Schools struggling to teach citizenship

SOME secondary schools in England are still struggling to teach citizenship, inspectors warned today, seven years after the subject was made a compulsory element of the national curriculum.

An Ofsted report found that in some secondaries, pupils had a patchy knowledge of the subject. While many knew a lot about topics like human rights, there were "important gaps" in other areas, like understanding politics.

Citizenship was made a compulsory part of England's curriculum seven years ago and while lessons are generally improving, some schools still do not fully understand what they need to do to provide pupils with a good education in the subject, the report found.

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The study is based on visits to 91 secondary schools between September 2006 and July 2009.

Its findings show that while half of the schools were judged to be at least good for their students' achievement in the subject, 10 were inadequate.

These schools had done "little or nothing" to introduce the subject, and it had been "misunderstood or ignored".

The study adds that in schools where the citizenship lessons on offer were simply "satisfactory", students were getting an uneven education.

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"Typically, students knew a good deal about some aspects of the curriculum (such as human rights), but had important gaps in their knowledge.

"The quality of teaching was also uneven and the curriculum only partly covered," it said.

Often in these schools, citizenship shared a timetable slot with Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) education, but often the time allowed was "too little to do justice to either subject", inspectors said.

The report also found that teaching of the subject was outstanding in only one school, with just over half rated good. Most lessons were not taught by citizenship specialists.

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