The implementation of ‘Education for Citizenship’ in schools in Scotland: a research report

Abstract

Changes in society and government have increased concerns of low participation and involvement by people, especially the young, in the political process and decision-making. As a result, citizenship has become a focus of recent curriculum developments in many countries. In Scotland, ‘Values and Citizenship’ has been made one of the Scottish Executive's national priorities for education and is linked to the major national initiative, ‘Education for Citizenship’. This is seen as encouraging pupils to make informed choices and decisions and to take action, individually and as part of the community. More recently, A curriculum for excellence 3–18 (SEED 2004) placed promoting responsible citizenship at the heart of the curriculum. This article reports on the extent to which a sample of Scottish schools was making progress towards developing education for citizenship, the strategies they developed and the barriers encountered in this implementation. It compares progress and developments in Scotland to the model devised in a longitudinal study for citizenship in England (Ireland et al. 2004, 2006).

Keywords:

• barriers
• citizenship
• curriculum
• implementation
• Scottish schools
• wider experiences

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the following for their support:

•	staff of the 78 schools who completed the survey, in many cases in great detail;
•	the three BEd (Hons) students in 2004, for permission to review and include information from case-studies in their dissertations; and
•	the School of Education, University of Aberdeen, for funding this research.

A preliminary version of some of the results included in this article was presented at the Scottish Educational Research Association Conference, Perth, Scotland, in November 2004.