Citizenship education

It is essential that all children from a range of backgrounds participate fully in a free and open society. Citizenship education, therefore, has an important role in imparting knowledge and understanding of human rights, civic responsibilities, democracy, and the rule of law. Citizenship education is good for tackling extremism, fostering respect, and promoting cohesion.

Policy summary

Problem:
Some schools are not educating pupils about democracy, human rights, and critical thinking.

Consequences:
Without a requirement to follow a statutory framework at primary stages, children risk missing out on vital early years citizenship education. And at the secondary level, the national curriculum requirements are very thin. Any further citizenship lessons could be from a faith perspective, leaving pupils potentially deprived of a comprehensive and objective education.

Our policy:
We want all children to receive an education that will prepare them for life as citizens, including skills of democratic participation and critical thinking and knowledge about political and legal institutions and human rights.

Recommendation:
Citizenship education should be strengthened within the national curricula of the UK, and present from primary school onwards.

In depth

We believe that the whole curriculum should be underpinned throughout by human rights. That should both be true in terms of how it is developed, and in places it should be explicit. For example, in citizenship education, human rights should be taught about; in religious education, freedom of religion or belief should be taught about; and in relationships and sex education, pupils should be taught in a way that combats sexism and homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic bullying. We think that UNICEF’s Rights Respecting Schools Award should be examined to see how it can best be mirrored in the curriculum proper.

England

Since 2002 citizenship education has been a compulsory part of the national curriculum in England for secondary schools. In primary schools, citizenship education is part of a non-statutory framework. We believe the subject should be a statutory element from primary school onwards. We also believe that the secondary formulation of citizenship education should be expanded to cover freedom of belief and respect for the environment. The secondary national curriculum in citizenship currently runs to just 2.5 pages – in other words, it is extremely thin. In 2026, improved citizenship education was linked to wider work on cohesion as part of the UK Government’s cohesion strategy, Protecting What Matters.

Wales

As part of the Welsh Government’s reforms to the curriculum and changes to its Religious Education, renamed ‘Religion, Values, and Ethics’ (RVE), a duty was placed on schools to promote knowledge and understanding of UN Conventions on the Rights of the Child and on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, further strengthening the rights-based approach to education in Wales. Since 2022, Wales has had a ‘Purpose Led Curriculum’, with one of these purposes being to support learners to become ‘ethical, informed citizens of Wales and the world’, however there is no actual Citizenship subject.

Northern Ireland

Local and global citizenship is a statutory subject in secondary education, with a program of study for Key Stages 3 and 4. Like England, there is no statutory requirement to teach citizenship at primary school.

Scotland

In Scotland, Citizenship is a non-statutory cross-cutting theme with aspects such as democracy taught as part of Social Studies. Our sister charity Humanist Society Scotland leads the campaign for a broad and balanced education in Scotland.

What we’re doing

In England, we called for citizenship education to be maintained within the National Curriculum as part of our Curriculum and Assessment Review call for evidence submission. We also called for it to be a statutory element from primary school onwards, and for the expansion of the subject so that it covers topics like freedom of belief and respect for the environment. We welcomed the Review’s recommendation that citizenship education become a statutory part of the primary National Curriculum.
We support Lord Harries of Pentregarth’s Private Members’ Bill, ‘Education (Values of British Citizenship) Bill’, which seeks to put ‘values of British citizenship’ into education law. The values in question are democracy, the rule of law, freedom, individual worth, and respect for the environment. We welcomed this as a valuable contribution to the development of civic education in schools and to the tackling of extremism in schools.

Appendix: Past work on this issue

In 2015 we supported a campaign against the exam board AQA’s plans to drop its AS and A-Level in citizenship studies. This was withdrawn in 2017, although a GCSE in Citizenship Studies was still offered.
In 2014 we responded to a consultation by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England on ‘a rights-based approach to education’, highlighting the importance of citizenship education.
In the 2013 curriculum review, the then UK government proposed to remove all references to equalities, human rights and freedom of speech from citizenship in the English national curriculum. We spotted this, organised sector opposition, and managed to secure the retention of human rights.
In 2011, we successfully argued against plans to relegate citizenship education to the looser ‘basic curriculum’ with no compulsory programmes of study or attainment targets.