This resource has some stories and dilemmas which may be used by primary or secondary practitioners. Each story has a theme linked to moral character (explicit in the title) and may be utilised to encourage children to make the right decision in certain dilemmas. Each story can be used with a particular year group or in whole school situations such as Key Stage, Phase or Whole School assemblies.

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Keynote speech presentation given  Professor Ian Davies at 5th International citizED conference in Hong Kong, June 2009.

The meaning of citizenship education is contested.  Different characterisations of citizenship education emerge in debates regarding nationality, globalisation and cosmopolitanism.  For some there are distinctions be be made between 'citizenship education' and 'global education'.  For full power point presentation download attachment.

Can citizenship education promote democracy and Britishness? A survey of trainee teachers' attitudes on the purposes of citizenship education.

The teaching of democracy has been an objective of citizenship education since its inception (QCA 1998) and so we thought it was timely to explore the extent to which this goal had been embraced within initial teacher education (ITE). But this project was prompted by the growing presence of the topic of ‘Britishness' and national identity in political discourse at the highest level, which has been accompanied by a number of governmental initiatives to emphasise the idea of British citizenship.

The research project sought to evaluate the attitudes of trainee teachers of citizenship and history towards the notions of teaching ‘Britishness', national identity and promoting democracy, alongside their attitudes to some aspects of multiculturalism. In some ways the trainee teachers can be seen as a sub-sample of British society and a representative sample of future teachers of citizenship and history. However, as teachers of these two subjects they are likely to be at the forefront of such curriculum objectives. A questionnaire was deployed to the trainee teachers in a sample of higher education institutions across England at an early point in their post graduate teacher training programme. The questionnaire was designed to produce quantitative data from immediate ‘agree', ‘disagree', ‘undecided' responses to a small number of statements about British values, national identity and teaching democracy. It also generated qualitative data through inviting the respondents to explain their responses and their thinking in prose. The project deployed a phase 2 follow-up questionnaire to the same group of trainee teachers at a late stage in their training programme, and a small number of them participated in semi-structured interviews.  See full report attached.

This research project seeks to explore the views and beliefs of young people from black and minority ethnic (BME) groups concerning the citizenship agenda. This research will also investigate how prepared citizenship educators feel, to meet the needs and aspirations of young people from BME groups and what they feel is required from training and professional development to enable them to meet these needs. It is intended that the research will contribute to the development of citizenship educators so that they might adequately meet the needs and aspirations of young people from black and minority ethnic (BME) communities.

An excellent set of thinking skills posters designed by a secondary teacher to be used by pupils to help extend their citizenship skills. The posters come with ideas for use, including lesson plans, schemes of work and examples of pupil work.

A series of thinking skills posters (pdf doc.) along with a rationale and ideas for their use in the classroom, (word doc)

This article indicates some of the most significant papers on the Citized site (www.citized.info) supporting secondary colleagues on the new Certificate course established by DfES. It should be noted that these documents were not written with a CPD cohort of teachers in mind and therefore some of the documents, whilst useful, have only partial relevance. I have attempted to include the most directly relevant but ultimately this comes down to judgement. Practising teachers will find a huge amount of valuable material on this site. Schemes of work produced by PGCE Citizenship beginning teachers have not been included though these will also be of interest to many colleagues.

Don Rowe

This paper attempts to present some exploratory, theoretical considerations for and practical pathways into the community dimension of citizenship, in particular regard to religion, politics and pedagogy (1). It presents for debate, discussion and experiment, a provisional, indeed highly tentative, ‘Questioning Community’ approach, supportive of the active participation strand of the National Curriculum but aiming for greater critical engagement with it.

Helen would very much like hear feedback from people who try these techniques and am always available for discussions around this complex area! Her email address is Helen@lawson58.freeserve.co.uk.

This paper draw on a number of conceptual frameworks and presents some initial finding arising from my ongoing doctoral research, on the policy, process and practice of embedding a civic dimension into the Irish higher education curriculum. A multi-site case study methodology has been used to explore these diverse initiatives, in context. The significance of factors such as legislative arrangements, institutional culture, disciplinary field and academics' values, beliefs and prior experience are explored. The contribution such initiatives can make to the advancement of democratic values in society will be critically explored and enabling conditions for sustainable, transformative civic engagement will be mooted.

