Education: Citizenship Studies

Lord Phillips of Sudbury Excerpts

Monday 30th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

I am a little confused about the Labour Party’s attitude on compulsory subjects in the national curriculum. I thought that its study group had proposed that all schools should be free not to teach the national curriculum, but I will not attempt to keep up with this flip-flopping. We do not agree that it should be mandatory. A lot of people want to have subjects made mandatory in the curriculum but there is not room. Schools must teach citizenship at key stages 3 and 4. They must also teach about spiritual, moral, cultural and social responsibility and British values. The curriculum includes all the institutions to which the noble Baroness referred.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the founder and president of the Citizenship Foundation. I say to my noble friend that while he paints a very rosy picture of citizenship, at the moment less than 2% of pupils take citizenship education at GCSE. The free schools and academies do not have to teach it at all and Ofsted does not extend to citizenship in schools, while the Government have withdrawn bursaries for young teacher trainers to teach citizenship education. In the light of the statistics and the general sense of gloom in the citizenship community at the moment, will my noble friend please go back to his Minister and seek to do something about what has happened to citizenship education over the past two or three years?

[Lord Nash]

Ofsted reported last year that it found that in primary schools citizenship was “thriving” and that in secondary schools the quality of citizenship education was stronger than in its 2010 survey. It also found that head teachers recognised the rich contribution the subject makes to pupils’ learning, their personal development and the ethos of the school. We have substantially improved the citizenship curriculum from the previous, rather issues-based, syllabus and we are now enhancing the requirement to teach about British institutions and values.