Should all schools be required to teach national civics and politics as a core subject for all pupils?
Citizenship has been compulsory in maintained secondary schools since 2002, covering democracy, government, law, rights and political participation. In November 2025 the Labour government made it statutory in primary schools from 2028, with strengthened content on media literacy, financial literacy, climate education and democracy. Academies will also follow the revised national curriculum, though implementation challenges remain around timetable space and teacher training.
3 Opinions
Students should be learning ethics and philosophy, with open, structured debates and no exams, not learning national civics and politics. Civics and political education often risk devolving into partisan cheerleading, institutional memorisation, or state-sanctioned thought.
No, mandatory state curriculum is a joke. Schools should be free to choose their own, market then wouldndecide. At the moment kids leaving the education do not remember 3/4 of what was teached, including reading and writing. Additional subjects will end the same.
I mean, is teaching the next generation how the country is governed and how politics works ever going to be a bad thing?? Quite simply, we should be teaching kids the rules of the "road" before handing them the "keys" to vote.