‘We have put teachers back in charge of the classroom,’ they said. ‘They can search pupils without consent, confiscate prohibited items and use reasonable force to remove disruptive pupils from the classroom when necessary.

‘We know many good schools already work with the police and other organisations to educate pupils and protect them from harm and involvement in crime.’

Which is all very well, but seems a little inadequate – and arguably unhelpful.

For a start, beginning from a standpoint that kids are probably criminals that need protecting from each other is likely to alienate the kids and, well, turn them into criminals; that is, people who don’t follow society’s rules because they’re imposed and appear arbitrary, and feel they have no stake in them.

It’s a shame the Government’s reaction is to see pupils as the problem, rather than as people that benefit from education about the law: what it is, why it’s there, how it gets there, how it affects people and why society criminilises certain behaviours. It’s a double shame because this Government wrote a citizenship curriculum that is supposed to do that.

So, businesses are stepping in. More than 40 law firms, in-house legal teams and chambers put their staff into schools as part of our Lawyers in Schools programme. Big companies like Addleshaw Goddard, Olswang, Barclays, Verizon, JP Morgan, Mitsubushi and BBC Worldwide work with groups of school students to connect them to the legal framework that governs their lives.

Of course, it’s not just altruistic: businesses are keen on Lawyers in Schools because it connects them with communities, offers pro bono opportunities and breaks down barriers between young people and the legal profession. But they also like it because they see a positive change in attitudes towards the law and, as a result, towards other people.

So, if you want to help schools reconnect young people with society, send in your lawyers.

Image: ‘Australia Day’ by marragem (Flickr; (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Auvisa.org is an Australian visa agency. In this guest post, an employee explains how Civics and Citizenship Education has developed in Australia.

The Australian approach to Civic Education takes its distinctive traits from Australia’s governmental system and its historical and geographic contexts. Australia is a constitutional monarchy with a representative parliamentary process based on the Westminster system. Voting is compulsory; that is, all eligible Australian citizens must enroll and appear at voting stations for federal elections, by-elections and referendums, although casting a null vote is possible. 1

‘The Australian Curriculum: Civics and Citizenship‘ describes Australia as a ‘multicultural, secular, and multi-faith society, governed through a well-established representative parliamentary process and based on liberal democratic laws, values, principles and practices.’ Based on the 2008 Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians, the current Australian Curriculum directs special attention to three cross-curriculum priorities: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and cultures; sustainable living; and Asia including Australia’s engagement with Asia. Its stated goals read in part: ‘…all young Australians should become active and informed citizens [who] act with moral and ethical integrity; appreciate Australia’s social, cultural, linguistic and religious diversity, and have an understanding of Australia’s system of government, history and culture; understand and acknowledge the value of Indigenous cultures […]; are committed to national values of democracy, equity and justice, and participate in Australia’s civic life […]’ 2

Civic Education in the 20th century

At the turn of the century and early 1900s, civic education was not treated as a discrete subject in the Australian educational system, but was incorporated into history and moral training. By the 1930s and 1940s it had become explicitly included as a component of social studies. 3 The late 1980s and early 1990s saw rising perception of a deficit in civic knowledge and participation by the public, especially among people between the ages of 15 and 35 4, and the federal government conducted inquiries in 1989, 1991, and 1994. 3

As a result, in 1997 the government initiated the Discovering Democracy program, which made lessons in civics and citizenship compulsory for all students in years 4 to 10. 5 Delays in receiving and implementing curriculum materials dogged the program at first: in 1999 only 80 per cent of teachers were aware of the Discovering Democracy program and 69 per cent of teachers had no significant experience in teaching the program. Despite these drawbacks, the report stated that among those familiar with the program, ‘the aims of the program are generally seen as sound and among the most important and valued learning experiences for their students.’ 6

The National Goals for Schooling in the Twenty-First Century, commonly known as the Adelaide Declaration, followed in 1999. One of its goals specifies that graduating students should be ‘active and informed citizens with an understanding and appreciation of Australia’s system of government and civic life.’ 7

Still, major challenges persisted. A 2003 study identified two major issues: teachers’ lack of preparation and students’ lack of motivation. 7 Only three per cent of teachers surveyed had studied civics as part of their pre- or post-graduate degree, and up to one-third of the teachers surveyed reported they did not feel confident in teaching a number of the twenty topics the Adelaide Declaration laid out as essential to civics education. Another 2003 study found that Australian students scored average when compared globally in terms of overall knowledge of civics, but lagged behind in civic participation: 83 per cent felt that joining a political party was not important; 55 per cent felt that knowing about the nation’s history was important; and 50 per cent felt following issues in the media was important; additionally 66 per cent of regarded engaging in political discussion as unimportant. 8

