Active citizens and passive learning: a qualitative study of students’ perspectives on citizenship education across England and Wales

Across the UK there has been a steady, but rising, concern over young people’s political engagement. Citizenship education (CE) is one policy response to this lack of engagement, seeking to mould young people’s transition to full citizenship according to prevailing values and ideals of citizenship. In this paper, we examine CE in England and Wales reporting on the findings of twenty focus groups with secondary school students across ten schools. We identified four representations in how students represented good citizenship: Communitarian; civic; transactional; and rights-based citizenship. We also found, across our focus groups, a clear preference for practice-based teaching that connects abstract ideas around citizenship into lived experience – which students missed in actual CE practice. In the discussion of the paper, we draw on these findings to make recommendations for future CE provision in the UK and more broadly.