Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government whether Lord Lieutenants are being encouraged to help promote the Commonwealth in schools in their counties ahead of the Commonwealth Summit in April 2018 in London.

As part of the Department for Education’s outreach to schools ahead of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), we have prepared an education pack for 11-14 year-old school pupils. We plan to contact the Lord Lieutenants when the pack is ready to be sent to schools, with a view to asking them to support the promotion of the pack.

Schools are also free to teach their pupils about the Commonwealth as part of their school curriculum. The national curriculum for citizenship education, introduced in September 2014, sets out that pupils are taught about local, regional and international governance and the United Kingdom’s relations with the rest of Europe, the Commonwealth, the United Nations and the wider world.

There are also a number of opportunities in the history programmes of study for pupils to be taught about the Commonwealth; for example, pupils are taught about British history from 1745 to 1901, including the development of empire; and they are taught about the end of Empire and Britain’s place in the world since 1945.