The Melbourne Declaration and today

The Melbourne Declaration of 2008 superseded the Adelaide Declaration and laid out two goals: ‘Australian schooling will promote equity and excellence,’ and ‘All young Australians will become successful learners, confident and creative individuals and active and informed citizens.’ 9 Besides making civic education an explicit central goal, it seeks to improve on the Discovering Democracy program by emphasizing political involvement and civic responsibility in addition to civic knowledge. 10

The Australian Electoral Commission plays a major role in supporting civic education, with dedicated staff to provide teacher trainings and public education programs on request. These efforts have been found to have a positive effect, as a 2009 study found a boost in percentage of students who intended to vote (if it were not mandatory) after having taken a course about government (62.5 per cent) versus those who had not (52 per cent). 10 The gains may be more pronounced, as young people are more likely to engage in forms of civic participation other than electoral voting, including signing petitions or attending protests. 11

However, civic knowledge doesn’t necessarily result in civic action, as structural barriers to civic engagement also remain. Aspects of gender, ethnicity, and class affect individuals’ time for and access to means of civic engagement; for example, a person can’t participate in voting without a stable address. Stereotypical or tokenistic representations within civic discourse can increase alienation. 11

Overall, the effectiveness of the current curriculum remains to be seen as it continues to develop. Most recently, on 18 September 2015 the Education Council endorsed the Australian Curriculum in eight learning areas. 12

Auvisa.org is a professional Australian visa agency, established in 2011 by migration lawyers. Auvisa.org has ‘helped thousands of applicants to get the visa to Australia and always provides the most efficient and suitable migration solution to the clients’.

1. http://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/voting_australia.htm
2. http://www.acara.edu.au/verve/_resources/Shape_of_the_Australian_Curriculum__Civics_and_Citizenship_251012.pdf
3. http://www.ied.edu.hk/include/getrichfile.php?key=efd0cb13e6f575cbbe511016c26c9850&secid=900&filename=cgc/LTudball_DHenderson_ANewCivicsCurriculumForAustralianSchools.pdf
4. http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp9899/99RP15
5. http://www.alrc.gov.au/publications/10-children-education/civics-education-and-participation
6. http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_representatives_Committees?url=em/education/subs/attacb.pdf
7. http://www.civicsandcitizenship.edu.au/cce/default.asp?id=9318
8. https://depts.washington.edu/ccce/assets/documents/bennet_civic_learning_in_changing_democracies.pdf
9. https://prezi.com/psejxcjgwmiv/melbourne-declaration/
10. http://www.iier.org.au/iier25/heggart.html
11. http://www.socresonline.org.uk/19/1/5.html
12. http://www.acara.edu.au/curriculum.html

‘A goat is like Parliament or the justice system: unpredictable, more complex than one might expect and close enough to kick you.’ (Image by Natesh Ramasamy [Flickr; CC BY 2.0])

I’m not saying democracy is like a goat, that would be silly. No, democracy is more like the bucket of milk: attempt to fill it without understanding how the goat works and practising first, and the whole thing could come crashing down around your ears (or, in this case, ankles). (The goat, of course, is more like Parliament or the justice system: unpredictable, more complex than one might expect, and close enough to kick you – or lick you, for that matter.)

Suppose I had not visited that farm but that I had dived headfirst into the global milk supply business. Would it have been enough for me to spend a little time at a desk in front of a blackboard (this was the nineteen seventies), looking at diagrams and naming parts? I suspect not; I suspect my enterprise would have been very short-lived.

And while a healthy global goats-milk market is great and all, I reckon a healthy society is probably greater. So I’m a bit bothered that the UK Government has stripped the new key-stage 3 and 4 citizenship curriculum of any meaningful practice (it’s now mainly about learning facts rather than preparing young people for practical civic engagement).

And the GCSE! Before, a good chunk of its assessment was of practical application, outside in the community, away from the artificial conditions of the examination hall. But the new citizenship GCSE, for teaching from next year, has none of that. Zero. The whole thing will be assessed through a written examination of what the students can remember – or of what they think the assessor wants to hear.

Of course, there’s an argument that the last thing we want to do is give people a glimpse of reality and tell them they have now enough experience to change it; that, actually, we should leave such important stuff to the professionals and out of the school classroom. We wouldn’t attempt open heart surgery from an interactive tutorial on the internet (I hope), we would take the patient to a hospital; so why is it a good idea to encourage young people to meddle in civic life after just a little exposure to it?

