Introduction

This chapter deals with many of the issues that are discussed in greater detail elsewhere in this book. It approaches them from the practical perspective of the Association for Citizenship Teaching (ACT) in the UK, which is a membership organisation promoting high-quality citizenship education for all. As of 2022, citizenship had been a national curriculum subject in England for 20 years. This period generated a wealth of school-based experiments and saw the development of a cadre of experienced subject specialist teachers, which led to some principles that inform the work of ACT and underpin its planning for the future. Our starting point is that good citizenship teachers address the emotional dimension, the role of knowledge and rational argument, and the need for citizenship to be enacted. This approach continues to inform how teachers are responding to significant ongoing and emergent challenges. In considering five of these challenges, this chapter reflects on what the next 20 years might hold, and what citizenship in schools might look like in the near future.

The urgency of political literacy

Bernard Crick paved the way for citizenship education in England's national curriculum by calling for a programme of political literacy, by which he meant learning about the institutions, problems and practices of our democracy and how to make oneself effective as a citizen (Crick, 2000). This task must be understood in the context of several profound challenges:

• 1. We have to acknowledge the continuing decline in satisfaction with democracy among young people – partly because of the failure of democracy to prevent rising inequality, hardship and the associated frustrations of young people (Foa et al, 2020).

• 2. There is some evidence that this leads to greater support for ‘outsider’ candidates who promise to break the mould, potentially linked to the rise in populism (Sloam and Henn, 2018).

• 3. Young people's political activity often happens in broad social movements or campaigns, which keeps political action alive, but potentially does little to refresh the institutional and party political infrastructure of democratic governance (Norris, 2004).

• 4. The legacy of Brexit seems to be a more deeply divided and polarised political culture (Hobolt et al, 2020).