Political literacy sits at the heart of the definition of ‘citizenship education’ offered by Professor Bernard Crick in the landmark report, Education for Citizenship and the Teaching of Democracy in Schools (QCA, 1998). The ‘Crick Report’, as it came to be called, was clear about the task to hand: ‘We aim at no less than a change in the political culture of this country both nationally and locally: for people to think of themselves as active citizens, willing, able and equipped to have an influence in public life’ (QCA, 1998, p 7). When David Blunkett became Secretary of State for Education in the UK in 1997, one of his first acts was to commission Crick, his former politics tutor, to bring together an advisory group that would inform its content.

In terms of both citizenship and citizenship education, the Blunkett-Crick nexus was to produce two further reports, Citizenship for 16– 19 Year Olds in Education And Training (FEFC, 2000), and, during Blunkett's subsequent tenure as Home Secretary, The New and the Old (Home Office, 2003), a document focused on the still controversial terrain that sits between citizenship education for children and young people in schools, colleges and similar settings, and citizenship (not least in the legal sense) for newcomers to Britain and for some long-settled migrants.

The growing concern about the settlement, integration and (legal) citizenship of both newcomers and the members of settled communities that intensified after the bombings in New York in 2001 (9/11) and London four years later spawned a broader literature concerned with community life and questions of national identity. Here, the former area is the main concern of, for instance, Our Shared Future (2007), produced by the Commission on Integration and Cohesion led by Darra Singh, while the latter is the focus of, for example, Citizenship: Our Common Bond (Goldsmith, 2008), part of a broader literature that emerged from the Ministry of Justice as a strand of the wider ‘Governance of Britain’ initiative launched following Gordon Brown's becoming prime minister in June 2007, which brought with it a new focus on ‘Britishness’ (Breslin, 2007a).