Our young people deserve to have citizenship education teachers who are properly trained if we are to close the class gap in political awareness

Hans Svennevig and Sera Shortland.

“I want to grow up in a country where the people are more powerful than the government.”

This statement was made by 16-year-old Harry in a speech he gave during MP6, a political speaking competition in Leicester. MP6 was part of his school’s Citizenship education programme, which, in a new decade, with a new government, is more important than ever.

Citizenship education inspires and encourages political knowledge and action. It is often the only opportunity within the curriculum that Harry and others might have to learn about democracy, government, politics, elections, referenda, human rights and international organisations such as the EU and the World Trade Organisation. Perhaps most importantly, it’s a chance to develop their own skills of active participation.

Since 2002 Citizenship has been on the national curriculum and the programmes of study require these topics to be taught in secondary schools. Discreet lessons in Citizenship are often the only opportunity for these ideas to be explored with adequate time to develop students’ confidence and strategies to navigate the complexities of local, national and world issues.

Developing students’ skills of critical evaluation, so they can knowledgeably discuss controversial issues such as the recent escalation of conflict between Iran and the United States, is vital in today’s polarised world.

Hoskins and Janmaat highlight in their new book Education, Democracy and Inequality and in a recent IOE blog that the link between lower social background and lower voting turnout in Europe is most prominently felt in the UK. Our current political and educational system appears to be increasing this class-based gap in political engagement.

This makes Citizenship education particularly important as “experiencing a high volume of CE helps children of disadvantaged backgrounds to catch up with their peers of more endowed backgrounds of political engagement”. Perhaps surprisingly, they found that having teachers with special responsibility for the subject does not seem to be making a difference to students.

We believe that this is due to the current shortage of Citizenship teachers who have had high-quality specialist training.

The House of Lords Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement said in 2018 that the government should ensure that there is a trained Citizenship teacher in every secondary school and that teacher training in Citizenship education should be urgently prioritised. The committee said many schools do not have adequate provision or expertise in the subject and therefore are not delivering it in the most effective way (i.e. those with responsibility for it do not have the expertise).

There are now only five university providers of Citizenship Post Graduate of Certificate in Education (PGCE teacher training) and UCL Institute of Education is one of them. We urge the new government to improve recruitment of Citizenship specialists. Our young people are relying on it and as of 2019 OFSTED requires it.

As Osler and Starkey contend, young people need more than access to processes such as voting. They need to know how to participate, be informed and critically understand the messages and impact of decision makers and decision making. Students do not just need knowledge; they need to know how to use what they have learned. The participatory nature of Citizenship education gives them opportunities to listen to other ideas and opinions and explore different narratives. The classroom becomes truly ‘deliberative’. (For more resources on this method of teaching see The Association for Citizenship Teaching and for ideas on teaching about elections see EducateGE 2019, which produced resources for the most recent election).

Sir Bernard Crick (1998) aimed for a change in the political culture of the UK through Citizenship education. In the Netherlands, where Citizenship education is not part of the formal curriculum, Groot and Eidhof (2019) demonstrate that the time and attention to focus on issues such as mock elections in a meaningful way to develop young people’s engagement with systems of democracy is limited.

Young people should always have the final word in matters that concern them, and the importance of Citizenship education and active support for it is best expressed in this video made by the students of Hamilton Academy in Leicester (from which the photo is taken).

Hans Svennevig is Senior Teaching Fellow Citizenship Education and Subject Leader Citizenship PGCE, UCL Institute of Education. Sera Shortland is Head of Citizenship, New College Leicester and former Citizenship Coordinator at Hamilton Academy, Leicester.