Education Through Citizenship at School: Do School Activities Have a Lasting Impact on Youth Political Engagement?

Avril Keating,Jan Germen Janmaat

doi:10.1093/pa/gsv017

Abstract

*Correspondence: a.keating@ioe.ac.uk Over the past two decades, various policy initiatives have been proposed to solve the perceived problem of youth disengagement from politics. This article examines the impact of one such policy initiative—namely the introduction of activities that seek to teach ‘education through citizenship’ at school. In short, ‘education through citizenship’ involves formal and informal learning opportunities that enable students to acquire civic skills and knowledge through hands-on experiences. School councils, debate teams and/or mock elections are some of the most common ‘education through citizenship’ activities in schools in England, and drawing on data from theCitizenshipEducationLongitudinalStudy this article shows that such activities can indeed have an effect, not just in the short-term (as previous studies in England have shown), but also in the medium-term (by encouraging political engagement once the students have left the confines of the school). This article thus argues that school activities can have a lasting and independent impact on youth political engagement and provides support for the continuation of education through citizenship, as well as about citizenship.

Highlights

Youth civic engagement has been the subject of much comment, concern and contestation over the past two decades, both in the UK and internationally
Through path analysis of these data we show that activities such as these can have a positive effect on two types of youth civic engagement even after students have left the confines of the school and have moved into early adulthood
We found that there is no direct relationship between school-based political activities in Year 7 and our outcomes of interest, which suggests that activities at this young age (11 – 12) are not leaving a lasting impression on electoral or expressive types of engagement

Summary

Introduction

Youth civic engagement has been the subject of much comment, concern and contestation over the past two decades, both in the UK and internationally. Concern about these trends has prompted the introduction of a wide range of policy initiatives over the past 15 years (see HM Government, 2010), many of them targeted at young people in schools. These school-based initiatives have aimed to increase opportunities for learning about civic engagement through the formal curriculum (i.e. with the introduction of a new Citizenship subject), and to increase opportunities for students to learn about citizenship through experiential, extracurricular and informal learning activities. These types of activities involve, for example, participating in student councils or conducting community-based action projects with classmates

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Conclusion