Who’s listening to whom? The UK House of Lords and evidence-based policy-making on citizenship education

ABSTRACT

The 2017–2019 House of Lords’ select committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement made a number of bold proposals to reinvigorate citizenship education in the UK. However, the public and academic debate surrounding the Lords’ report and its recommendations has been startlingly muted. To tackle this lacuna, this article analyses a range of ‘policy documents’ alongside the Lords’ report to make three distinct contributions. Firstly, this article is the first detailed analysis of the Lords’ report and what it says about the state of citizenship education after two decades of varying policy narratives and implementation. Secondly, I take the Lords’ report as a ‘window’ onto policy-making under the Conservative and Coalition governments since 2010. I find that the Government approach to citizenship education and affiliated programmes such as the National Citizen Service is out-of-step with the thoughts, experience, and advice of ‘the policy community’. By contrast, the findings presented here highlight the potential for the House of Lords to play an important new role in the policy process. Thirdly, this article is methodologically innovative, insofar as I combine qualitative data collection with computational text analysis that is still rare in policy studies undertaken in both education and political science.

KEYWORDS:

• Education policy
• citizenship
• select committee
• evidence
• parliament

Acknowledgments

The author would like to acknowledge the time and support given by Dr Sarah Mills and Dr Avril Keating, who helped to shape and encourage the intellectual journey leading to this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Please note that this discussion revolves around the policy implementation of citizenship education in England; elsewhere in the UK citizenship education varies according to decisions taken by devolved administrations (Andrews and Mycock 2007).

2. This figure was cited by Liz Moorse, CEO of the Association for Citizenship Teaching, in a recent evidence session for the 2017/18 House of Lords Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement. A full transcript can be obtained here: http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/citizenship-and-civic-engagement-committee/citizenship-and-civic-engagement/oral/72120.html.

3. Not all focus group participants agreed to complete the pre-event survey, and therefore these descriptive statistics may over- or under-represent the reported characteristics of the sample population.

4. Ethics approval (Ref. 007549) for this study was granted by the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield.

5. Active citizenship = ‘community’, ‘engage’, ‘engagement’, ‘participate’, ‘participation’, ‘democracy’, ‘inclusive’, ‘democratic’, ‘active’, ‘cooperate’, ‘cooperation’, ‘respect’, ‘civic’, ‘active’, ‘politics’, ‘openminded’, ‘openness’, ‘dignity’, ‘rights’, ‘responsibilities’, ‘responsibility’, government”, ‘democracy’, ‘justice’, ‘fairness’, ‘equality’, ‘tolerance’, ‘diversity’, ‘culture’, ‘religion’, ‘global’, ‘environment’, ‘sustainability’, ‘interpretation’, ‘ethic’, ‘ethical’, ‘interaction’, ‘cooperation’, ‘questioning’, ‘collective’, ‘power’, ‘structure’.Character = ‘resilient’, ‘resilience’, ‘work’, ‘character’, ‘development’, ‘develop’, ‘improve’, ‘improvement’, ‘adult’, ‘adulthood’, ‘job’, ‘service’, ‘autonomy’, ‘critical’, ‘curiosity’, ‘judgement’, ‘reasoning’, ‘reflection’, ‘resourcefulness’, ‘confidence’, ‘determination’, ‘motivation’, ‘perseverance’, ‘resilience’, ‘teamwork’, ‘neighbourliness’, ‘service’, ‘volunteering’, ‘compassion’, ‘courage’, ‘gratitude’, ‘honesty’, ‘humility’, ‘integrity’, ‘justice’, ‘respect’.

6. CE = citizenship education; DfE = Department for Education; coefficients >.4 are highlighted in bold to indicate moderate-strong relationships (Ratner 2009); ‘policy recipients’ refers to collated focus group data; ‘stakeholders’ refers to collated submissions of evidence to the Lords' committee from the policy community (see section II).

Additional information

Funding

There is no funding to report for this article and the underpinning research.

Notes on contributors

James Weinberg

James Weinberg is a postdoctoral research associate on the Q-Step programme at the University of Sheffield and an Associate Fellow of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics. James is currently a convenor of both the Political Psychology and Young People’s Politics specialist groups at the UK Political Studies Association, and in January 2019 he was awarded the prestigious Chancellor’s Medal from the University of Sheffield for his outstanding contributions to social science research and impact in parliamentary circles. His research on topics such as political literacy, the basic values of politicians, and the mental health of elected officials has been published in journals such as the British Educational Research Journal, Parliamentary Affairs and in books with Policy Press. In September he will be starting as Lecturer in Political Behaviour at the University of Sheffield and he has just been awarded a 3 year Leverhulme Fellowship.