street would be as chairman of NCS’ patrons.
He described NCS as “the Big Society in action”, saying that he wanted to “embed NCS in our national fabric”.
Flawed concept?
For many, that is the very opposite of what should happen and, despite the positive experience of citizenship education at Barrs’ school, there are teachers who believe that the subject should not be taught in classrooms.
Kevin Rooney is head of social sciences at Queens’ School near Watford, where he teaches politics. He thinks that the concepts behind citizenship education are flawed.
“Teaching students about government and politics is great,” says Rooney, “but the ideas of social and moral development and community involvement are problematic. Citizenship was introduced in the late 1990s as a reaction to the ‘crisis’ of political apathy. This was arguably a crisis of ideological choice. Young people weren’t apathetic; they had rejected mainstream politics.”
Seen in this light, argues Rooney, citizenship can be viewed as a form of social engineering. “It has always been about producing compliant citizens,” he concludes.
Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent, adds that citizenship has often been characterised by an attempt to transmit a predefined set of “values”.
Some see the Department for Education guidelines on teaching “fundamental British values” as a case in point. And although these aren’t technically part of the citizenship curriculum, it is seen as the natural place for teaching them.
“If you’re genuinely worried about what it means to be British - and I think we should be - the proper way to morally educate children is through teaching them history and literature,” says Furedi.
‘The proper way to morally educate children is teaching them history and literature’
Add these views to a tight timetable, an accountability framework based on core subjects (with citizenship excluded) and a lack of specialist staff, and you can begin to see how the idea that citizenship education has no place in schools gains traction.
And yet those who believe in citizenship education are fighting back.
Jean-Louis Dutaut, teacher of politics and citizenship at Southend High School for Girls, concedes that the citizenship curriculum has been poorly taught in many places, but he thinks that Furedi’s view represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what the subject can offer students.
“It can teach how British democracy works, why it works in this way, and lead students to think critically about how it might be made to work better (or indeed, be undermined),” says Dutaut.
“It can teach what the rule of law is, how it is maintained in the UK, and cases where it is not, and the impact of that. It can teach elements of political philosophy and sociology pertaining to liberty and to the individual in society.
“Besides these, it can teach political party ideologies, theories of state and international relations, human rights, how government works and how to influence policy and politicians within the law, how the tax system works and much more besides.
“Many of these things may be covered in other curricula, but usually in optional subjects, which means that no student would get the full picture - unless they studied politics at A level.
“This isn’t a subject for woolly 21st-century skills and meaningless engagement. It is a subject for a robust knowledge-led curriculum and concrete involvement in our democratic society.”
Defending democracy
As for the accusation of social engineering, Jerome says it is nonsense.
“Citizenship education does not seek to socially engineer like-minded individuals,” he says. “It sets out to help young people understand what it means to live in a democracy and how to influence change. If you don’t give students space to think critically, you make them susceptible to the whole bunch of nonsense which is out there looking for people to believe in it.”
That there is an obvious thirst for the above knowledge among the student body is not contested by either side of the citizenship debate.
As one Year 9 student at a school in Buckinghamshire told Jerome, “Schools can give students enough knowledge so you can see past what’s being fed to you in the media, so we can make our own opinions.”
The methodology to actually offer that knowledge and to enable that critical thinking among pupils, however, looks like it will be much contested for some time yet.
Where the pro-citizenship group will struggle is that if you speak to a random selection of teachers you will likely hear sympathy for citizenship teaching as a concept, but little indication from most that this is something they are willing to fight for - with the exception of those like Dutaut who are already actively engaging in teaching the subject.
Does that mean citizenship is likely to eventually fade away quietly?
Blunkett has been at the heart of the debate over citizenship education since the formation of the subject by his advisory group in the late 1990s. He is currently president of the Association for Citizenship Teaching and a board member of the NCS. Despite the challenges the subject faces, he is confident it can thrive.
“Young people are the future, and a healthy democracy demands effective citizenship education,” he says. “We know citizenship works in schools where it is allowed to…[it can] build confidence to challenge constructively injustice and work with others to make a difference to the world around them. We want to see the subject flourish in every school.”
He managed to ensure that was the case once before; many will be hoping he can repeat the trick.
Tommy Lumby is a freelance journalist
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