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Contemporary societies face a range of important challenges, including: climate change; poverty; wealth, income, and other forms of social inequality; human rights abuses; misinformation and fake news; the growth of populist movements; and citizen disenchantment with democratic politics [...]

Contemporary societies face a range of challenges, including: climate change; poverty; wealth, income, and other forms of social inequality; human rights abuses; misinformation and fake news; the growth of populist movements; and citizen disenchantment with democratic politics. Citizenship education, properly conceived, seeks to address issues of general concern through both individual and collective action. A key aim is to enhance citizens' levels of political knowledge and understanding, and to educate citizens as actors in civil society so as to promote critical and active citizenship, with citizens able to develop their capacities to engage in civic and political activities to bring about social changes they wish to see. This Special Issue on 'Citizenship Education and Civil Society' will explore how current forms of citizenship education in different societies, in both formal and informal educational contexts, are, or are not, contributing positively to citizens' levels of political knowledge, understanding, and efficacy. It is concerned with questions such as: What role can and should citizenship education play in pluralistic, liberal democratic societies? Can it successfully promote common values and overcome intolerance and discrimination? What are its strengths and limitations in practice? The Special Issue welcomes theoretical and empirical contributions from a range of disciplinary perspectives that address these, and other pertinent, questions, and that draw on evidence and examples from subnational, national, international, or comparative contexts. Contributions are welcome from scholars, practitioners, and activists across a variety of settings.

Purpose: This article explores linkages and disjunctions between citizenship education and character education in England.Approach: The article undertakes a theoretical discussion of what both forms of education are and involve, and a historical overview of their development over the past twenty years, utilising a wide range of primary and secondary sources.Findings: Citizenship education programmes tend to place much greater emphasis than character education on the development of the necessary knowledge and skills that enable participation in political and democratic activities. The focus of character education is on personal ethics rather than public ethics, and the particular understanding of character education advanced by British politicians has been narrow and instrumental, linking the development of character with individual 'success', especially in the jobs market.Research implications: Comparative research is now needed to examine the strengths and weaknesses of these two forms of education as they are delivered in other countries, and to explore the similarities and differences between the experiences of different countries.Practical implications: Policy-makers concerned to ensure that young people have the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes they need to engage in civic and political activity should focus on programmes of citizenship education rather than character education.

Purpose: This article explores linkages and disjunctions between citizenship education and character education in England. Approach: The article undertakes a theoretical discussion of what both forms of education are and involve, and a historical overview of their development over the past twenty years, utilising a wide range of primary and secondary sources. Findings: Citizenship education programmes tend to place much greater emphasis than character education on the development of the necessary knowledge and skills that enable participation in political and democratic activities. The focus of character education is on personal ethics rather than public ethics, and the particular understanding of character education advanced by British politicians has been narrow and instrumental, linking the development of character with individual 'success', especially in the jobs market. Research implications: Comparative research is now needed to examine the strengths and weaknesses of these two forms of education as they are delivered in other countries, and to explore the similarities and differences between the experiences of different countries. Practical implications: Policy-makers concerned to ensure that young people have the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes they need to engage in civic and political activity should focus on programmes of citizenship education rather than character education.

This article reflects on the relationship between evidence and interpretation in policy-making and policy analysis. It proceeds by critically analysing both David Blunkett's understanding (as articulated when holding office in the UK Labour government) of the concept of 'evidence-based policy-making' and three noteworthy, alternative approaches to understanding the links between facts, evidence, values and interpretive framework — Keith Dowding's rational choice approach, Alan Finlayson's rhetorical political analysis and Mark Bevir and Rod Rhodes's narrative-based form of interpretivism. It argues that all four approaches are underpinned by generalised, fixed claims about the nature of these relationships, when in fact no such generalisable claims are possible. In so doing, it develops an alternative, distinctive understanding of these relationships as changeable and context-specific, bringing into focus more clearly the contested nature of the theoretical assumptions underpinning particular policy-related claims and to the continuous need for political argument — on the basis of facts, evidence, values and interpretation — by both policy makers and analysts.

The Prime Minister, David Cameron, recently set out his vision of a 'big society'. Its core themes are empowering communities, redistributing power from the state to citizens and promoting a culture of volunteering. The idea is badly flawed. It overlooks the crucial role that needs to be played by the state in promoting social justice, which is vital to the development of active citizenship and vibrant communities. Moreover, Cameron views the active citizen as simply a philanthropist and volunteer rather than as a politically literate individual, knowledgeable about the major political issues of the day and actively involved in debates about how public or private services ought to be run. The initiative is particularly perverse in the context of the credit crunch, a vitally important cause of which was precisely not the development of an over‐mighty state but rather the inadequate state regulation of free market trading activities by banks.

This article examines the impact of the concept of social capital on the citizenship education initiative in England through its influence on the normative content of the policy, as embodied in the report of the Advisory Group on Citizenship (AGC) — which was one of the immediate causes of the inclusion of citizenship in the National Curriculum in 2002. It argues that the policy is underpinned by what it describes as a hybrid `republican—communitarian' model of citizenship (the model implicitly advanced by the US political scientist Robert Putnam in his work on social capital), which emphasizes the value of political participation by citizens and the extent to which this participation is reliant on community membership. The article argues that the model of citizenship advanced by the AGC embodies crucial tensions between its republican and communitarian elements and by its being situated within the context of an uncritical acceptance of the boundaries prescribed by neo-liberal economic orthodoxy, which necessarily undermines the community attachments that the citizenship education policy seeks to promote.

This article argues that citizenship lessons were introduced in schools in England in 2002 principally because of concerns amongst a range of key figures in & beyond New Labour about perceived declining levels of social capital in Britain. The article is structured as follows: first, it places citizenship education in its historical context prior to the election of Labour in 1997, also emphasising the historical dimension to debates inside the Labour Party about political participation & democracy. It then outlines the importance of social capital for the party & explains how the concept was a crucial motivational factor for a variety of actors, constituting an ideational policy network, involved in the development of the citizenship education policy. It concludes that the effectiveness of the initiative is weakened by New Labour's reluctance to challenge the entrenched inequalities that undermine the promotion of social inclusion & thus prevent the development of social capital. Adapted from the source document.

This paper provides preliminary evidence suggesting that Labour introduced citizenship lessons in schools because of its concern about perceived declining levels of social capital, and that the normative model of citizenship underpinning the curriculum is that which best corresponds to the concerns of social capital theorists. It also proposes an ideational approach to policy network analysis for analysing the introduction of the policy, with the concept of social capital, treated as a programmatic belief, regarded as the independent variable. Adapted from the source document.

1 Introduction -- 2 Theorising Character Education -- 3 Character Education in Historical Context -- 4 The Jubilee Centre's Character Education Teaching Resources -- 5 There Case Studies of Character Education in Practice -- 6 Character Education or Citizenship Education? -- 7 Conclusion -- Index