National CPD Distance Learning Programme 2010
© Citizenship Foundation and Birkbeck, University of London
Unit 1d The three strands of the English Citizenship
Curriculum
What kind of citizen?
We have already seen that Crick argued that the new citizenship
curriculum should aim to enable young people to develop into
active, informed, critical and responsible citizens (para. 1.10).
These different characteristics represent the ideal citizen to be shaped by
the citizenship curriculum. But they must be nurtured in different ways:
citizenship education therefore must be seen as being made up of different
strands, each contributing vital knowledge, skills or dispositions to the
whole. Crick identified three major strands that should constitute good
citizenship education:


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social and moral responsibility,
community involvement and
political literacy.
Crick himself acknowledged that what his Committee was proposing
went beyond the aims of his earlier campaign for ‘political education and
political literacy’ (para. 2.9). Even though, on his earlier definition,
political literacy included a willingness to take action in pursuit of a
political goal, the Crick Committee envisaged that the classroom
teaching of political ideas and contemporary issues should be enriched by
forms of community activity in order to embed the theory in the actual
practice of participation. Such participation would provide the richest
possible context for the development of the necessary skills for
effectiveness in public life. Interestingly, writing later about the
introduction of the citizenship order, Crick commented that such
community activity had not been seen by the Committee as a mandatory
part of the subject.
The Report strongly recommended pupil participation both in
school and in the local community as good practice, but not to be
part of a statutory order – ‘value-added’, if you like. We thought
we were being politically prudent […] being acutely aware both
of the dangers of appearing to overload the bending backs of so
many teachers. […] But the Secretary of State sent word to the
working party who were drafting the consultative order (civil
servants, QCA, teachers, advisers) that actual participation could
be mandatory, if we cared so to recommend. We did not demure.
[…] Without the experiential , participative side of citizenship
learning, some schools could turn (and still might if inspection
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does not follow the aims as well as the precise language of the
order) the brave new subject into safe and dead, dead-safe, old
rote-learning civics. [Crick, 2000, p.119]
The requirement to include participation as part of the statutory
curriculum provides a considerable challenge to busy classroom teachers,
and has made it necessary for Ofsted to pass judgement on what might
constitute a reasonable minimum entitlement to participation for all
students, given that it is likely to prove very difficult to provide
opportunities for all students to be involved in off-site community
activities. We shall return to this point.
Of course, one major difficulty with the term ‘political’ is that, strictly
speaking, the teaching of politics in its own right is traditionally confined
to the secondary curriculum because few children show an interest in the
niceties of political processes and institutions before adolescence.
However, what Crick proposes is a continuous and progressive curriculum,
based around a framework of key concepts, which can and should be taught
at every key stage, at the appropriate level. In this way, a radical new
vision of what citizenship education can be opens up, marking a major
step forward from earlier, much narrower conceptions. Citizenship
education should be understood as the nurturing of the child’s social and
moral development in the early years through learning about a wide
range of topical issues, near at home and overseas, from the discussion of
school rules and classroom or playground behaviour, to the alleviation of
poverty in the developing world and through the encouragement of
critical thinking, of emotional literacy, and of the abilities to think
critically and express and defend one’s own thoughts in discussion.
The failure to conceive of civic education as developmental in this way,
has lead many European countries in the past to confine citizenship
education to more narrowly framed civics courses in the secondary years,
a fairly common pattern being a one year’s course in year 9 and another
in year 11. A side effect of this arrangement has been that across Europe,
civic education has traditionally been taught by non-specialists, given its
modular appearance in the time-table. History and philosophy teachers
have often been required to teach it and in many cases, as in England
where too many non-specialist tutors are similarly engaged, it is taught
badly, without enthusiasm and is widely regarded as low status and
ineffectual by students and teachers alike (Rowe, 2006). Such a subject
arrangement, where citizenship is on the margins of the curriculum, is
not enough to attract committed enthusiasts into the profession in
numbers. There is no career for them, except as teachers of examination
level politics or sociology. However, once citizenship education becomes
nominated as a specialist subject, resources are set aside to ensure there is
a supply of committed, specialist teachers and the subject is allocated
appropriate curriculum time. And when the subject is taught by such
teachers, it becomes transformed from low status, irrelevant and boring
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taught by a reluctant workforce, to a dynamic subject, valued by very
many students and central to the life and ethos of the whole school. Let
us look at these three strands in a little more detail.
