There was a surreal debate in the House of Lords as a former Bishop introduced a citizenship education bill into the upper chamber of Parliament to put pressure on ministers during the public consultation on the national curriculum and exams.
You can read the debate in Hansard here where peers approved the principles of the Education (Values of British Citizenship) Bill at its Second Reading in the Lords – even though the content of the bill is sparse. The briefing for the Bill itself is minimal – you can browse through the briefing here.
Despite this, the Bill gave the opportunity for peers to tear shreds out of the approach of previous governments and put pressure on the new Labour Government to do something about it.
Citizenship in the context of security policy
One big complaint from peers was that the PREVENT strategy – a national security policy, is what frames current citizenship education. Furthermore, what should be taught and how it should be taught remains a hotly-contested issue. For all of the rhetoric individual Conservatives might express about the importance of the public knowing how UK democratic institutions function, their record on building it into the education system remains woeful.
“We all value citizenship teaching, but do teachers now find the concept vague and difficult? Or do they, conscious of the sensitivities involved, need the confidence of new definitions and more clarity?”
Baroness Gillian Shephard (Cons), Lords Hansard 18 Oct 2024 Col. 333
I was like: ***You certainly did not when you were Education Secretary in John Major’s Government when you denied my generation of teenagers the ability to learn about citizenship and democracy***
I don’t know whether it’s one of my undiagnosed ADHD traits but grudges I developed in my teens I seem to have held onto for life. And rage can be triggered off by the most innocuous of things and go from zero-to-90 in a flash – with the accompanying rise in heart rate which risks the inevitable chest pains. Given my health history, it’s exhausting trying to control such internal emotions. It also explains in part why I’m so obsessed with this aspect of public policy: My generation was knowingly failed by a previous government – let’s not have another government failing this generation of teenagers.
“We are failing our children if we do not educate them about their place as part of nature; that needs to be part of a much broader change where our education system works to prepare people for life, not just exams and jobs.”
Baroness Natalie Bennett (Green Party), Lords Hansard 18 Oct 2024 Col. 342
Given the miserable turnout at the last general election for the youngest voters, this is all the more important.
“My Lords, I declare an interest as president of Young Citizens, formerly the Citizenship Foundation. Teaching citizenship has a relatively short history in the UK, certainly when compared with other European countries. Its formal inclusion in the national curriculum began only in 2002.”
Baroness D’Souza (Cross-Bencher) Lords Hansard 18 Oct 2024 Col. 334
You can see some of the old publications of the Citizenship Foundation here. I finished school in the late 1990s and graduated in 2002. I only found out the civil service was a thing via an advert at the back of Big Issue magazine in the year 2000. Lady D’Souza continued:
“At this time, citizenship education had become compulsory and a GCSE in citizenship studies was introduced. However, this early promise was not maintained and in 2014, a government review resulted in a weaker programme that stressed constitutional history and volunteerism rather than active citizenship. Furthermore, the requirement for most schools to teach the national curriculum was removed, resulting in a significant decrease in citizenship teaching and, indeed, teachers.“
This is what I mean by the policy being contested. Tories worry that ‘leftie teachers’ will indoctrinate teenagers to become socialists. Secular opponents ask why do we have faith schools – don’t they do the same thing? Not just in terms of what they do teach but what they omit. I’m of the Section 28 generation and one of the things that led to an existential crisis and a mental health crisis was getting to university and realising that all of the institutions I had been through had not prepared me at all for the real world outside ‘as is’ – rather instead we had been taught either not to discuss certain subjects through the power of shame and guilt, or to pretend that challenges and threats were not there. For example how to deal with the threat of physical violence. Schools in the 1990s did not have the resources or freedoms to respond to the needs that their students raised. I still recall clearly a group of us asking for our school to organise self-defence workshops but nothing came of it. (Note this was pre-internet so none of us would have known where to look).
Issues on democracy education for children also apply to adults
“We should not regard our democratic institutions and respect for the rule of law as entirely secure…We need to make sure that populism does not begin to get a stronger hold here. That requires us to engage our citizens and teach them the values of mutual respect, freedom of expression and the value of our institutions as such.”