Linda Asquith, who teaches at a school in Wakefield, submitted a successful bid to the BT Citizenship and Communication fund for a Holocaust education project encompassing Citizenship and RE. She is also a participant on the Imperial War Museum Holocaust Education Fellowship Programme. Here she shares her thoughts and some learning resources relating to her work not only in Holocaust education but  also the broader study of genocide.

This is a fully developed scheme of work written by a KS2 Team Leader.

There are six sections to the whole scheme. Each section has a column for Evaluation of Learning - for teachers to note whole class issues, group issues and individual issues, but this is not included in the grid below. There is also a fourth column for ‘Next steps'- also not included in this grid.

The unit has its home in History but feeds into ICT, music, PE and art lessons as the children will be developing their own portrait gallery of their heroes for parents to visit.

This essay argues how citizenship can be taught through community involvement, which is one of the most important elements of citizenship education. There have been different notions of the relationship between citizenship and community involvement. Since ‘community' exists at a variety of forms and levels, defining community had caused unsolved debates. The idea of social capital is also controversial. On the one hand, it has been considered as enhancing the effectiveness of society, on the other, critics argue that its basic elements, such as social norms or values, can be determined by groups that have greater power than others. In schools, for example, community involvement has been implemented in various ways. Although it is widely considered as an important element of citizenship education, some schools have failed to achieve its original purpose and motivate students, and some schools have not given enough importance to it. In order to discover the principles of community involvement, Dewey's conception of education can be seen to underpin and also imply the necessity of more pluralistic approaches in a contemporary diverse society. I conclude by examining the studies by Freire and Wallman, which suggest that citizenship education should be implemented through a sort of community involvement that encourages people to be critical citizens and enhances civic equality and social inclusiveness based on pluralistic concepts.

Jeremy Cunningham, former Headteacher of an Oxfordshire 11-18 state school, and an enthusiastic proponent of Citizenship Education, describes the challenges of responding to the 1998 Crick report on Citizenship and Democratic Education. With very few resources, and little guidance as to how Citizenship could be meshed with an over-directed and over-crowded curriculum, the school built on its efforts to create a more open and participative culture, responding to the elements of the Citizenship Orders requiring a whole-school approach to Citizenship. Establishing disputes procedures, behaviour and anti-bullying approaches that were in accordance with the norms of human rights and responsibilities, reinforced the strategy, but the curriculum issues remained a major stumbling block. Suspended timetable days, global links, and tweaking the PSHE curriculum did not result in good progression for knowledge and understanding. An in-school review concluded that a specialist team was essential for further development, and the school is now acting on the conclusions.

Introduction : This paper describes one approach adopted on a history with citizenship secondary PGCE course to address the requirements of the citizenship programme of study for key stages 3 and 4 in relation to the skills of participation and responsible action. As has already been discussed at length through Citized meetings and correspondence, ITT providers currently find themselves in the unique position of being responsible for training, and verifying the standard of training, in an area that scarcely exists in many schools. At the end of the first year of statutory citizenship education, it is evident that the curriculum requirements are often poorly understood, let alone implemented, with some schools continuing to "treat the strands in isolation, believing that … participation in other contexts can be counted as citizenship: such as… participation in team games" (Ofsted, 2003: 10). In the first year of a new programme at APU, we have experienced the same variability in awareness and action as Ofsted found. It is evident that some partner schools are still some considerable distance from having full programmes in place that transform their pupils' entitlement into a practical reality.

The paper is divided into three sections. The first section provides the context and includes a brief account of the background to the course, the nature of the partnership that supports it and the problem identified in relation to active citizenship. The second section outlines the actions planned to tackle the problem and ensure trainees had some worthwhile training in planning and implementing active citizenship projects. The third section considers the evidence generated by the trainees and partner schools and assesses the extent to which the approach adopted was successful.

Education for citizenship has experienced a long and chequered past. From humble beginnings at the end of the 19th century, when citizenship appeared as a repository of civics education in mainstream state schools (Batho, 1990), to its more politically active conception that was prevalent during the 1960s (Heater, 1969), education for citizenship has been imputed a curious status. Its rise to prominence and fall from grace within educational circles has repeatedly coincided with the vagaries of intellectual whim and political expediency, neither of which has served the concept in any particularly favourable light. Paradoxically, this has both reaffirmed its appeal as a panacea to the myriad of social problems that beset our society and yet has also contributed to its failure to secure any permanency or lasting status within the formal curriculum - as a subject in its own right. That is, of course, until now.