Social and Moral responsibility
Note how in paragraph 2.11 Crick denies that moral thinking is ‘prepolitical’. It is too simple to think that in the primary years, the
citizenship curriculum will address inter-personal issues of right and
wrong (such as why we have school rules, or why bullying is unkind) and
leave truly political issues to the secondary years. There are many
genuine citizenship issues to be discussed in the primary years, such as
care for the environment, racism, children’s rights and so on.
Whilst it is true that, developmentally, full-blown politics is not for the
primary school child, there is a sense in which children are developing
their understanding of key political ideas from the very beginning. At the
centre of political debates are central questions concerning equality,
fairness, justice, rights, responsibilities, power, authority and so on. In an
important study of pre-school children between 18 months and three
years, Dunn (1988) showed that these are the very concepts that preoccupied them a lot of the time in their developing relationships with
parents and siblings.
The bases of their excuses, justifications, and jokes include not only the
idiosyncratic practices of a particular family, but some of the key
principles of the wider culture outside the family: principles of
possession, positive justice, excuses on grounds of incapacity or lack of
intention, even gender-role division of labour. [p172]
This underlines the importance of discussing citizenship issues explicitly
with children from the early years. Such issues relate to how we should
live and work together, in school and in the community, with other
people, particularly those with whom we may not share the same values.
What are the school rules for and are they fair? How should we work
together to address behavioural issues in the class? Why is it wrong to be
unkind or to treat others with disrespect? How can we all help to make
the world a better place? Why should we raise money for charitable
causes or care about the natural world?
Moral thinking, in its own right, is a key element of citizenship thinking.
Simply to question whether something is fair is to think morally and
underneath all political judgements and all visions of how society might
be improved, are moral values. For this reason, citizenship education, as
Crick says, should include an element of ‘moral education’. This term
‘moral education’ often sounds alarms bells amongst teachers, who fear
that they might be asked to instruct children and young people in what is
right and wrong. In other words, they understand ‘moral education’ as
‘moral instruction’, begging the question, ‘Whose morals are we
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supposed to be teaching?’. Rowe (2006) argues that teachers in both
primary and secondary schools need to become confident in using the
kind of questions which elicit moral thinking, e.g., considering who has
rights, assessing responsibility for actions, apportioning blame, showing
empathy, thinking about the consequences of actions, discussing fair
outcomes, proposing how a situation could be improved, and so on.
Citizenship issues are rich in opportunities to employ these forms of
moral thought. The more students are exposed to, and are encouraged to
use these form of thinking, the more likely they are to internalise them
and use them spontaneously in their own reasoning.
As in any other discipline, moral thinking improves with practice.
Students cannot use concepts with which they are unfamiliar and solving
moral problems gets easier with practice. It is important here to
remember that thinking morally is not the same as being a good person,
or having particular personal values or virtues. We use moral reasoning
to refer to thinking about issues in terms of whether they are right or
wrong, good or bad, fair or unfair, important or unimportant. Thinking
morally can lead to more morally right actions - it can assist the process
of becoming fairer in one’s judgements, more able to recognise the claims
of others in any given situation and thus less egocentric. Being asked to
think about the consequences of actions for other people, or how other
people think or feel about a situation, can actually have a sensitizing
effect, nurturing emotional literacy (also a key aim of the national Social
and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) programmes). We would
argue that good citizenship or political decisions are informed not only
by good political judgements but sound moral ones.
Political literacy
From one point of view, citizenship education can be regarded as the
induction of young people into the way our society resolves its differences
in a fair and non-violent manner. To put this another way, citizenship
education introduces students to the ‘nation’s conversations’ or the
debates of the moment. This has been described as a public discourse model
of citizenship (Rowe, 2000).
In his chapter in Developing Citizens Ted Huddleston (2006, p.147) draws
on a public discourse model of citizenship education and suggests that
political concepts are simply those ‘without which democratic thought
and communication would not be possible’. Here, it is helpful to consider
the fact that within mono-cultural organisations, like families, there may
be high levels of agreement about a range of social and moral issues
(though this is not, of course, guaranteed). Conversations in such nonpublic settings rest on many shared cultural and value-based assumptions
which do not need to be articulated or justified. However, when people
move from the private to the public sphere to discuss shared problems
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with people who do not share the same values or world view, new forms
of argumentation have to be learnt and employed. New justifications have
to be offered for the stances taken and some arguments (such as ‘this is
wrong because my religion says so’) can no longer be used because others
do not recognise them as valid. So, it becomes a central concern of
citizenship education to assist young people understand and negotiate the
public sphere. Without such understanding, active citizenship is simply not
possible.
