Abstract
This paper presents student perspectives on what they consider to be a fair and equitable national education system, based on their own experiences of primary and secondary level schooling by the age of 13 or 14. A survey of 5432 students in five countries involved a questionnaire administered as part of an EU‐funded project to develop indicators of equity in European school systems. Overall, the UK students reported favouring an egalitarian system where all students were treated in the same way, and this was largely what they felt that they experienced. In this respect, they differed from their peers in the other EU countries, a substantial proportion of whom thought that the least able should receive more support and attention in class, but who found that more attention was actually given to the more able. The UK students also appeared to be more self‐confident about their ability to succeed in school. We discuss these results in terms of policies for school allocation, student assessment and the formation of personal notions of justice. In particular, we argue that equity in structure and procedure is important for the effective teaching of notions of justice in citizenship studies.
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