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

Andreouli, Eleni, Obradović, Sandra ORCID: 0000-0001-7930-3909, Young, Katharine, Burton, Tom and Hecht, Annika (2025) Active citizens and passive learning: a qualitative study of students’ perspectives on citizenship education across England and Wales. Youth & Society. ISSN 0044-118X

Text (Active citizens and passive learning_main doc_Rev_Youth and Society) - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (336kB)

• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177...

Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s)
Divisions:	LSE
Subjects:	L Education > L Education (General) L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB1603 Secondary Education. High schools B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Date Deposited:	14 Oct 2025 00:19
Last Modified:	15 Oct 2025 14:39
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/129792

Actions (login required)

View Item