What characterises ‘political’ discussions? Bernard Crick suggests that
politics is the ‘jostlings of self-interest, group interests and ideals’ (Essays
on Citizenship (2000) chapter 2, p 14). This is a very different view of
citizenship from it being all about voluntary service to others.
Fundamentally, politics is about questions such as, ‘What kind of society
do I want and what can I do about it?’, ‘How shall we deal with this
problem as a society?’, ‘Is our society fair?’ and ‘What is for the common
good?’. These key questions underlie a great deal of public debate and
they should equally infuse classroom discussions.
If the above are fundamental procedural questions, substantively,
political thinking and discussion may draw on law, politics, ethics,
economics, sociology and philosophy depending on the particular issue
under the spotlight. Thought about in this way, it is little wonder that
many people never manage to achieve an adequate level of political
understanding. Citizenship education aspires to help young people
sufficiently master these discourses to enable them to become politically
literate and thus to be able to participate with confidence in public life.
Community involvement
Community involvement is the logical outcome of political thought. In
one sense, community involvement can be said to begin when students
begin to think in an engaged way about what is going on around them,
they have taken the necessary first step. As their understanding of how
society functions develops, so does their capacity to envisage ever more
effective solutions to social and political problems.
Indeed, merely thinking about political issues is a necessary form of
social engagement and should not be dismissed as of no consequence
because it is not ‘active’. Not every citizenship topic readily leads to a
‘change action’, though teachers must always ask themselves what
students might be able to do as a result of any specific study. Learning
about, for example, how a law is made may not lead to social action
(though the lessons can be extremely active) but it can lead to enhanced
understanding of how we are governed and give students much greater
awareness of how power is wielded. This is an important step towards
becoming a ‘critical’ citizen, and criticality is a vital civic virtue in any
democratic society.
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Whilst community involvement is a compulsory element of the
curriculum, it is worth bearing in mind that citizens’ of liberal
democracies are not obliged to get involved. They have the right to take
no interest or part in public life, though others might argue that such
people are neglecting their moral duties by opting out in this way. So, can
the current curriculum, with its insistence on community involvement be
justified? Arguably, yes. The purpose of education is to expand
possibilities for action for its students and unless citizenship seeks to
develop the skills of political action, then it leaves to chance the
development of an important entitlement for all democratic citizens.
Whether they choose to use these skills in later life is up to each
individual – it should not be the role of the school to deny emergent
citizens such life enhancing skills.
Study Tasks

Take a topic you are already teaching and think about how it
might separately support the development of students’ social
and moral development, political literacy and community
involvement. Or take a new topic and treat it in the same way.

Take a topic from the citizenship syllabus and analyse it in
terms, not of knowledge, but of the key citizenship questions it
should help students focus on?

How can school life be constructed in such a way that all
students can be offered opportunities to participate in
citizenship acivities? For example, what steps can be taken to
guard against school council engagement being limited to an
elite group of students?
References
Crick, B. (2000) Essays on Citizenship. London, Continuum
Dunn, J. (1988) The Beginnings of Social Understanding . Oxford,
Blackwell.
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Huddleston, T. (2006) ‘From Political Education to Political Literacy:
equipping young people for life in a more genuine democracy’ in Breslin,
T. and Dufour, B. (eds) Developing Citizens. London, Hodder Murray.
Rowe, D. (2000) ‘Common Schools, Good Citizens: towards a public
discourse model of moral education’ in Best, R. (Ed) Education for
Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Development. London, Contiuum
Rowe, D. (2001) ‘Value Pluralism, Democracy and Education for
Citizenship’ in Collins, J., Insley, K. and Soler, J. (eds.) Developing
Pedagogy: researching practice. London, Paul Chapman Publishing
Rowe, D. (2006) Developing Moral Thinking in Primary and Secondary
Schools in the ‘Teaching Thinking and Creativity’ Vol 7:1. Birmingham,
Imaginative Minds Publishing
Further Reading for Unit 1
Making Sense of Citizenship: A CPD Handbook by Ted Huddleston and
David Kerr, section 1 ‘What is Citizenship?’ pp 1-14.
Developing Citizens (Breslin and Dufour), Chapter 3.3 by Ted Huddleston
‘From Political Education to Political Literacy’, pp 143 - 150
Developing Citizens (Breslin and Dufour), Chapter 1.3 by Ian Davies
‘Citizenship in the National Curriculum: contexts, requirements and
expectations’ pp25 – 34.
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