Because, unlike surgeons, no young person in the UK chooses to be a citizen – they are one whether they (or we) like it or not – so a little practice is a lot better than none at all.

And because our political leaders want us to take more responsibility in these days of austerity. It would seem somewhat unfair of them to expect us to do what we’ve never done before without a certain amount of training.

So why does the Government fail consistently to promote its citizenship curriculum? Citizenship is the one place in the mandatory school landscape where issues such as British values and extremism – topics the Government is keen for schools to address – already have a natural home.

And, when run well, it’s a safe and nurturing home – one where the occupants are enabled to develop their critical thinking and explore issues from all sides – and not a reactionary one where issues are like eggshells and views become polarised: or, worse, uniformly ignorant.

Yet its status in schools has been undermined in recent years by the absence of government endorsement, even now that schools are expected to tackle the thorny, societal issues of British values and extremism.

(If you want further proof of our Government’s lack of interest in its citizenship curriculum, you need look no further than the current excitement around human rights. ‘Human rights’ is there already, firmly and squarely in the citizenship curriculum (the citizenship curriculum, I might add, that was written and prescribed by this very Government), yet the education secretary, Nicky Morgan, seems to have forgotten that and ploughed ahead with her own pet programme of human rights lessons.)

So, on this International Day of Democracy, let’s raise a cheer for citizenship education. Because it deserves it. And because at least we have it; without it, we would be even further from belonging to a citenzry that feels part of the process.

Remember, if you want people to milk goats successfully themselves, you must first teach them how to do it.

Whereas the Conservatives seem to have forgotten they even have a citizenship curriculum, and the previous Labour leadership took some time to acknowledge it, the new shadow cabinet has a history of supporting it.

In 2010, David Blunkett tabled an early day motion to recognise the importance of citizenship education. It was signed by Jeremy Corbyn himself, Heidi Alexander (shadow health secretary), John McDonnell (shadow chancellor) and Lisa Nandy (shadow energy secretary).

And earlier, in 2005, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell signed an EDM in recognition of our work (yes us, the Citizenship Foundation).

As for the actual shadow education secretary, Lucy Powell, we shall have to wait and see. I don’t know much about her (leaving aside her controversial television appearances and her involvement with Labour’s ill-fated general election campaign), except that she voted for state school teachers to have qualified teacher status and against greater autonomy for schools.

Help us petition the exam boards to keep A level citizenship

A-level enrolment figures for last year were released yesterday. They show that citizenship studies is far from the subject with the smallest intake: 2,914 students took either the A or AS level in 2014. And yet, A-level citizenship is being dropped.

By comparison, A-level archaeology had fewer than half that number – just 1,238 entries – but no-one is proposing to drop that qualification.

It’s important that we understand our past, of course it is. But it’s equally important that we understand how best to shape the present and prepare for the future. And, in that regard at the very least, the need for stronger citizenship education and qualification opportunities in the UK has rarely been greater.

This is clear from young people’s disaffection for formal politics, the dramatic potential shifts in the landscape of British democracy, radical changes to the justice system and how citizens access it, and our uncertain relationship with Europe.

But perhaps the clearest indicators for schools and colleges are the new requirements of them to prevent extremism and to engage their students with British values such as democracy and the rule of law.

Citizenship is on the reformed National Curriculum. Exam bodies are busy writing their new GCSEs; but what’s the point if there’s no A-level to progress to?

The A-level combines academic knowledge and understanding with practical action. And it makes an excellent contribution to preparation for higher education and employment.

It carries full UCAS points and is widely accepted for university entry. Cambridge University and the LSE, for example, cite it as a good subject choice for students preparing for a range of arts, political and social science degree courses.

So, with campaign group Democratic Life, we are continuing the petition to keep A-level citizenship.

Ofqual will consider reinstating the citizenship A-level if an exam board wants to offer it. So, please help us convince the exam boards to propose new A-levels in this important subject.

Go on, sign the petition!

Children join Nataylia Roni to sing the Go-Givers song.

Musician Andy Silver has written Singing Out!, a collection of twenty ‘exciting new pop songs’ that teach topics such as trust, peace, forgiveness, friendship and justice.

The songs come in all sorts of styles: pop, jazz, dance, ballad et cetera. A book contains the lyrics with piano notation and an accompanying DVD has backing tracks, on-screen lyrics and downloadable mp3s. The book begins with teaching notes: each song has an SMSC teaching point that it seeks to reinforce.

