Compulsory citizenship for the disenfranchised: benchmarking students,schools, and social and political attitudes before the Citizenship Order

This article reviews the current state of the debate about the political orientation and social attitudes of young people. After cautioning against a pessimistic view of moral decline, the article reports the results from a survey of 1249 young people in Hertfordshire. While showing evidence of low levels of political knowledge, interest, trust and efficacy, the findings do not confirm a lack of engagement with the wider social world. They show that young people contribute to social capital, by volunteering, for example, and that young people have broadly developed moral awareness. We explore students' engagement in citizenship-type activities both within and outside school; the extent to which they have covered the citizenship National Curriculum in school; and the degree to which they are active participants in their school. Our findings are generally positive, identifying reasonably high levels of engagement and integration. In short, there is a base from which to develop curricular reforms to promote political education.