Strategic objective:
Better citizenship education

We have witnessed a sea-change in the position of citizenship education in schools during our lifetime - and we have been a key driver of this change.

Studying citizenship has been compulsory in secondary schools since 2002, due in no small part to our efforts. We continue to campaign for it to become a statutory part of the primary curriculum, too.

We also welcome developments across the broader social curriculum - for instance, in Enterprise Education, Financial Capability or Personal, Social and Health Education - and we will continue to make a distinctive contribution in these areas.

But that does not mean that our work is complete.

  • We want young people to leave school or college with the political, legal and economic literacy - and the social and moral awareness - that will enable them to thrive in adult society;
  • We want our schools and colleges not simply to teach citizenship but to demonstrate it through the way that they operate. We want them to champion student voices and community engagement and build the kind of learning communities that we describe as ‘citizenship-rich';
  • We need school and college leaders and policymakers to understand that high-quality citizenship education is vital to these aspirations and to the broader goals of raising achievement and promoting inclusion.

By 2013, we will have:

  1. Further developed our range of programmes, projects and publications that support effective teaching and learning in citizenship education, in the classroom and beyond;
  2. Continued to prove the value of citizenship education (in its own right and as an engine for school and college improvement) to educational leaders and to policymakers. We will do this through published research and through our work with employers across all sectors;
  3. Gained wide acceptance of the view that citizenship education is a necessity for everyone, and reinforced its position as a compulsory subject in primary and secondary schools;
  4. Made a particular contribution to related initiatives, such as those around Personal, Social and Health Education, Public Legal Education and Financial Capability;
  5. Engaged with government, the media, other policy-influencers and practitioners in the UK, in Europe and further afield so as to impact on key policy agendas.

Further information

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