Of course, citizenship education (which is what interests us most at the Citizenship Foundation) is about understanding and challenging viewpoints – dialogue for pluralistic progress – rather than reinforcing given values. But could music such as this be a good starting-point? It’s an interesting question.

Certainly, singing plays an important part in our Go-Givers celebrations. Go-Givers is our cross-curricular citizenship programme for primary schools. As well as producing resources and training teachers, Go-Givers encourages primary school children to engage in social action and holds local award ceremonies for those involved.

And Go-Givers has its own song, recorded by singer and former CBeebies presenter Nataylia Roni, which the children all seem to know by heart and often sing at the end of the ceremonies. It brings them together, gives them something in common and helps keep the importance of their activity alive in their young minds.

But it doesn’t just work for children. A colleague told me of his horror at being asked to sing at the end of a very serious conference session in Europe – and of his subsequent surprise that it actually helped to regroup people and bring an intense debate to a grounded finish.

It’s an area worthy of further exploration. If you’ve used music as part of citizenship education, I’d be interested to hear how you got on.

Go-Givers produces resources especially for primary school citizenship, PSHE and SMSC. The teams also provides training for primary schools, on issues such as SMSC and British values.

For more about SMSC itself, go to doingSMSC.org.uk where we explain what it all means.

The thought is simple but fundamental to the ‘why’ of citizenship education.

He said that he had been nervous of interventions with young people where we try to make them agents of change – it’s hard for us not to impart our agenda in some way or another.

But then he thought that world is changing all the time anyway. Hugely these days: few people are not part of the flux. Change is happening in many ways beyond our immediate control, particularly in respect to ‘globalism’ – shorthand for burgeoning multinational marketplaces, communications, shared perspectives and population shifts.

When changes start to happen, for whatever reason, some people can be more in control of how we respond. They become more powerful. They can exploit it (like multinationals across the globe, oligarchs in Russia, oil companies in USA) and become supremely powerful.

Young people are often at the end of the chain of change.

Perhaps not so in the sixties – richer American hippy youth felt that the answers were blowing in the wind of change… and they were the agents.

But this generation is in no such position.

So, Dan mused, given that change is happening – where are the next generation being prepared to be active in the nature of change, rather than passive recipients?

I agree.

The purpose of supporting young people as (active) citizens is not so that they can be the unique and exalted leaders of the future. It is to enable as many of them as possible to be involved in the changes that are happening all around them. To participate in collective decisions and actions. To guard their own interests against the exploitative giants or the myth makers who will spin their heads towards false Gods.

Social action, economic awareness, legal capability, political understanding – they all prepare young people to participate. They need it. We all need it.

Public petitioning power comes to Parliament

The UK Government and Parliament jointly launched a new website this morning, which lets British citizens create and sign petitions to them.

That must be different from the old Number 10 Petitions website, right?

Well, no, not really. The new website promises that petitions with over 100,000 signatures ‘will be considered for debate in Parliament’: so did Number Ten’s back in 2011.

So what has changed?

The difference is that, this time, the petitions have their own, dedicated select committee – the Petitions Committee – that will investigate them, liaise with petitioners and quiz the Government. Before, they were dealt with by the Backbench Business Committee.

So, presumably this new Committee has new powers?

No, not as far as I understand it. And no Government time will be set aside for the petitions, they still have to go through the Backbench Business Committee anyway (which appears to be parent to this new committee).

This is new wine in old bottles, then?

From the outside, it does seem like that. But, from Parliament, I get the sense that they really believe this will breathe new life into citizen engagement; that it demonstrates a renewed vigour in that direction.

I quizzed both the House of Commons Press Office and Alex Stevenson, the press officer to the Leader of the House (I hope I wasn’t his only enquirer, the Government got his phone number wrong in its press release). The Parliament Press Office told me this is ‘a step forward’; Alex, after looking into it further and very kindly ringing me back, said it is ‘an evolution not a revolution’.

So ‘the first time ever’ was a fib?

Well, I don’t think so. There is certainly nothing obviously new in our petitioning power as members of the public, but I get the sense that politicians really do see this change as shifting responsibility for petitions from the Government to Parliament.

It’s just symbolic, then?

It may be nothing more than a symbol that public petitions are being taken more seriously at Westminster; but, let’s be honest, that’s no bad thing.

Parliament’s press release
Government’s press release

A medium-sized family home in west London costing around £1m, probably one of 500,000 in the capital...

