Active Citizenship

Lord Norton of Louth Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Norton of Louth]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lord Maclennan on initiating this valuable debate. Like others, I will focus on citizenship education. In a free society, citizens are able to participate in public affairs. They may come together to organise or they may contribute in a purely individual capacity to the affairs of the community. An active citizenship is a sign of a healthy democracy. It underpins the Prime Minister’s idea of the big society. My purpose is to call attention to the potential contradiction between government aims and apparent government intentions.

The most consistent and productive means of instilling awareness of the value of engagement in public life is through citizenship education. One cannot force people to engage in public affairs but one can make them aware of the value of getting engaged. Awareness of how society is organised and how one can make a contribution and influence what goes on is a form of empowerment and is to the good of society. There is therefore a compelling case for citizenship education. As we have heard, that was recognised in 2002, when citizenship education became part of the national curriculum. If people are to take responsibility for their own community, they need to be aware of the values of so doing and the structures within which they are operating. Citizenship education can therefore be seen as a prerequisite to achieving the big society.

However, as my noble friend Lady Walmsley said, there are concerns that citizenship education may not survive a review of the national curriculum in England. That would be a great mistake—one that derives from a misunderstanding of what is happening. There have been criticisms of the quality of teaching of citizenship. Some people, not least in my own party, are suspicious of the teaching of citizenship, seeing it—as they sometimes see the teaching of politics—as a means of indoctrination and of instilling particular political values in young minds. I do not deny that there are problems with the teaching of citizenship, but they derive not from the vigour or extent of such teaching but from the fact that it is underresourced and undervalued. Though part of the national curriculum, it has not had the resources devoted to it that are necessary for it to be taught thoroughly. There have not been the necessary incentives for schools to take it seriously and invest time and effort in making it a success.

I was once interviewed by an MA student for his dissertation. At the end of the interview, he asked me my views on citizenship education. I explained that I was a strong supporter. He revealed that he was a trained citizenship teacher. He had been hired by a school but, the moment there was pressure on the school budget, he had been the first to be let go. I suspect that he was not the exception. Without teachers trained in citizenship education, the danger is that responsibility is given to teachers who are free on a Wednesday afternoon or do not have the heaviest teaching load. In such circumstances, the danger is that the subject will not be taught as well as it should be. That is a reflection not on the teachers but on the situation in which they find themselves. It is also a situation where bias may creep in, because teachers are not tutored in how to ensure neutrality in delivering the subject. In such circumstances, one can see how critics will be wary of citizenship education.

What is needed is not the ending of citizenship education but rather the opposite. It needs to be taken seriously by schools. Head teachers presently have no incentive to take it seriously. The Department for Education needs to address how to ensure its more effective delivery, and a prerequisite to that is enhancing its status. If citizenship education disappears, we will end up with a massive divide between those who understand how our political system works and how they can contribute to it and those who have a limited awareness and for whom the political system may be a closed book.

Only a limited number of schools offer politics at A and AS-level. Where it is taught, it tends to be taught extremely well, often by teachers who have degrees in politics and entered teaching through the history route. The teachers are keen and know how to teach politics. Pupils who study politics end up having some understanding of the community around them and how to influence it. They are the ones in a position to make the big society a reality—except, of course, they are in a minority. We have the potential not for a big society but, rather, for a small one if we exclude most of our young people from being able to get a good understanding of the society that they inhabit.

The schools that we really need to get to are those which are not necessarily the most successful and which are not able to offer politics. These are the schools where pupils, without citizenship education, may end up with little awareness of their local community and how they can contribute to it. We need to help them, not work against them by contemplating the removal of citizenship education.

Enhancing citizenship education does not necessarily entail investing substantial sums in it—I appreciate that the money is not there—but rather is about enhancing its status and giving greater incentives to schools to take it seriously. There are resources available, not least on the internet—the Parliament’s Education Service, for example, does a fantastic job in generating material for schools—but the challenge is to ensure that those resources are exploited to their full extent and, indeed, to ensure that schools are aware of them and want to make use of them.

I conclude as I began: it is essential that the aims of government are consistent with its intentions. Getting rid of citizenship education would undermine the Prime Minister’s aim of achieving the big society. If we want citizens to understand Parliament and take it seriously, we could do little better than put our weight behind enhancing citizenship education in this country.