I finished the previous chapter by highlighting the ambivalent position – also illustrated by these quotations – of the teachers who invest considerable time, energy and commitment in highlighting and explicitly promoting respect and tolerance to students, (other FBV have a much lower profile, as discussed). As the ‘good’ professional cannot be an ‘unreasonable’ one, teachers’ promotion works through a discourse of liberal ‘reasonableness’ (Chetty, 2018) that fails to recognise the entanglement of long- standing classed and raced inequalities in defining what ‘we’ know and should transmit through education. This absence of acknowledgement produces a curriculum and pedagogy that ‘suggest[s] not moving too far from where we are and not looking too closely at how we got here’ (Chetty, 2018: 9), a stance that also has to overlook the determining role of current high-stakes testing in shaping what are understood to be ‘effective’ curricula and pedagogies. Given this situation, there are ‘no straightforwardly heroic, noble acts of resistance’ (Hunter, 2015: 144). However, in this chapter, I go on to briefly consider whether particular approaches to citizenship education have the potential to offer considerations of liberal democratic values that go beyond the simplistic, assumed consensus of FBV. But, first, I shall summarise my arguments to this point.

The enactment of FBV

Ball, Maguire and Braun identify a major tension visible in recent education policy as being that between ‘neo-conservative and neo-liberal versions of government, knowledge and social authority’ (2012: 140). The FBV policy, however, exemplifies both. The influence of neoconservatism is visible in the idea of promoting a set of national values. This raises questions about equal belonging to the polity, and the likelihood of the effectiveness of a policy that seeks to enforce uniform commitments and loyalties on everyone, despite unequal starting points in terms of whether people perceive themselves, and others perceive them, as full citizens.