The report had five recommendations for the new government. Each should increase youth social action opportunities across the UK. This is a target the government is vocally committed to supporting.

The Minister for Civil Society, Rob Wilson, acknowledged the report (without indicating any interest in its recommendations) and went on to make his big announcement.

He told us that the government has just put aside £1 million to support youth social action initiatives across the UK.

He then told us that he recognised the million pounds couldn’t solve everything, so it would help with specific action in the East of England because that is where the least social action is happening with young people at the moment.

This is where my dismay began to set in. It doesn’t relate to the proposition, but the solution:

£1 million always sounds impressive. However, you couldn’t announce less.

And, put in perspective, it’s the cost of a medium-sized family home in West London. Yes, he’s put aside the cost of a medium-sized family home in West London to help solve the problem of disenfranchised young people in the UK.

It makes you wonder how we got to the point where that could sound sufficiently impressive to not be simply shameful coming from the lips of a minister of the world’s ninth richest nation?

How did we set our aspirations so low? Could we have side-lined the issue any further? I must check out whether slug pellets get a bigger subsidy.

Could he not have simply said: ‘and today I am pleased to announce that we will tokenise the issue of youth social engagement’?

Of course, it is not politically savvy for me to write this. But I can’t help wondering why, by contrast, it is politically savvy for a minister to get away with committing such a relatively trivial sum to empowering the next generation of citizens without a shocking outcry.

Instead we’ll stand around looking grateful for their choices around our money.

Yet to make such an announcement six months after he cut a much smaller amount of funding from our school program (Giving Nation) that has been engaging forty thousand young people a year in six hundred schools – and would have returned more than a million for charity in the process – is galling.

If that sounds bitter, I promise you I’m bigger than that: as a citizen I just can’t get my head around the differential between the needs of our young people facing an unprecedented future of social flux and the cost of a medium sized family home in West London. It makes the whole enterprise look pitifully trivial and our collective priorities meaningless.

We have overpriced the housing plot, privatised the political plot, and lost the social plot.

They happened on the same day that the Secretary of State for Education announced new responsibilities for teachers: to spot early signs of radicalisation in students.  This role felt particularly daunting for citizenship teachers: theirs is the subject is most likely to proactively address issues of personal beliefs and political responses. How should these conversations happen now? Isn’t everyone a little less free to talk openly?

The BBC report on the new responsibility also noted David Cameron’s distillation of the task following the terrible atrocities in Tunisia; “we must become intolerant of intolerance’.

This maxim may well ring a bell to those who perceive fundamentalist beliefs as being, by definition intolerant (which may be so in legal terms as they question the practices of those of protected characteristics). But it will mean very little to those of religious convictions who perceive the dominant liberal mainstream (those now trumpeted as having ‘British Values’) to be intolerant of their own principles.

Put more simply – most people now called ‘extreme’ are already intolerant of intolerance. They can no longer tolerate the way that others cannot tolerate their faith. Some are driven to violence by it.

Like the teachers in the room yesterday I find the phrase to be an unnerving use of simplistic rhetoric. It veers towards fighting fundamentalism with fundamentalism. Creating an ‘us and them’ when none is necessary. It is creating a new ‘British Fundamentalism’ where none exists.

British people have never all shared the same values, although we have got a settlement around the way we are governed.

The current duty of schools is to promote fundamental British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. This is not the same as rooting out ‘transgressors’ which teachers fear they are now being asked.

Neither does it involve holding the line on some kind of British Fundamentalism: an unwavering definition of what is right and positioning on the outside those who default from its orthodoxy.

The antidote to radical fundamentalism is not a conformist fundamentalism, it is actually doubt.

If anyone is not 100% sure that it’s right to risk their lives or those of others based solely on their beliefs, then they are not so likely to do it.

To sow doubt is to eradicate extremes.

Teachers of citizenship are supremely well placed to tackle extremism, but not by simply proposing the British counterpoint to people convinced by another revealed truth. Their task is to introduce a broad range of thoughts and opinions into the emerging young mind… To foster conversations that don’t put any one section of the classroom or population under pressure to defend their inherited views or primary identities.

No one develops mutual respect and tolerance without first having it shown to their own beliefs.

This government has yet to recognise the implications of its short-sighted undermining of the subject of citizenship. Instead teachers and students are victims of half-baked ideas that bring the cavalry of old school Britishness to the rescue. We already have an intelligent pedagogy and a subject of lasting educational value – stop tinkering and get serious please.