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LibDems) Lords Hansard 18 Oct 2024 Col. 334
How do you educate adults on the above? And where? Hence the Education Select Committee’s recommendation for a lifelong learning centre in every town, back in December 2020.
‘House of Lords calls on the Government to reverse its lack of commitment to citizenship policies in the UK’
This was back in April 2018 – see the press release and the report here. The Tories responded to this by making Boris Johnson their leader. The time between then and now is something of a blur/disaster/catastrophe. On civic and democratic engagement it stated:
- The Government has failed to integrate the National Citizen Service (NCS) with existing civic engagement opportunities.
- The Committee recommends that the NCS must be focused on creating long term sustained social action.
- The Committee recommends that the Government ensures public service commissioning includes public engagement, so that the general public have a greater say in the services they receive.
- Public agencies should bring the public into decision-making processes as early as possible so that they can have a real say in how policy is decided.
The challenge with all of those is the assumptions it makes about the public:
- The public has the awareness of civic engagement opportunities – eg public consultations
- The public has the time to respond to those consultations
- The public has the motivation and positive disposition to engage
In my experience over the past decade-and-a-half or so, all of these have been found wanting in/around Cambridge
Some of the assumptions also go much, much deeper than headline recommendations. For example the use of third party organisations (privatisation of public services) to run essential services – a model that for the public utilities has been found wanting. Not least because as natural monopolies they have been used as cash cows by their shareholders and undoing this is not without major consequences. We were warned at the time – feel free to browse through the titles from publications at the time from Left on the Shelf’s secondhand bookstore to see who said what.
It remains to be seen whether the new government will change the rules of the system. Unlikely without an external shock to force their hand. Economic and social historians will be more than familiar about the claims that the existing neoliberal system will deliver the growth needed.
The strange decline of social town Cambridge
Compared to the end of the 1990s, I couldn’t help but notice recently (Even with the students returning) how *empty* many of our pubs, bars, and restaurants seemed to be.
“Rising rents are crowding out other forms of economic activity. The problem here isn’t mere farmland, as Ricardo thought. It’s wider than that, as Brett Christophers has shown. We’re handing so much money over to owners of prime residential or commercial land, to owners of oil and gas fields, intellectual property and infrastructure that there isn’t enough left to create enough demand for dynamic sectors of the economy.”
Stumbling and Mumbling Blog – 19 Oct 2024
I.e. the structure of our economy is hotwired to extract so much wealth and value from those on lower incomes to the asset rich that it’s having a visible impact on day-to-day life. If people are paying so much for their rent, they cannot afford to eat out or go out and socialise. Furthermore, the competition from home delivery services and the conveniences of, inevitably have an impact. Irrespective of whether you see it as a good or a bad thing, every home delivery by electric scooter of whichever brand involves one less face-to-face conversation between a local resident and a local takeway worker or shop assistant. Ditto the rise of the automated checkout.
Add to this the rise of the short-term lets and the houses built as residential accommodation now used either for short term lets and/or student accommodation with high rates of tenant turnover.
What impact do all of these things have on social life in towns and cities? How do you build a civic and democratic life on that social life if those social lives are structurally undermined by economic systems that put the assets in the hands of those that don’t live in the communities and are primarily interested in extracting as much ‘value’ from the properties as is legally and financially possible?
One of the frustrations I have with Cambridge is that we have an unequal distribution of community development investment across our city. The investment understandably has to be targeted at greatest need – which is why King’s Hedges and Abbey Ward historically get more support. At the same time the newbuild developments have community development officers paid for by developers for the short-medium term. But too many existing residential communities – in particular those estates built in the 20th Century, fall through the gaps. With the long-acknowledge social, arts, leisure, and sports infrastructure gaps, the risk is that Cambridge simply becomes a series of dead housing estates with only those connected to The University or with other connections having anything like a social life. A picture that reminds me of early-mid 1990s Cambridge. We’ve been here before. We don’t need to go there again on a larger scale. Which is why the county council and mayoral elections in six months time will be all the more important in terms of what future vision the candidates put forward.
Food for thought?
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The Cambridge Town Owl 